"It was fine," I said. "Nothing happened."
He pulled back. I felt the shift in his breathing, his focus on my face. He was reading me the way I read rooms.
"There's someone new at the restaurant," I said. "Viktor called him Konstantin."
His hands tightened on my waist. Not the possessive grip of desire—the grip of a man holding something he was terrified of losing.
"I know," he said.
Two words. And inside them, an entire cathedral of things he wasn't telling me. His heart slammed against my hand like a trapped bird desperate to escape.
But we just stood there in the dark, two people holding each other like the water wasn't rising around us.
I wanted to tell him something that'd been building in my chest for days, pressing against my ribs and clogging my throat every time he touched me, every time his breathing changed in the dark, every time he whispered delicious, dirty things against my skin.
Three words. That's all. Three stupid, ordinary, devastating words that people said every day without thinking, without understanding what it cost to mean them.
But I couldn't.
Not now.
Saying it now would be cruel. Not because it wouldn't be true. It would be, and that was the worst part. But because the truth had sharp edges, and the people holding it always bled first.
Tomorrow. I'd say it tomorrow.
His mouth found mine in the dark. Not gentle. Desperate. The kiss of a man running out of time and trying to stop the clock with his hands.
I kissed him back with everything I had, and everything I was hiding, and everything I was too afraid to say.
And tomorrow, when the silence was still holding and the spider was still watching and the web was still tightening around us both, I would sit at that piano again and play for a room full of men who wanted me dead because I couldn't think of any other way to prove my innocence to them.
But tomorrow never came the way I'd imagined it.
Because at 3:47 a.m., Milo's phone buzzed against my nightstand. He answered it in Russian—a language I'd never heard him speak—and his whole body went rigid against mine.
Three words. That's all Viktor said.
I didn't need a translation.
Milo was already moving, already pulling on his clothes, already pressing his lips to my forehead with a desperation that tasted like goodbye.
"Stay here. Lock the door. Don't answer for anyone."
"Milo—"
"Anyone, Raven."
The door closed.
And the silence swallowed me whole.
CHAPTER 15
MILO
Three words. That's all Viktor said.
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