Mealtimes were lonely events and the only time I truly missed my family—the memory of them, at least, if not the reality. Ruslan more than anyone else. The silence of the dining room was broken only by the occasional shift of abykibehind me, the quiet movement of people paid to be present without being noticed.
The beef stroganoff was rich and perfectly seasoned. My appetite was absent regardless.
I drank more of the red wine than I should have. But I needed something—warmth, numbness, the illusion of company—and the wine was what was available. I could understand, sitting alone at a table set for one in a room built for twenty, how people arrived at dependency. How the bottle became the only reliable guest.
When I had finished eating what little I managed, I sat for a while longer, turning the glass slowly, staring out at the dark beyond the tall windows. The grounds were invisible at this hour—just black, and the faint reflection of the candlelight on the glass, and my own face looking back at me with an expression I didn’t particularly want to examine.
I wondered what my family were doing. Whether Ruslan was at the dinner table in my absence, whether the space I had left was simply closed over or whether anyone had noticed the shape of it. Whether my mother had said my name today.
I thought about going to bed.
That was when the flutter arrived—low in my stomach, a slow coil of nerves that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Four nights. He hadn’t come near me in four nights. We passed occasionally in the corridors—him moving with purpose toward somewhere that wasn’t where I was, his eyes finding me for a moment before moving on—but no words. No contact. Just the eyes, and the certain quality of attention behind them that suggested the matter had been deferred rather than forgotten.
I drained my glass and stood.
Spartak pulled my chair back before I had fully risen. A maid appeared at the table to clear. Radovan fell into step behind me as I left the room and followed me up the stairs with the quiet persistence of a man who had been told not to lose sight of me and intended to keep his position.
When I reached my room I opened the door and slammed it shut behind me in one movement, directly into his face.
His soft chuckle made me smile.
Asshole.
??????
The city lights sparkled beyond the confines of his home, beckoning from the other side of the glass. Life outside the cage. The Black City going about its business without me, indifferent and luminous and entirely out of reach.
Compliance.
That was what he wanted. What the contract required. What everyone in this house was waiting for me to arrive at, as though it were only a matter of time and the correct application of pressure.
I closed the curtain.
My door opened.
It felt as though I had called the devil by thinking of him. Vadim stepped inside and closed the door behind him with the quiet deliberateness of a man who had decided something and was no longer in any hurry about it. He was still in his suit—jacket on, shirt buttoned—and he looked exactly as he always looked. Larger than the room suggested he should be. Colder than the temperature warranted.
His eyes found me and didn’t move.
The silence held for long enough to be intentional.
“It won’t end well for you if you snoop around my business,” he said.
“I was curious.”
“There is a saying about curious cats,” he said, and began to walk toward me.
The light moved across him as he came—the lamp on the bedside table catching the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, making him appear larger and darker with each step. The room, which had felt like mine for four days, was rearranging itself around him the way rooms did.
“But since you appear to need my attention,” he said, reaching up to slip his jacket from his shoulders,“why don’t you get out of your clothes so we can get down to business.” He tossed the jacket toward the nearest chair without looking at it.“I’ve got four days to make up for.”
I stood frozen at the window.
His hands moved to his shirt buttons.
He had come to collect.
Chapter 11
