The doors open. We step in. He presses a button and I glance at the panel.
Twenty-three.
"That's not my floor," I say.
"It wasn’t."
We start moving. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two passes without stopping and my stomach tightens.
"Where are we going?"
Viktor's expression doesn't flicker. "Mr. Novikov is moving you to his suite."
"I'm fine where I am."
"It's not an offer. Mr. Novikov's orders. Your things have been brought from the motel."
I stare at him. He stares back. This is a man who suggested putting my body in a ditch with the emotional range of someone ordering lunch. I am not going to win this one.
The doors open on twenty-three. A short corridor. One door at the end. Viktor swipes a keycard and pushes it open and steps back.
"Settle in," he says. "Someone will bring dinner."
He doesn't come in. The door closes behind me. The lock engages.
The penthouse is huge. That's the first thing. It's three or four times the size of the suite I've been in. The living area has floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall, the city laid out below in the early evening light. There's a kitchen, open-plan, with a marble island and fancy appliances. A long leather sofa. A dining table. Bookshelves.
The whole place smells like him.
His scent is soaked into the furniture, the curtains, the carpets. Whiskey and cedar, warm and deep, and my body responds to it the way it has responded every time since that first night. Heat pools low in my stomach. My skin prickles. Between my legs, the first betrayal of slick.
I breathe through my mouth and walk through the space quickly. There’s a second bedroom at the end of a short hallway but there’s no bed. It’s filled with a large conference table and a wall of monitors showing feeds from all over the casino. I guess this is my new office.
His bedroom door is at the other end of the hallway. I don't open it. There is no second bed. I don’t want to think about where he is intending me to sleep.
I go back to the office and sit at the desk and watch the feeds because it’s the only thing that keeps my brain in charge of my body. Ten minutes later, someone arrives with the laptop from downstairs. I open it and start working. Better than thinking about what happens when Dominic Novikov turns up.
Two hours pass. The city darkens beyond the windows. I identify two players and I'm closing in on the third when I hear the front door open.
His scent arrives before he does. It rolls through the room, fresh and strong, layered with the cold air of outside. He's been somewhere. I don't know and I don't ask because I don't look up from the screen.
"You're settled in," he says.
I have no idea what to say to that.Thanks?I don’t feel particularly thankful, so I say nothing.
“You belong in here with me,” he says.
At least he's honest about what he’s thinking. I keep my eyes on the monitor. My fingers are still on the keyboard but I've stopped typing because my hands aren't steady enough and I won't let him see that.
I hear him move through the space. The kitchen. A cupboard opens and closes. The clink of a glass. The sound of liquid pouring.
"Have you eaten?" he asks.
"Someone brought something."
"Did you eat it?"
I didn't. It's still on the kitchen counter, covered in plastic wrap. I was working.
