Page 19

My throat tightens.

Use.

The word should send me running. It does not. He caps the tin.

“Step out.”

I hesitate for half a second. Then I obey. I work the trousers and briefs over my shoes and kick them aside. They look small on his perfect floor... cheap, out of place.

Like me.

Now I am standing in his kitchen in a shirt and a coat I never took off and nothing from the waist down but burning skin and shining gel.

I do not know where to put my hands. I leave them on the counter because he has not told me to move them.

Dmitri walks around me. Looks. Not like a man embarrassed by what he has done. Like a man inspecting a decision.

My ass still gleams under the kitchen light. I can feel it. I know he can see the shape of his hand on me.

“You followed a man who kills people,” Dmitri says. “You sat across from his club. You thought you were hunting.”

I swallow. “I wanted to know who you were.”

“You know.”

“I wanted in,” I say.

There. It is out. There’s no going back now.

Dmitri’s mouth curves. Not kind.

“That is closer.” He stops in front of me. Close enough that I have to look up. Close enough that I can smell vodka and cold air and the clean bite of the gel. “This can be the ticket you have been chasing since you quit that useless degree,” he says. “Yes, I know all about you. I know what you crave too. Money. Danger. It can be the thing that ends you. There is no third version, Elias. Not with me.”

My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in the places he spanked.

I think of Zane. Of Singapore. Of the Greek boys and the nights I ran. Of the boy who wanted a master and told himself that word was only about work.

I look at the windows and the city he thinks he owns.

Then I look at him.

“I didn’t come this far to leave with my pants in my hands and a good story,” I say.

Something flashes in his eyes. Approval, maybe. Hunger. Both.

“Good,” Dmitri says. “Then you will learn the first rule in my house.”

He waits. I hate that I wait with him.

“You do not follow me unless I tell you to follow me,” Dmitri says. “You do not listen at doors unless I put you there. You do not decide the path. I do.”

My wetness has not gone away.

If anything it is worse.

“And if I break the rule?”

Dmitri glances at my bare ass. Then back to my face. “Then we begin again,” he says. “And I do not stop at the elevator. And I use more than my hand.”