I glance toward the door, toward the shattered evening still waiting outside it. “I have men to speak to. And a fake date to officially end.”
Her fingers catch my wrist before I can move away.
I look back at her.
“What happens now?” she asks.
And there it is. The question beneath every other one.
I don’t answer right away. Because I don’t know.
A week ago she was a voice in a file. Now she’s in my bed, under my blanket, asking me what happens now like I haven’t already blown my life apart enough to know better.
So, I give her the truest answer I have.
“Now,” I say, “everything gets more complicated.”
She lets out a soft breath that might be a laugh and might be fear. “Great,” she murmurs. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
I kiss her knuckles once before I stand. “No,” I say. “It’s exactly what I needed to say.”
And when I leave the suite this time, it’s not to go back to some other woman. It’s to deal with the world outside that I just made infinitely more dangerous?—
Because now Zatanna is not only in my head.
She’s in my life.
24
ZATANNA
When we finally step out ofthe suite, everything changes.
Inside, it had been just the two of us. Heat. Truth. His body. My body. His voice low against my skin and my own moans still trapped somewhere in the room we left behind.
Outside, the hallway is cool and polished and full of distance.
Aleksei puts his mask back on so fast it gives me whiplash.
He walks half a step ahead of me, expression unreadable, shirt replaced, jacket back on, every line of him composed again. If I didn’t know what his mouth had just done to me, what his body had felt like inside mine, I might believe he was always this controlled.
It’s weird. No, worse than weird.
It hurts.
Because the sex had been… incredible. Mind-blowing. Better than anything I’d imagined in all the books and scripts and stupid private fantasies I’d ever had. There had been no pain, notreally. Just heat and stretch and being so overwhelmed by him that my body forgot to be afraid.
And now he’s acting like none of that changed anything.
His men are waiting at the far end of the corridor. Sergei first, then Anton, both of them grim and efficient and deeply uninterested in whatever happened between the boss and the assistant in the suite upstairs. Or pretending to be.
The sight of them brings every doubt from last night roaring back.
The guns. The scars. The organized crime confession that wasn’t really a confession so much as a whole terrible reality sliding into focus.
My steps slow slightly.
Aleksei notices immediately, because of course he does, but he doesn’t look back. He just says, low enough that only I hear, “Keep walking.”
