But I don't buy it. Over and over, I glance behind me, my heart hammering. I know I fucked up, but why the fuck did they do this to him?
I twist, kneeling backward on the seat to check Nik again. His chest rises. Falls. Rises. There's a smear of blood at his hairline, dark against that silver hair, and my stomach turns because I put him in this position.
Well, technically, Jeffrey did.
"You hit him too hard," I say, flipping back around, my hair slapping the seat. I stare at the back of Jeffrey's neck and imagine stabbing him with a basil stake from the rooftop garden.
Jeffrey exhales. "He was trying to shoot us, Ellie-girl."
"Don't Ellie-girl me. You concussed my... friend." Something tells me calling him my hookup won't land well with this crowd.
The tower looms ahead, black glass swaggering up into the sky. As we step out of the car in the basement, an unconscious Nik held between two men, a valet startles and looks away because even he knows this is above his pay grade.
They hustle us through the private entrance and straight into the elevator that will take us up to the penthouse. I stand taller, spine straight, refusing to be embarrassed for wanting one night.
We ride up and I know Gayle's fury will hurtle toward me the moment the doors open. My mother doesn't do waiting. She makes the world follow her calendar or burn trying.
The elevator hums, and I can only imagine how I look. Hair wrecked, makeup smeared, dress that screams bad decisions. There's a sting between my thighs, a soreness that whispersyou did it, you finally did it.
Only, you got the guy destroyed in the process. Fuck.
"Hey," I whisper as we reach our floor, dropping beside Nik as they lift him, hoping he can hear me in some alternate universe. "Wake up soon, okay? Before my mother orders your head on a tray."
"Stay back," Jeffrey says, and I bare my teeth at him like a feral cat.
The penthouse doors open.
Mother's waiting in the living room. Of course she is. Black suit, white blouse, lipstick the exact red of punishment. Gayle Donovan looks at me like she's scraping gum off a Louboutin.
"Explain," she says to Jeffrey. Not to me. Like I'm furniture that has offended her by moving.
Jeffrey tells her everything, but doesn't add the part where I begged. Doesn't add the part where, for the first time in years, I felt like a person instead of a package, and he smashed that feeling with the butt of a gun.
Mother listens with her arms folded, jaw set somewhere between homicide settings one and five. When Jeffrey finishes, a vein pulses at her temple.
"You just ruined your future," she hisses. The words hit like thrown rocks. "The husband I selected for you will not want damaged goods."
My face goes hot. "I am not goods."
She turns her head just enough to slice me with a smile. "You are what I say you are."
"Great. So we're going back to when they burned women at stakes and called them witches, huh?" I say, because I'm furious and my mouth is a suicide note.
Mother ignores me. Her eyes slide past me to the men depositing Nik. Something flickers across her face when she sees him. Recognition. Cold and immediate, like a match catching.
It makes no sense.
She whirls on me, striding forward. "You stupid, naive girl." Her voice is low enough to skin me alive. "Do you have any idea what you've done? Do you know who this man is?"
"His name is Nik," I say, utterly confused. "He's the guy I picked."
She laughs. It's the ugliest sound I've ever heard come out of her mouth. "His name is Nikolai Ivanov, you fool. And he works for Viktor Ivanov."
I stare. Both names could easily be a brand of vodka. They mean nothing to me.
"Okay? And?"
"And," she says, eyes bright like a blade catching light, "you brought a wolf into my house."
