I turn off the shower. I stand dripping on the tiles and stare at the mirror through the steam. The bite mark on my collarbone is livid red against my skin. The bruises on my hips are purple,thumbprint-shaped. I look like I've been in a fight, which in some ways I have. A fight I lost badly.
The deal was: find the ring, earn my freedom. I wasn’t sure I believed him then. I definitely don’t believe it now.
I stopped believing it somewhere around day two of the heat, when I saw his face above me in the dark and there was nothing in it that looked like a man planning to let go.
So the names are the only card I have left and I need to play them right.
I dry off. I have no clean clothes. I only ever had two changes anyway and some time during the heat, Novikov sent them down to laundry and they haven’t yet returned.
I find a pair of his sweatpants in the closet and a T-shirt that hangs off my frame. The cotton is soft, expensive, and saturated with his scent. Cedar and whiskey soaked into the fibers. When I pull it over my head, my stomach clenches and a low pulse of warmth rolls through me that has no right to exist now that the heat is over. My body still responding.
When I come out of the bathroom, he's awake. He's sitting up in bed, bare-chested, one arm resting on his knee. The sheet has pooled at his waist. The scratches I left on his shoulders are red, four parallel lines on the left side, and there's a bruise on his throat where my mouth was. He doesn't look damaged by any of it. He looks fed.
He watches me walk through the door in his clothes and his gaze tracks down my body and back up, slow, proprietary. He smiles, pleased. The smile of a man looking at something that belongs to him.
"Morning," he says. His voice is rough from sleep and the low register of it vibrates somewhere behind my sternum.
"Heat's broken. I'm going back to the office and get back to work."
"Sit down. I'll make coffee."
"I don't want coffee. I want to go back to work. The sooner I am done here, the sooner you’ll let me go."
He gets out of bed. He's moving slowly, unhurried, and I can see every muscle in his back shift as he stretches, the broad slope of his shoulders, the tapering line of his torso. He's built like a man who has never had to worry about who's between him and the door.
He walks toward me and I hold my ground.
He stops close. His scent is there without the devastating intensity of the heat, but it's not nothing. It settles around me and my pulse picks up.
"Time for you to eat," he says. "You've barely had anything solid in five days."
"I ate when you told me to."
"And you'll eat again now. You’re too thin. Unhealthily thin. It’s my job to look after you. Then we'll talk."
He walks past me. His arm brushes mine and the contact, bare skin against bare skin, sending a jolt of heat up to my shoulder. I clench my teeth and don't react. I hear him in the kitchen. The fridge opening. The heavy base of a pan landing on the stove. The click and whoosh of the gas ring igniting. The crack of an egg against the rim of the pan.
The casual authority of it makes my stomach clench with fury. There’s a complete absence of any question about what I want.
He says things and they happen and it has never once occurred to him that they might not.
I stand in the hallway and try to think. I have something they want and that means I have some leverage. I just need to be careful about how I play my cards.
I trade the names of the people cheating him for my freedom. I can’t do it here. Not while I'm inside his building, inside his reach.
I have to keep that information close and only give him the names from a distance, once I'm clear.
He gets what he needs. I get what I need. Nobody has to trust anybody.
It's the only play that makes sense. You don't show your hand until the pot is being pushed in your direction.
The smell of butter and eggs reaches me from the kitchen. My stomach turns over, not with nausea but with hunger so sudden it makes me dizzy. My body burned through everything it had to fuel the heat and now the debt is coming due.
I walk into the kitchen. He's at the stove, scrambling eggs with a fork, his back to me. The muscles in his forearm flex with the movement. He plates the eggs without looking up, pours coffee into a mug and slides it across the granite toward me.
I sit on the bar stool. I eat because my body needs fuel, not because he told me to.
He leans against the counter across from me and drinks his own coffee and watches me eat and the weight of his attention sits on the back of my neck like a hand.
