I kissed her then because the room had narrowed to the shape of her mouth and the impossible fact that she’d walked through terror and still found a way to challenge me inside it.
She kissed me back hard. No yielding. No shrinking. Her fingers gripped my shirt, and her body came against mine with enough trust to make my control ache.
When I lifted my head, her lips were parted.
“We have to go,” she said.
“I know.”
“You don’t look like you’re moving.”
“I’m considering whether Gennady needs both hands.”
Her smile was small and sharp. “He’ll need at least one to sign whatever makes this over.”
“That’s practical.”
“I’m a practical woman.”
“You’re my practical woman.”
“I’m still myself.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the part I’m obsessed with.”
Her eyes softened.
Then she stepped back first.
I let her.
The Sorin club sat behind a private frontage in Manhattan with no public sign and a doorman who had worked for my father since I was sixteen. Black stone steps led up from the curb. Late-autumn wind moved hard between the buildings, cutting beneath coats and carrying the metallic smell of rain that hadn’t started yet.
My car stopped beneath the awning. Another car idled behind us with Lev inside. Two more waited at the curb. My men moved before the doors opened, not rushing, not drawing attention, just putting bodies between Nadia and any angle I hadn’t approved.
Nadia looked through the tinted window at the entrance. “This place is yours?”
“My father’s.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“It will be mine.”
She glanced at me. “That one was.”
I stepped out first and turned back for her.
She took my hand because she wanted to, not because she needed help from the car. The wind caught her dark hair and lifted it off her shoulder. Her coat moved around her legs. She looked too alive for the gray street and too clean for the men waiting inside.
Gennady Kask had mistaken money for claim.
I would leave him with neither.
Inside, the club smelled of leather, old wood, tobacco sealed into walls no ventilation could fully clean, and black tea steeping somewhere behind a closed service door. The main floor was quiet at this hour. The bar stood dark, glasses turned upside down on a towel, and no man pretended business became civilized because it happened under chandeliers.
Lev met us at the foot of the private staircase. “Petya is in the east room with two guards. He’s angry, ashamed, and asking for his sister.”
Nadia’s hand tensed in mine. “I want to see him.”
