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He wraps one arm around my waist, and I stop mid-sentence because the contact melts me.
My brain starts screaming at me to move, get away, this is dangerous, this is—
“Pretty please.”
His voice.
His voice.
It comes out soft. Cute. Genuinely, devastatingly cute in a way I have never once heard from this man in my entire life, and it makes me yield.
I swallow like an idiot and rearrange my face into something that at least isn’t visibly collapsing. “Fine. Fine. I’ll entertain your boring little life.”
I feel him smile behind the mask. “It’s a privilege, my prince.”
Then he starts dancing.
And he is good at it.
One hand at my waist. The other guiding mine. He moves us like this is a thing he has done a thousand times with a thousand people, and that thought makes me want to break some skulls.
I am clumsy.
I am not going to pretend otherwise. I step on his foot twice in the first thirty seconds, and he doesn’t even flinch. He leads me through it and makes it look easy. “Does your head hurt?”
I blink. “What?”
“The stitches.” His thumb brushes against my waist, just above my hip, and I realize he is checking for the way I hold myself when I am in pain. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
He hums, but doesn’t believe me, then he spins me.
I shriek. “You don’t have to go that far!”
He chuckles and spins me again, pulling me back in close, and says, easy as anything, “I always go all the way in love.”
I mutter something under my breath in Russian. Something I don’t mean to say out loud.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“No. Repeat it.”
I lift my chin and look straight into the black of the mask and say it clearly.
“Ya khochu, chtoby ty menya potseloval.” I want you to kiss me.
He goes still, then he narrows his eyes. I can’t see it clearly through the mask, but I know he does.
He reaches up, takes the mask off, and kisses me.
My eyes go wide. I shove at his chest with both hands, breaking the kiss, stumbling back a step. “Did you understand what I said?”
He tilts his head. Perfectly innocent. “What did you say?”
“That I want to kill you.”
