My mouth opens, some sharp comment on the tip of my tongue, when he tosses something small and dark through the air.
I flinch, then catch it clumsily against my chest. Pain spikes through my ribs and I hiss.
“Easy,” he grunts. “It’s just a phone.”
I look down.
Sleek. Shiny. Black screen, no cracks. Edges smooth and expensive. It glows faintly to life when my thumb brushes the side.
Way nicer than the beat-up brick I had before. The one with the spiderwebbed screen and the battery that died if you looked at it wrong.
“Your new phone,” Maksim says.
My fingers tighten around it. “You broke my old one and now you’re… replacing it?”
“You lost your old one being an idiot,” he corrects, utterly calm. “Location on after getting your ass beat? Stupid move.”
The words dig under my skin.
“You’re a fucker,” I mutter. “So what strings are attached?”
“None, there’s no tracking on it,” he adds.
My head snaps up. “What?”
He jerks his chin at the device. “No GPS, no spyware. No way for anyone, including the pretend stairs you fell down, to get to you.”
I stare at him, suspicious. Men like him don’t give gifts without hooks. The phone sits in my palm, almost weightless and somehow heavy as a shackle.
“Why?” I ask.
His eyes flick to my face, sharp and assessing. “Because if you need help, I want you to call. Not disappear.” He pauses. “And because I don’t need to track you to find you.”
A chill runs down my spine.
He nods toward the hallway. “There’s food waiting for you in the kitchen. Eat.”
I open my mouth—no idea what I’m even going to say, then shut it again when he crosses to the dresser.
He pulls open a drawer, grabs a fresh t-shirt, and peels the one he’s wearing over his head like I’m not even here.
For a second, my brain stutters.
I’ve seen him shirtless before in flashes—blood, chaos, adrenaline, but never like this. Never in full light with nowhere else to look.
Ink crawls over his torso and arms, a tapestry of violence and meaning I could probably stare at for hours and still not understand. A lion on his forearm. Black script in Russian down his ribs.
When he turns, I see his back.
A large skull dominates it, grinning over the ridges of muscle, smoke and thorns wrapping around the bone. It should be ridiculous. It isn’t. It’s terrifying.
But it’s not what makes me snort under my breath.
What gets me is the space.
Right over where his heart should be—where every other square inch of him is claimed by ink, there’s a clean patch of skin. Bare. Untouched.
Figures the one place he leaves unmarked is the one place that might prove he has a heart at all.
