My breath catches. He moves closer, stopping just short of touching me.
“If that frightens you, be frightened,” he says. “If it angers you, be angry. But don’t ask me to pretend I would have let him live. I would kill him again.”
I look up at him.
The terrible thing is that I believe him.
The more terrible thing is what belief does to me.
I remember the fear in that hallway. The blood on my dress. The sense, even then, that something darker than danger had stepped out of the shadows on my side.
“You were mine before you even knew it.” His voice roughens on the last word, and suddenly I see it beneath the violence. The fear he will not name. The obsession that was not only possession, not only desire, but some fierce, irrational refusal to let the world have me.
“I think I should be furious with you.”
“You are.”
“Not enough.”
His hand comes up slowly, giving me time to move away. I don’t. His fingers settle at my waist, over the towel. “Then be furious tomorrow.”
My breath catches. “Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
His mouth lowers toward mine, but stops a breath away. “Tonight, let me show you what I wanted the first time you looked at me.”
The words move through me like flame.
I should tell him no. I should make him wait. I should hold on to the anger because it’s reasonable, because it belongs to me.
Instead, I rise on my toes and kiss him.
The towel loosens under his hands. He catches it before it falls, then looks at me with a question that is not soft but is there. I answer by taking his wrist and placing his hand against my bare skin.
His control frays in his eyes.
Only there. Only for me.
He kisses me then, and it’s not like the shower. Not rushed, not desperate, not all heat and wet tile. This is slower. Darker. He lifts me carefully, carries me to the bed, and lays me down like he has already imagined it too many times to hurry now.
25
YAROMIR
Larisa leaves before breakfast.She doesn’t say goodbye.
That is very like her.
One of the staff informs me while I’m buttoning my shirt, and for a moment, I only look at the woman in silence. “When?”
“Before dawn, sir.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No, sir.”
I should be relieved. Part of me is. Another part knows she is rarely finished just because she’s gone.
