But under everything, a current running beneath ice, is the image of Elizabeth Calloway standing in front of my refrigerator door in shorts that barely covered the tops of her thighs, clutching a bottle of milk, eyes wide like she’d been caught committing a federal crime.
The shorts had cartoon cats on them.
I’ve killed men, ordered executions, sat across from federal prosecutors and stared them down until they blinked. And I am currently being undone by the memory of a kindergarten teacher in kitten pajamas.
I close the laptop and open the security feed. Camera six. Empty. Camera two, the hallway outside Anya’s room. Empty. Camera nine. Empty. She’s either in her room, which has no camera because I’m not that far gone, or she’s?—
I close the feed, only to open it again.
I’m not doing this. I’m not going to sit in my office cycling through security cameras searching for that woman. I have an empire to run and Albanian dealers trying to dismantle my construction contracts. I have a soldier who’s been spending beyond his means and needs to be addressed. I have a mole somewhere in my operation that I still haven’t identified. I have things that matter.
I close the feed and step out of the office.
My mind keeps wandering back to the kitchen.
The way she was stretching for the chocolate, both arms raised. That little shirt riding up to reveal a strip of smooth, pale skin at her lower back, the shadows of her spine visible.
Her body was pulled taut, every line elongated by the reach, and the shorts — those ridiculous, criminal shorts — shifted upward with the motion, climbing her thighs to the point where the curve of her ass was no longer a suggestion but a fact. Round. Full.
I should have walked away. The moment she said she was making hot chocolate, I should have left the kitchen, gone to my office, and poured the drink there. That was the correct course of action. The rational one. The course that a man in my position — a man who employs this woman, who controls her environment, who holds the power in every conceivable dimension of this dynamic — should have taken.
Instead, I stayed.
I watched her stir, the spoon moving in slow circles, her wrist rotating with a practiced rhythm when her body bent to check the heat, and the shorts shifted again, and the full curve of her was there — offered, unconscious, devastating — and my blood went south.
She was trembling, all because of me. Because I was standing there in the dark, and my presence did what it alwaysdoes: it fills a room until there’s no air left for anyone else. It makes people smaller. Quieter. Afraid.
I liked that she trembled. The admission is ugly, but I can at least acknowledge it in my own mind.
The way her body registered my proximity. The quickened breathing and flush of her cheeks, trying to keep her eyes on the pot because looking at me cost her peace.
I liked knowing that I could affect her, that my presence altered her chemistry the way it alters everyone’s, but differently. The guards go rigid. The staff go silent. She went liquid.
She didn’t leave or shut down. She didn’t lose her voice the way the last governess did, the way most people do when they register what I am.
Elizabeth Calloway stood in my kitchen, talking about her father’s recipe and promising the hot chocolate was good.
She was afraid of me but stayed anyway. The combination of fear and defiance, vulnerability and backbone, is more arousing than anything any woman has ever done to me deliberately.
And that’s dismantling me.
The women at galas and fundraisers wear dresses cut to provoke. They approach me knowing what I am, or at least the version of it they find exciting. The power, the danger, the money. They perform desire. Arching their backs, lowering their voices, and angling their bodies. It works, in the purely mechanical sense, the way any competent transaction works.
Katarina did it best.
The thought surfaces before I can block it. Katarina. My dead wife. She wore the right dresses, said the right things, performing desire so convincingly that I believed it for almost a year before I realized that everything, every moan, every whisper, every touch was engineered, merely a strategy. A long-term investment in a position she wanted to secure.
And she did, by getting pregnant. In doing so, she got the ring, the name, the protection. And then she died, and I was left with a daughter and a conviction that desire is either a weapon or a trap and never anything as simple as what it pretends to be.
But Elizabeth Calloway was standing in my kitchen in pajamas with cartoon cats on them, making hot chocolate for my daughter who’d had a nightmare. There was nothing calculated about it. Her body wasn’t arranged for my benefit, and the clothes weren’t chosen to provoke. The strip of skin at her lower back wasn’t revealed as a strategy.
Yet it hit me harder than every designer dress and every moan of every woman who’s ever stood in front of me performing want. Because this was a woman being herself, and that was enough to make my body respond with a violence I haven’t felt in years. Maybe ever.
I left before I did the unforgivable.
Once I was in the shower, I stopped pretending.
The water was too hot, and my hand was wrapped around myself before I’d consciously decided to put it there. My body demanding what my mind refused to authorize.
