“Don’t,” he said.
One word: Dangerous. The way a wire is dangerous when it’s been stretched past its limit.
I removed my hand. I had already removed it, but I removed it again in some psychological sense, taking myself further from the contact. The warmth of his chest against my palm was still registering as sensation, and I was very deliberately not paying attention to that.
“Don’t what?” I inquired, and my voice came out lower than I intended.
“You know what.” He looked at me. Something moved in his face, underneath the control, in ways I was only beginning to understand.“Don’t do that and then look at me like you don’t know what you’ve done.”
“I pushed you.” My heart was too loud. “I barely—”
“I know what you did.”
The words were quiet. They were also the end of that particular thread of conversation, because there was nowhere to take them that didn’t acknowledge something neither of us was going to acknowledge in a corridor in a casino on a weekday.
I took a breath.
“I will never belong to you,” I declared. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You looked at me in that hallway and made a decision, and the decision wasn’t justlet her live, it was something else.” I held his gaze. “I will never belong to anyone. I don’t care what you’ve decided. I don’t care how many cars you park outside my building or how many of your people you put on my floor. That is not something you get to decide for me.”
Viktor looked at me for a long moment. The corridor hummed with the distant sound of the casino, with the ventilation, with the ambient electricity of a building that ranon scale. In it, we were very quiet and very close, and his eyes remained on my eyes. It was complete attention.
The kind that felt, in its intensity, almost like I was being enveloped in a tight hug.
“You’re in my sight now,” he said. “Whether you choose that or not. That’s what it means to be in this. There is no outside of it anymore.”
“You don’t get to tell me what I’m in.”
“I already have.”
“I’ll never belong to anyone,” I said again.
He looked at me. A long, considered look that moved over my face with the thoroughness I had come to dread, that saw things I had not offered.
“No,” he said quietly. And then, so low I almost missed it, he added, “Not to anyone.”
I left before I could think too carefully about the distinction.
The floor was busy when I came back. I took my tray, delivered drinks, and smiled at the right moments. I did not think about the warmth of his chest against my palm or the sound of his voice when it had lost an edge of its control or the fact that he had saidnot to anyonein a tone that did not mean what I had meant when I said it.
I thought about it anyway. Despite myself.
The surveillance was not going to stop. I understood that now in a way that was less theoretical than it had been two hours ago. Viktor had built something around me—not impulsively,not sloppily, but with the same deliberate and architectural patience he appeared to bring to everything—and he was not going to dismantle it because I had asked him to. He was not the kind of man who dismantled things because he was asked.
And the truth that sat at the bottom of all of it, the truth I pressed on like a bruise on the bus home at 3 am, was this: He had put surveillance on me, yes. He had built a perimeter, yes. He had done all of it without my consent or knowledge, and it was an invasion and an assertion of control. Everything I had said about it in that corridor was true.
He had also looked at me—had looked at me with those dark eyes in a dim hallway over a dead body—and chosen something. He did not explain the choice. He did not justify it.
My palm was still warm.
I pressed it against the cold surface of my tray and made myself focus and did not look up at the mezzanine.
I didn’t need to look up. I already knew what I would find there.
Well, not what…who.
Chapter Six
Viktor
