“She’s not my damsel,” I growl.
But my hand’s still in her hair, stroking it back once, twice; like muscle memory I didn’t know I had.
Boris smirks. “Sure.”
We turn off the main strip, tires crunching over gravel. The buildings here are quieter. Gated. Private. Boris hits a code, and the garage door lifts, mechanical and slow.
I stare out the window.
“I see we’re not going back to my place.”
“Wearegoing to your place,” Boris says. He shrugs. “Just saying, if I were carrying a woman covered in blood who just fainted because some jackoff tried to rape her,” he jerks his chin toward the backseat, still gripping the wheel one-handed, “I might want to upgrade from cracked vinyl floors and a water heater that screams like a banshee.”
I don’t respond. He’s not wrong. I hate that he’s not wrong.
He continues anyway. “You want her passing out again in a folding chair, or maybe we lay her out somewhere with sheets that don’t smell like mildew and cat piss?”
“Boris.”
“Don’t ‘Boris’ me,bratan. You know where I’m going with this.”
I do. I just don’t like it.
Because this wasn’t supposed to beanything.
Not a rescue mission. Not a safe house operation. And definitely not her sleeping in my bed.
But here we are.
The building rises like a monolith; matte black steel, no signage, no buzzers. Tucked behind a security gate just off Desert Inn. Boris picked the location. Quiet, central, forgettable. Ten units in total. No leases. Everything bought in cash. Everything under my name.
I’ve never stepped foot inside.
It was one of several properties they secured for me; Lev handled the shell companies, Dima vetted the security feeds, and Boris hired some woman with perfect posture and dead eyes to make it look livable. A place to vanish into, if shit ever went sideways.
Guess we’re there now.
We pull into the underground garage. Motion lights snap on, flooding the space in cold, sterile white. Clean floors. Reinforced elevator shaft at the far end; glass-walled, fingerprint-locked. Cameras in every corner, masked under sleek chrome casings.
Boris shuts off the engine.
“She gonna make it up, or you want me to carry her?”
I look down.
Mary’s still unconscious, her face slack against my leg. But fuck… She’s gorgeous.
Even now—bruised, blood-specked, lashes clumped together—she looks like something meant for a different world than mine. Fragile in all the wrong ways. Tough in all the right ones.
“I’ve got her.”
I slide out of the SUV with her in my arms, careful not to jostle her. Boris moves to the elevator, already scanning the garage like he expects company.
He doesn’t say anything until we’re inside, door sealed, elevator rising.
“I’ve got a lot of shit to do,” he mutters. “Figure out who Viktor’s working with, how the hell they found the girl, what she knows, who else knows it. Not exactly light work.”
“I want it quiet,” I say. “Low. No chatter up the chain.”
