Page 65

After that night, Delaney never says the word quit again.

I didn’t order her back to the top floor. For the first time in my life I asked, actually asked, my heart hammering in my throat, and waited for her answer before I brought her back up as my assistant. The asking cost me something I didn’t know I still had to spend.

I haven’t set foot in the company in days. The avoidance is its own mute confession, and I know it.

I’ve spent forty-four years never letting anyone see inside me. I give orders. I’m hardwired that way. I don’t explain myself, and I don’t bare my chest for anyone to aim at. She has changed that in me, and the change frightens me more than any man with a gun, bathed in blood or wearing a tailored suit, ever has.

I stand at the window of my study and light a cigar and flick the ash to the side. The smoke tastes bitter on my tongue. I have kept her close, snug within reach. I moved her desk beside mine and refused her resignation and got down on my knees for her, and I still cannot put a name to what she is to me. Infatuation is too small a word for it. The not-knowing sits in my chest like a stone that will not shift, and I have learned to work around it the way a man learns to work around a bullet the surgeons decided, as a last resort, to leave in.

Yelena’s return has made all of it worse, crowding every quiet corner of my days. Are you in love with her? The question follows me from room to room, in her voice, and it will not be shut in a drawer. I’ve started to wonder whether I ever truly loved Yelena, or whether I only loved the idea of the one soft thing in a childhood made of stone, a buoy in that dark night. I don’t know what the word is even supposed to mean. Turning away from her felt like a visceral betrayal, like turning against my own history, against the boy in the garden and the girl who came down to the basement for him, and my head has never once been this scrambled, this hazy.

The butler knocks discreetly. “Miss Lebedeva is here to see you, sir.”

“Send her in,” I say absently.

Yelena comes in looking worse than when she left, her hair mussed. Her eyes are red, and I know pain when I see it. There are dark circles carved beneath them, but she holds her chin up and refuses to surrender, to come apart in front of me.

“Have you been avoiding me?” she asks, tilting her head and forcing a smile.

“I’ve been working,” I say flatly.

“You’re working from home.” She sits across from me, long legs stretched to the side, ankles crossed, and her eyes go glassy. “I know, and I made a real mess of things, Lev.”

Then Yelena apologizes, which she has almost never done in her entire life. “I lost my temper,” she all but whispers. “I moved your assistant without asking you first. And I weaseled my way into your email to force that wedding planning through. All of it was me. I’m sorry.”

I never once confronted her about the email, and I’m momentarily taken aback. She’s admitting it entirely on her own, which means she has actually sat with what she did.

“I was jealous,” she says, and the tears finally spill over, trickling down her cheeks. “I wanted her to understand, one way or another, that I’m the only one who will be standing beside you in the end. That is the ugly truth of it, and I know exactly how it sounds.”

Something cold in my chest loosens at that, whether I want it to or not. A woman who was worshipped like a princess her whole life, who has always held court like she owned the place, who has almost never in my memory said the words I’m sorry to anyone, is standing here admitting to jealousy and cheap tricks with her voice strangled and shaking.

It is not a thing I know how to stay angry at. She has done something small and human and difficult, and the old instinct to shield her from every hard thing wells up in me before I can decide whether I still want it to.

I let out a slow breath. “Don’t do it again,” I say in a low warning.

I’ve said those words to her before.

She nods quickly, and her eyes dart away, like a child promising to behave. “I didn’t come back on a whim,” she insists. “I gave up my whole life abroad, my freedom, all of it. I made a real decision, and then I got here and found I was afraid I had left it too late.”

She’s right that I wanted it first, years ago. I never got the question out before she left, and now she has come back wanting the exact thing I bought a ring for, and all I gave her in return was a blunt I’m not ready. She’s been in my life since before I was Pakhan, since before my father put this whole family into my hands. I should not be the one who makes her cry.

I reach out, drawing a knuckle gently down her jaw, and wipe the tears from her cheek with my thumb. “Stop crying now,” I say lightly.

Her shoulders shake unsteadily, and she leans into my chest. The position is an old one, worn smooth by a lifetime. When we were young, and her heart would race and stutter in the middle of a garden or a stairwell, I learned to hold perfectly still exactly like this, slipping an arm over her waist, breathing slow, so that I would not jolt the fragile rhythm of it back out of time. My whole body still remembers the drill of it.

Keep her calm. Keep her steady. Don’t let anything reach her.

“Even your comfort still sounds like an order,” she says, and laughs softly against me. “I never hated it, though.”

Her perfume drifts up, floral and lush and heavy. My mind hands me lemon soap instead, clean and bright, and lets it hover, and I could not have picked a worse moment for it to do so.

Yelena’s arms come around me, and she tips her face up toward my mouth and fixes me with a look. “Kiss me,” she says. “Just to prove that nothing has changed between us.”

I look down at her pale lips, and I know with an unsettling certainty that kissing her would not light a single thing in me the way Delaney’s fresh mouth does. Fuck. I have honestly forgotten what kissing Yelena even feels like.

I want to give her this one small thing. It is a kiss. Twenty years ago, I would have paid a fortune for it. My mouth will not move toward hers. I stay there, gritting my teeth, and my mind is somewhere else entirely, on a woman across the city with lemon on her silky skin and a mouth that fights me on everything.

“You have been crying,” I say lamely instead. “You should rest.” It’s an excuse, and we both hear it for exactly what it is. Yelena stiffens against me, her fingers trying to find purchase in my shirt.