Page 61

Delaney doesn’t defend herself. She just stands there, twisting her fingers together to hide their trembling, and her eyes go red at the rims, and her face moves from confused to hurt right in front of me.

I remember that she’s never once begged me for anything. She’s never blamed another person to save herself, not once while climbing the ranks. She stood up to that big bastard Abernathy in front of a whole floor on the worst morning of her life and didn’t flinch. Her silence now, this quiet swallowing of a blow she didn’t earn, makes me angrier than any argument ever could.

“Do you have nothing to say?” I demand.

She pulls the file up against her chest and wraps her arms around herself, holding it there like a shield. “Are you finished?” she whispers back, already resigned to wearing the blame for all of it.

“I didn’t say that,” I grumble.

“You didn’t have to,” she says, every trace of the casual lilt to her words gone. “It is exactly what you meant.”

Something in me is breaking, low in my chest, because she’s right, and because I’ve made her expect the worst of me so completely that she braced for the blame before I even opened my mouth.

And then her voice finally rises, forceful and raw, and everything she has been holding down comes pouring out at once.

“That assignment came from your email,” she cries out. “Your name was on it. Sablo’s whole events office was copied. What was I supposed to do, Lev? Write back and ask whether you were sure you wanted to marry your own fiancée?” She doesn’t give me one inch to answer. “You would’ve torn my head off for questioning a task that small, and you know you would have. Do you have any idea what that transfer notice was like? An official one, sent down through the system. The rumor making the rounds at Sablo, everyone asking me to my face whether you got bored and shipped me back down like returned merchandise. And now you stand there and ask me who authorized it.”

Her breathing turns labored and ragged, and the hurt spreads all across her face, and my heart clenches hard at the sight of it.

“Yelena poured that water over herself,” she says, her throat thick with emotion. “She lied straight to your face, and you believed her without listening to me for one single second. You held her and comforted her right in front of me. And then, in the elevator, you put your hands on me and pulled me closer, gently. Do you even remember that part?”

Every word lands somewhere in my ribs like a crack running through bone.

“You told me you would not let me die in there. I believed you. I actually believed you.” Her voice breaks apart, and she presses her hand over her mouth. “And then the doors opened, you let go of me, and you walked out carrying another woman, not looking back at me one single time.”

I want to tell her about Yelena’s heart, about the weak, failing thing in her chest, about twenty years of instinct worn into me that cannot be erased. In my mouth the explanation sounds like exactly what it is, a coward’s excuse, and I feel like a dolt. She’s right about every last thing I did.

“I didn’t send that email,” I say at last, in words that taste like blood, and my voice finally drops out of its ice. “I didn’t order your transfer. Neither one of them came from me.”

She goes very still, eyes wide, comprehension dawning. “Then who did?” And before I can answer, I watch her arrive at it herself. “It was Yelena, was it not?”

I hesitate for one single second. It is one second too long, and her lashes tremble, fluttering with it.

“Of course it was,” she says, bitter and quiet. “Who else would be that ballsy. And you would never blame her for a single thing.” She lets out a small, broken laugh, aimed mockingly at herself. “She got me out of your office, used your own email to hand me your wedding, and when it blew up in your face, you called me in here to tear a strip off me for it.”

I round the desk, slowly, and take her by the shoulders. “Listen to me for one minute. I didn’t know about any of it until an hour ago.”

She jerks back out of my hands. “No, I’m done. I’m fucking done, Lev, and I need to get out of here. Whether you knew or not, you looked at me and chose to believe the worst, every single time.”

She opens the folder and lets it drop with a rustle, and forty pages scatter across the floor between us like a line drawn in the sand.

“What did you just say to me?” I ask, my voice dropping low, and silence surges between us, thick and sharp.

“I’m resigning.” She lifts her chin, her eyes swollen, and holds my gaze anyway, matching me inch for inch. “Effective right now, this minute.”

“Don’t be rash about this,” I say rather than ask, and I hear the command sitting inside my own voice, the exact tone I use on men who work for me. She hears it too.

“There it is,” she says, and shoots me a sideways glance. “That right there. You decide everything for everyone around you. The pay is good, I will give you that much. But I’m not going to be paid to be treated like something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe.”

My jaw locks. Anyone else in this building who spoke to me this way would learn a very hard lesson about it, the same one I teach when I exterminate the vermin. She’s not anyone else. That fact detonates in me before I can talk myself out of it.

She turns for the door, paper crunching under her shoe, and a panic I don’t recognize, wild and paranoid, grabs me by the throat. She’s about to walk out of my reach for good, out of the one small circle of the world I can actually hold, and the thought of it empties me out, leaves me bereft.

“Stop,” I bark.

She doesn’t.

My body moves before my mind catches up, and my hand closes around her wrist.