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“It’s nothing, truly,” she’s saying, breezy and brave. “Just a few little scrapes. They don’t even hurt.”
“Why were you not wearing any shoes?” Lev asks.
Through the crack in the door, where sunlight slices through the slats of the blinds, I can see him kneeling on the floor in front of the couch, the man half this city is terrified of, down on his knees with one of her small feet cradled in his hands while he dabs at it with cotton. She sits above him on the couch with her ankle resting in his lap, looking down at the top of his silver head like a queen who has come home, with a brightness I have not seen, a fire in her.
“I heard them all shouting that the car had dropped, and I just ran,” she murmurs quietly, reaching out to touch his hand. “I didn’t think about shoes. I didn’t think about anything at all except getting down to you.”
“Don’t ever do a thing like that again,” he says. “You could’ve made yourself much worse.”
It’s meant to be a scolding, and it lands wrapped in velvet, the softest thing I have ever heard come out of his mouth. He’s ordered men to their deaths and put a target on their backs in a flatter voice than the one he is using on her right now. My stomach boils and curdles around it.
“You always do this,” Yelena says, shyly dropping her gaze, and there is a smile threaded through her voice. “You have always looked after me so quietly, ever since we were children. Even your right hand treats me like something breakable. When Yuri brought the clothes down earlier, he kept his eyes fixed on the floor the entire time, on purpose, so that he would not see a single inch of me.” Her laugh is throaty and small, and she sounds pleased with herself. “I think he knows you would take his eyes out otherwise. That is what it means, to belong to you. Everyone learns to be gentle.”
“Everyone knows how to behave around you,” Lev says. “They always have.”
Every word comes through the gap perfectly clear, and I stifle a laugh that has nothing funny in it.
Something drives straight through my chest and out the other side.
He knows how to be gentle. He knows how to be careful. He simply doesn’t spend either one of those things on me. Yelena is carried and cleaned and shielded from every set of eyes in the building. She’s a weak spot he guards with his life. I was pinned to a wall in a steel box that anyone could’ve opened, as if he meant to let the whole fucking city see, my clothes shoved up, and he never once stopped to think about my shame.
I make myself keep walking. I sit down at my desk, beside a vase of flowers that I bought myself, square the files in front of me, and clench my jaw until it aches.
I refuse to sit here dropping my head into my hands. I’m not going to cry over this, not here and definitely not for him.
17
DELANEY
I tell the front desk I’m sick, exhausted in a way sleep will not fix, and go straight home.
The second the door shuts behind me, I finally stop holding myself together, and I shatter like I’m made of glass. My bag slides off my shoulder and hits the floor with an inelegant thud. I press my back to the door and slide down it until I’m sitting, and the first sob that tears out of me comes out ugly, like a wounded animal caught in a pit it cannot get out of.
I have to face the brutal, simple truth of it. Lev, the nightmare whispered about in backrooms, protected me because he could. He crushed his mouth against mine because he wanted to.
Men like him, sleek as any predator, have seen too many women and know too well how to hold the reins. One promise, one embrace, one stolen kiss, one perfectly timed moment of tenderness is enough to make a fool like me believe I’ve been chosen. But when it comes to the woman he actually cares about, she comes first every single time.
I bite down on the side of my hand, gasping around it, and still, I can’t stop the tears.
My phone buzzes in my bag, and my traitor heart picks up its pace, reveling in one stupid second of hope before I can stop it. Is it Lev? Before I even lift my head, I have already started imagining what he would say, and how the growl in his voice would sound saying it.
“Come back to me.” Or maybe, “Where the hell are you, woman?”
He rarely explains himself. He just gives orders, like someone collecting dues. And I curse him for being an asshole even as that unshakable certainty of his, growing like a vine in me, drags me right back to him.
I wipe my eyes and grab my bag, my fingers riddled with tremors, fumbling over the passcode. There’s no name on the screen. There’s only a company email, and my misplaced hope plummets.
The subject line reads, “Position Adjustment Notice.” Below it sits one flat line. “Effective tomorrow, Delaney Cox will return to Sablo House, floor staff. Original position and responsibilities reinstated. Salary unchanged.”
I read it three times over, trying to decipher something human in it. There is no reason given, no transition, nothing at all.
When Lev pulled me up to the assistant role, it went exactly like this. A hard notice, a new desk set uncomfortably close to his, close enough to catch that dark, woody, smokey scent of him all day. He decided, and I moved, as though his reach knows no bounds.
Now he’s finished with me, so back down I go, squeezed dry and tossed out like pulp.
My finger hovers, wary, over the words salary unchanged.
This is supposed to be good news. I would not have to watch him with Yelena anymore, her cleavage beautifully on display for him. I would not have to sort through his tangled reports spanning restaurants and jewelry stores and bars and casinos, a warehouse of risk dressed up as business. I should feel relieved. Instead, the tears keep falling onto the screen and blurring the words into smears of light, a frozen sea of golds and silvers.
