Oh no, oh no, oh no.
I press both palms flat against my face and breathe into them. The cotton of my pillow smells like my own shampoo, like home, like safety. All the things I apparently decided I didn’t need last night when I was standing in Pavel Strakov’s office letting the entire architecture of my professional life come crashing down around my ears.
We slept together.
Except we didn’t even sleep. There was no sleeping. There was his couch and his hands and the low, wrecked sound of his voice, and there was me, throwing years of careful professional distance straight out the eighth-floor window.
I sit up too fast. The room tilts.
I press my fingers to my lips like I can hold back whatever is trying to crawl up my throat and force myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way my old roommate used to say when anxiety had me wound tight enough to snap.
He is your boss, I tell myself. He is your boss, and you walked into his office at ten o’clock at night to drop off paperwork, and somehow you left with your dress backward and your pulse in your throat and the distinct impression that the world had shifted a hundred degrees off its axis.
Here’s the thing about Pavel that I have spent the better part of a year carefully not thinking about: he is not a man you stumble into lightly. He’s not careless. He doesn’t do drinks at the company holiday party, not an almost-kiss in the parking garage, not the kind of situation you can file neatly under professional lapse and move on from. Pavel Strakov is a pakhan. He runs his criminal empire with the same immaculateefficiency with which he runs his legitimate businesses, and everyone in his orbit knows exactly what he is, even when they’re pretending otherwise.
I have been pretending otherwise since I was hired.
I have been pretending he’s simply my employer. Demanding, exacting, possessed of a gaze like February ice that has a way of pinning you in place whether you want it to or not. I have been pretending that the particular way he says my name, like it’s a word in a language he’s still deciding whether to learn, does not do something catastrophic to my composure.
Last night, I ran out of pretend.
I groan into my palms and fall back against the pillow. The night replays behind my eyelids whether I want it to or not.
I knocked. The office had been dark except for the amber pool of the desk lamp. I registered that first. Then his voice.
Pavel, standing, head tipped back, eyes closed, one hand braced against the edge of the desk and the other hand… busy.
And he was saying my name.
Not speaking it. Not the clipped, controlled way he summons me into meetings or signs off on approvals. He was saying it the way you say something private. The way you say something you’ve been keeping in a locked room for a long time.
The sound of it hit me like a physical thing.
I should have backed out of the room. Every functioning synapse I possessed was screaming at me to back out of the room, to close the door, to develop immediate and total amnesia, toperhaps consider a new career in a city where the skyline was different and my boss had not just?—
He opened his eyes.
Pale blue, nearly colorless in the low light. Glacier-cold, always, except that in that moment they weren’t cold at all, and when they found mine across the dark office the air went out of me completely.
He didn’t look away. I didn’t look away.
I should have. But for that breath, I couldn’t.
That was my first mistake, and I think somewhere in the part of me that had apparently been quietly catastrophizing since I came on, I knew it even then. The looking-away was the last line of defense. The looking-away was the thing that would have let us both survive this with our professional dignity intact, and I stood there in his doorway with the quarterly projections in my hand, and I did not look away, and neither did he, and the silence stretched between us like something pulled taut and trembling.
My heart did something violent and uncoordinated in my chest instead of letting me do the smart thing.
He crossed the room the way he does everything, with absolute certainty, no hesitation, like a man who has decided something and considers the deciding the end of the matter. And I stood there, rooted, the folder still clasped in my hands like a shield I’d forgotten to use, watching him come toward me and thinking, with the very last rational cell in my brain:This is where you turn around, Molly.
He stopped in front of me. Close enough that I could smell him, feel his heat. He looked down at me with those February eyes that were not cold anymore, not even slightly, and he said my name again. Quietly. A question and a warning at once.
I felt my restraint go.
Not gradually. Not the way you might talk yourself into something foolish, negotiating in stages with your better judgment. It went all at once, cleanly, like a snapped wire, and then there was nothing between us. His hands, the way he touched me, like I was something extraordinary. His touch was demanding and reverent in the same breath, commanding and careful, and I remember thinking in some dazzled, short-circuiting corner of my mind that I had never been touched like that, like I was both precious and desired, like he had been waiting?—
I shove the duvet back and sit up.
Stop it.
