He stayed where he was for a moment afterward. Then he rose.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said anything for several seconds. His expression was controlled again—almost. There was something remaining that the control hadn’t fully covered yet, something that looked at me with a directness that had nothing strategic in it.
He adjusted my skirt. The gesture was precise and impersonal, and somehow the most undoing thing he had done all evening.
I stood. My legs cooperated, which was generous of them.
“I haven’t agreed to anything,” I said.
“I know.”
“This wasn’t—that wasn’t agreement.”
“I know,” he said again, with the same evenness. He reached for his jacket. “Go home, Sofia. Think about what I’ve told you.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
He looked at me. “You’re good at being clear. I’ve noticed.”
I picked up my bag. My hands were steady, which was a victory I assigned significant value to.
*****
My apartment was dark as usual when I got home.
But this morning, I didn’t turn the lights on. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with my bag still on my shoulder and the neon glow of the city bleeding through the gap in the curtains. I thought about all of it—the proposal, the threat, the information about Cruz, the days of surveillance, Viktor’s hands on my hips, and the particular deliberateness with which he had—
I pressed my palms to my face.
The body does not negotiate. That was the thing I had been telling myself since the first night in that bathroom stall, since the first time I had stood close enough to Viktor to register his warmth and found my pulse doing something that hadnothing to do with fear. The body responds to what it responds to, and the response is not endorsement, and attraction to a dangerous man is a documented feature of human psychology with nothing romantic in it.
I had believed that. I had found it very useful.
I was finding it slightly less useful tonight, sitting in the dark with my body still humming in frequencies I hadn’t invited, replaying the particular expression on Viktor Golovin’s face when the control had slipped far enough that I could see underneath it.
He wanted me. That was not the question. He had made that clear with a precision that left no interpretive room. The question—the one I had been circling since I left the suite—was what to do with the fact that Rafael Cruz was apparently looking for a dark-haired waitress from the Golovin floor, and the only structure standing between me and whatever Cruz did with witnesses he found was a man who had told me, honestly and without decoration, that he wanted to own me.
And the other question—the one I was having more trouble with—was what to do with the fact that I had shoved Viktor Golovin in a private suite and he had caught my wrists, and I had stepped forward.
That I hadn’t said stop.
I lay back on the bed with my bag still on my shoulder and listened to the city outside. Las Vegas. The sound of it was always there, a low, constant hum.
Viktor had said,“You already belong to the danger you stepped into.”
The thing about that was, as much as it pained me to accept, he wasn’t wrong. I had been living in danger since the moment I had walked down that hallway that night. The surveillance, the cars outside my building—none of that had created the danger. The danger had existed first. Viktor had put walls around it.
Walls were also a cage. That was still true.
But Cruz was looking for me.
And, whatever Viktor was, whatever last night had been, whatever the next conversation between us would be, Viktor was the walls.
I closed my eyes.
I didn’t say yes.
I thought about his voice saying my name.
