Page 34 of Merciless Daddy

I had not planned to say it.

Her eyes came up off the dog and onto my face.

They stayed there. And something happened behind them that undid me: the fight went out of her shoulders. Not all of it. Just the top layer, the outermost coat of barbed wire, and underneath it was a woman with her hair down on one side, sitting on a floor in a scratchy blanket, breathing.

She didn’t say anything about it. She looked away, fast, at the lake, and I watched her decide not to have noticed, and I let her have that.

Fuck.

She could be a Little.

This just went from bad to dangerous.

Chapter 6

Yelena

Iwoke with a dog’s beard stuck to my mouth and ninety-one pounds of warm Italian judgment pressed across my shins.

For a few seconds, I did not know where I was.

Grey blanket. Dark lake beyond impossible windows. The soft mechanical breath of heat coming through hidden vents. A giant shaggy animal stretched along the length of my legs, his rough orange-and-white coat warm under my hand.

Then memory came back in pieces sharp enough to cut.

The road. The gunshot. Salvatore’s blood on my fingers. The plane. His hand around my wrists. The penthouse door locking behind me.

I sat up too fast.

Olimpo made a long, offended noise and put his giant head in my lap as if I had disturbed him for no reason at all.

“You are in my way,” I told him.

His tail thumped once against the carpet.

The clock on the wall said ten past nine.

I had slept.

Not dozed. Not closed my eyes and listened for footsteps through the door. Not dozed with one hand around a weapon and my shoes on. I had slept deeply enough that the sun was already turning the lake silver.

Fury arrived clean and immediate.

My body had betrayed me in a strange man’s house. In a cage with nice furniture. It had accepted a blanket, a dog, a low voice, and decided the escape could wait until morning. I was angry with myself—incandescent.

I pushed the blanket off and stood. Sal’s coat slid down my arms, heavy and dark and smelling faintly of wool, soap, and him. I hated that I knew the smell already. Hated that some low, traitorous part of me wanted to put my face into the collar and breathe it until there was nothing else in my head.

The wedding dress underneath was ruined. One shoulder bare. Silk torn at the bodice. A brown stain where somebody’s blood had dried near the hem.

I walked toward the kitchen because I could hear a pan.

Sal stood at the marble island in shirtsleeves, his jacket gone, dark shirt rolled to the elbows. Morning light cut across him from the windows. He was too large for the room in the way some men were too large for any room—not because he moved loudly, but because everything around him seemed arranged by his presence.

His forearms were bare. Olive skin. Dark hair over muscle. The old knife scar ran along his right arm, pale and uneven against the strength of it. His hands looked made for difficult work: broad palms, blunt fingers, a faint dusting of dark hair over the knuckles.

The butterfly closures on his cheek were stark against his stubble.

I had put them there.