In one fluid motion, he pulls a gun from somewhere beneath his jacket and points it at the senator's head.
"Leonid—" the senator starts, his face going white.
The gunshot is deafening.
Blood sprays across the white marble floor. The senator crumples, a hole in his forehead, dead before he hits the ground.
I scream.
My legs give out. I'm on my knees, staring at the body, at the blood pooling around his silver hair, at his eyes still open and staring at nothing.
Leonid stands over him. Gun still in hand. Expression completely blank.
"He trafficked in human beings," Leonid says calmly. "He sold children. He deserved worse than this."
I can't speak. Can't think. There's blood on my dress. The senator's blood. Some of it is on my face.
Leonid crouches in front of me. He tucks the gun away and reaches out slowly, carefully, like I'm a wounded animal that might bolt.
"Lily." His voice is quiet. "Look at me."
I force my eyes away from the body. Up to his face. He's close now, and I can see the lines around his eyes, the silver in his stubble. He looks tired. Old. And somehow, impossibly, sad.
"I am not going to hurt you," he says. "Do you understand? I am not going to touch you. I am not going to sell you. What that man did—what he wanted to give you away for—that is not who I am."
I'm shaking so hard my teeth chatter. "You just... you killed him..."
"Yes."
"In front of me."
"Yes." No apology. No explanation. Just fact.
"Why?"
His jaw tightens. "Because men like him are a disease. And I am the cure." He stands and offers me his hand. "Come. Youneed to get cleaned up. Get out of those clothes. You are safe now."
Safe.
I stare at his outstretched hand. Big. Scarred. Knuckles rough from violence I can only imagine.
He just killed a man in front of me without blinking. I should be terrified. I should be screaming, running, fighting—anything but standing here considering whether to let him touch me.
But the senator is dead. The traffickers don't care what happens to me. No one is coming to rescue me.
No one ever was.
So I take his hand.
His fingers close around mine—warm, firm, impossibly gentle for hands that just held a gun—and something electric sparks through me. My breath catches. There's blood drying on my face, a body cooling three feet away, and all I can focus on is the heat of his palm against mine.
What is wrong with me?
"Come," he says again, and leads me away from the carnage, down a hallway into the depths of his penthouse.
I don't look back.
He opens a door to a bathroom—white marble, soft lighting, bigger than any bedroom I've ever slept in—and gestures for me to go inside. Those ice-blue eyes watch me with something I can't decipher. Not hunger. Not cruelty. Something else.
