Page 21 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“What?”

“Nothing happens tonight,” he repeats. “You’ve been up since six, you stood on a borrowed cane, and I watched your leg go out from under you. You’ll go to your room, you’ll lock the door, and I’ll be down the hall. That’s what happens tonight.”

Every wall I built today comes down at once, and what comes in behind it is worse than the fight I was ready for.

“You don’t want me.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. I’ve never once done that to you.”

“Then what is this?” My voice goes gravelly. “Because I’ve heard this before, Lev. I know the whole script. It opens with you’re tired and closes with a man packing a bag while I’m still on painkillers, telling me it’s for my own good, telling me he can’t stand to watch me struggle. Three weeks after they fused my spine. Three. So if this is where you take stock of what happened in that church and decide the merchandise came home damaged, say it in a full sentence and let me get on with my life.”

He crosses the floor in four steps and crouches.

The crouch. The one thing I’ve hated most on this earth for two years, the folding down to the spaniel, and he does it anyway, forearms on his knees, his face where I can’t send my eyes anywhere but into it.

“I don’t care about the chair, Vasilisa. You’re a woman. A very beautiful one,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “My body reacts to you whether I want it or not. That’s a fact.”

My heart is going so hard I can hear it in my ears.

“Then why?”

“Because you didn’t get a choice on any of this. Not really.” His eyes stay on mine. “I’m the man who took your choices away, and I’ll probably do it again in the future. But this… this is the one choice I won’t make for you.”

No one says anything for about four seconds.

“Here’s the offer, and it doesn’t change, tonight or in a year.” It’s the same voice he used to tell me a man wasn’t walking back out of this building. “Nothing happens. Or it does. You decide, and you say it out loud, because I’m not going to be reading your face or guessing, and I won’t have you telling yourself in a month that I took a decision away from you again.”

“That’s not a proposal. That’s a term sheet.”

“It’s the only thing I’ve got.”

“You’re actually going to make me say it.”

“Yes.”

I want to hit him. I want to run over his foot with both wheels and reverse. I want to tell him to go fuck himself, roll to my room, throw the bolt, and lie in the dark, being furious in the only language I’m fluent in, because he’s done it again. He’s found the one thing nobody’s given me in two years, and he’s holding it out on his palm as if it costs him nothing.

Nobody asks me. The doctors decided. The therapists decided. Aidan decided three weeks after, standing next to my mother’s tin with a bag in his hand and my whole future in his mouth. My father decided across a card table for three hundred and forty grand. Every man who’s put his hands near my body since the accident has decided first and informed me second.

This one’s down on his own floor with my teeth marks in his lip, waiting.

“I can make you feel good,” he says. “If you want it. That’s on the table too.”

“Wow. That’s your opener.”

“I’m not opening. I’m telling you what’s available.” He doesn’t blink. “You want flowers and a speech, I’ll pay somebody to write it. This is what I have.”

Two years. Two years since anyone looked at me and saw a woman instead of a chair. Two years of being transferred and spotted and assisted and admired for my attitude, while everybody talked over my head about my range of motion. My body still lights up everywhere it lights up, all of it intact, all of it going to waste.

Two years of being the brave one, and I am so tired of being the brave one.

“Once,” I say.

He doesn’t move.

“That’s the deal, so listen to the whole thing.” My hands are shaking on the rims. “Once. Tonight. I want to feel again. But this doesn’t change anything. I’m not falling for you. I’m not moving down your end of the hall. Tomorrow I get up, and I’m still the woman who says good morning to you like you’re a neighbor she doesn’t care for.”

“All right.”