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“Except that it is,” I argue, forcing myself upright after all. His eyes immediately drop to my still bare frame, lingering on my chest until I swat at his. An action I feel horrible about when he winces in genuine pain. I have to bite my tongue from the apology that burns at the tip of it. “You’re holding me right now, and it doesn’t change that you’re still holding me against my will. Why is that so normal to you?”

Leonid releases an aggravated breath. “Things are different now.”

“Because we had sex? I had good sex with you and that means I’m your—”

“Okay, first of all,” he cuts in, “that wasn’t good. It was fucking phenomenal. And yes, but it isn’t the only reason. You saved me. You rose to a dangerous occasion like a fucking pro, except for how you aren’t one, and both things were equally clear to me in the car. But there’s a reason that fucking shoot-out happened, too. You’re not safe. Surely, that’s clear to you after everything.”

I nearly swat him again. “Don’t be condescending.”

“I’m not trying to be, sweetheart.”

The tenderness with which he says the words catch me off-guard, sufficiently knocking the wind out of my proverbial sails. My own tone softens as I insist, “Well, it sounds that way. I understand this world of yours I’ve been yanked into, kicking and screaming, is my reality right now. But it hasn’t made my family stop existing.”

“They’re safe,” he vows. “I have men on them.”

He doesn’t see it. He’s so close to his own brothers, I can tell from the way he speaks of them—and still, somehow, he’s obtuse. “Can your men tell them not to worry about me? Explain why I don’t have my phone? Why I’m not picking up my mother’s calls, or answering texts from my baby brother or best friend?”

I try to keep some bite out of the words, but they can’t help but simmer.

He shocks my system all over again when he leans in to press a chaste, sweet kiss to my shoulder. “I never took your phone. That was your original captors. I’m happy to get you one,” he says softly, punctuating with another kiss.

It’s unfortunate that, even talking about this, he makes my heart skip a beat over his warm, lingering mouth. “I need to see them,” I say, lashes tickling the apples of my cheeks.

“Meera—”

I hear the argument coming, and race to double down. “Just dinner. You can position as many of your guards as you want. Hell, you can come with me. Pose as my boyfriend, I don’t care. I just know them. I have to explain. And I miss them. It hurts me, how much I—”

“Okay. Let me work out the logistics,” he yields, his features scrunching together in distress, like my hurt is unacceptable to him.

Somehow, I don’t have it in me to argue with him—to throw in his face how that’s nonsensical when he’s hurt me plenty, because I’m no longer sure how much he truly has. And mostly, there’s no room for anything left when the relief hits me so hard my eyes sting.

It nearly bowls me over.

But there’s Leonid’s hand cradling my cheek, holding me upright.

Chapter 15 - Leonid

If they know where she works, they could know where she lives. It’s safer to stick to public spaces and properties crawling with security.

Meera isn’t thrilled with logic working against her. But she let me take her shopping and buy her an outfit yesterday, after she’d gotten her new phone and told her family she wanted to have lunch on Friday. She’d also spent an abominable amount of time in Sephora, and I suspect it’d been to punish me.

Nevertheless, the sight of her hips swishing in that skirt on her way into the car this morning makes it hard to perceive the circumstances as truly tragic. The hem swirls around her calves. Only the fact that I put her on her stomach and fucked her this morning keeps my hands to myself—for the most part at least.

“You can’t look at me like that inside,” she chides as the corners of her pretty mouth fight a smile.

I feign innocence, brows knitting together. “Like that?”

“Like you want to eat me,” Meera says without blinking.

“I ate you this morning,” I remind her, shattering the illusion of purity with a filthy smirk.

“Was it enough?” she asks like she already knows the answer.

I’m glad she does. She deserves to have no doubts about my bottomless appetite for her body and the sounds she makes when I play with it.

I answer, regardless: “I doubt it could be.”

But I still have to steer the car onto the street the app she’d punched her mother’s address into navigates us toward. The evidence of Meera’s ensuing anxiety is present in the way her smile turns strained. She doesn’t offer a witty rejoinder in return, no longer volleying sass back at me the way she’s been doing the past forty-eight hours, since we broke the ice between us by acting on our mutual attraction.