Page 48

“You used to help me with that,” she says, and doesn’t move.

“We were young then, and I was carrying you home from parties where the grown men had forgotten we existed.” I press a blanket into her hands. “It’s not the same now, Yelena.”

“Nothing is ever the same with you anymore,” she says, so quietly I nearly miss it.

Once she is steady, I turn my back and give her the room. I hear the slow drag of her zipper coming down, drawn out and pointed, meant to be heard.

Delaney’s face keeps flashing behind my eyes, kneeling, stubborn, hiding her wet lashes. I wonder if they were wet at all. I wonder where in the building she is right now.

Then Yelena’s bare body presses flat against my back, and her arms slide around my waist.

“Hold me,” she breathes against my neck. “Warm me up. Please, Lev.”

I turn around, and she stands there with nothing on. She is painfully thin, her chest flat, her ribs a faint ladder under the skin, her legs slender enough that a strong wind might carry her off the roof.

She trails her fingers down my chest, toward my stomach, reaching lower, and I catch her wrist before they arrive. Her glazed blue eyes ask me why without a word.

“You don’t want me,” she says.

I pull her into my arms and spread my hands flat over her bare back, holding her the way you hold something that is cold rather than something you want. With her skin against mine, I feel nothing a man is meant to feel in this moment. There’s no heat, no pull, nothing but the sharp cage of her ribs under my palms and a dull ache that’s closer to grief. I see only the girl who bandaged my knuckles in a freezing basement, who was too good for the family she was born into. Yelena is the softest thing my life has ever held, and you don’t put your hands on the one clean thing you own.

She is not something I could ever take for myself.

Her breathing is still too fast and shallow. I carry her back to the sofa and settle my jacket over her again.

She stares at me as though I’ve done something she cannot begin to understand. My refusal makes no sense to her at all.

“There is no world in which I don’t want you near me,” I tell her, choosing the words with care, because they are true in the only way I can make them true. “You are family. You always have been.” I pull the jacket tighter around her thin shoulders.

She eases a little at that, her small frame nearly swallowed inside the fabric, and it makes her look smaller still, and younger, and I have to look away from how much she resembles the child she used to be.

Her hand closes on my arm. “You have changed,” she says. “You never used to turn me away.” Her bare chest presses to my forearm, and the jacket slides, baring the long line of her spine and hip.

She climbs into my lap and grinds against my thigh through my trousers. Warmth creeps back into her face, and her nipples tighten against my chest, and a thin, needy sound spills out of her.

“I want you, Lev,” she whimpers, her eyes going hazy. “I have missed you so much.”

Any other man sitting here would let instinct take the wheel. I understand that plainly. The whole moment is built to pull it out of me.

But it is Yelena, and there is no want in me, only a heavy, pressing ache. I held her as sacred for twenty years. What did she go through, to believe this is the one door left open to reach me?

I lift her off my lap by her thin waist and set her down beside me, careful, the way you set down something that might crack. “You don’t need me,” I say. “You need rest. You are exhausted, and you are half frozen, and you are not thinking clearly.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she whispers.

“That is what frightens me,” I answer, before I can stop the words.

She sits stunned, hurt splashed bright across her face, and I cannot stand the look of it, and still I cover her back up and go no further.

My phone buzzes against my chest, a short message from Yuri waiting downstairs.

“Wait here,” I tell her. “I will bring your clothes up myself.”

“Why can no one simply carry them in for you?” she asks, frowning up at me from inside the jacket.

“No one is going to see you like this.” I will not risk a single one of my men walking through that door while she sits there bare, so I go down to fetch them myself.

The elevator answers fast. I step in and stop dead.