Chapter 5
MOLLY
The ceiling is familiar.
That’s the first thing I register. The water-stained patch above my bed, the one that vaguely resembles a duck if you tilt your head left. I’ve stared at it through insomnia and hangovers and the occasional bout of three a.m. existential dread. It has never once judged me.
It feels like it’s judging me now.
I become aware of myself in increments. The fluffy duvet pulled up to my chin.
The morning light pressing through curtains that I didn’t bother to close properly when I stumbled in last night.
The fact that I’m wearing yesterday’s dress, the one I threw back on backward when I left Pavel’s office, catching my own reflection in the mirrored doors and barely recognizing the flushed, wild-eyed woman looking back at me.
Oh no.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
I press both palms flat against my face and breathe into them.
The cotton of my pillow smells like my own shampoo, like home, like safety.
All the things I apparently decided I didn’t need last night when I was standing in Pavel Strakov’s office letting the entire architecture of my professional life come crashing down around my ears.
We slept together.
Except we didn’t even sleep. There was no sleeping. There was his couch and his hands and the low, wrecked sound of his voice, and there was me, throwing years of careful professional distance straight out the eighth-floor window.
I sit up too fast. The room tilts.
I press my fingers to my lips like I can hold back whatever is trying to crawl up my throat and force myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way my old roommate used to say when anxiety had me wound tight enough to snap.
He is your boss, I tell myself. He is your boss, and you walked into his office at ten o’clock at night to drop off paperwork, and somehow you left with your dress backward and your pulse in your throat and the distinct impression that the world had shifted a hundred degrees off its axis.
Here’s the thing about Pavel that I have spent the better part of a year carefully not thinking about: he is not a man you stumble into lightly.
He’s not careless. He doesn’t do drinks at the company holiday party, not an almost-kiss in the parking garage, not the kind of situation you can file neatly under professional lapse and move on from.
Pavel Strakov is a pakhan. He runs his criminal empire with the same immaculate efficiency with which he runs his legitimate businesses, and everyone in his orbit knows exactly what he is, even when they’re pretending otherwise.
I have been pretending otherwise since I was hired.
I have been pretending he’s simply my employer.
Demanding, exacting, possessed of a gaze like February ice that has a way of pinning you in place whether you want it to or not.
I have been pretending that the particular way he says my name, like it’s a word in a language he’s still deciding whether to learn, does not do something catastrophic to my composure.
Last night, I ran out of pretend.
I groan into my palms and fall back against the pillow. The night replays behind my eyelids whether I want it to or not.
I knocked. The office had been dark except for the amber pool of the desk lamp. I registered that first. Then his voice.
Pavel, standing, head tipped back, eyes closed, one hand braced against the edge of the desk and the other hand… busy.
And he was saying my name.
Not speaking it. Not the clipped, controlled way he summons me into meetings or signs off on approvals. He was saying it the way you say something private. The way you say something you’ve been keeping in a locked room for a long time.
The sound of it hit me like a physical thing.
I should have backed out of the room. Every functioning synapse I possessed was screaming at me to back out of the room, to close the door, to develop immediate and total amnesia, to perhaps consider a new career in a city where the skyline was different and my boss had not just—
He opened his eyes.
Pale blue, nearly colorless in the low light. Glacier-cold, always, except that in that moment they weren’t cold at all, and when they found mine across the dark office the air went out of me completely.
He didn’t look away. I didn’t look away.
I should have. But for that breath, I couldn’t.
That was my first mistake, and I think somewhere in the part of me that had apparently been quietly catastrophizing since I came on, I knew it even then.
The looking-away was the last line of defense.
The looking-away was the thing that would have let us both survive this with our professional dignity intact, and I stood there in his doorway with the quarterly projections in my hand, and I did not look away, and neither did he, and the silence stretched between us like something pulled taut and trembling.
My heart did something violent and uncoordinated in my chest instead of letting me do the smart thing.
He crossed the room the way he does everything, with absolute certainty, no hesitation, like a man who has decided something and considers the deciding the end of the matter.
And I stood there, rooted, the folder still clasped in my hands like a shield I’d forgotten to use, watching him come toward me and thinking, with the very last rational cell in my brain: This is where you turn around, Molly.
He stopped in front of me. Close enough that I could smell him, feel his heat. He looked down at me with those February eyes that were not cold anymore, not even slightly, and he said my name again. Quietly. A question and a warning at once.
I felt my restraint go.
Not gradually. Not the way you might talk yourself into something foolish, negotiating in stages with your better judgment.
It went all at once, cleanly, like a snapped wire, and then there was nothing between us.
His hands, the way he touched me, like I was something extraordinary.
His touch was demanding and reverent in the same breath, commanding and careful, and I remember thinking in some dazzled, short-circuiting corner of my mind that I had never been touched like that, like I was both precious and desired, like he had been waiting—
I shove the duvet back and sit up.
Stop it.
I need coffee. I need coffee and a shower and a stern internal monologue, and then I need to go to the office and behave like a functioning adult professional, because that is what I am.
That is what I have worked very hard to be.
I didn’t spend years climbing to this position to throw it away because I momentarily lost my mind.
But I prefer the positions he had me in last night.
It was a mistake.
I tell myself this while I brush my teeth.
It was a mistake, and mistakes happen, and the measure of a person is how they handle the aftermath.
We are both adults. Presumably, Pavel has navigated complicated situations before.
The man runs a criminal empire. He can certainly manage one regrettable lapse in professional boundaries.
We will be adult about this. Brisk, professional, and adult.
The way he said my name before he even knew I was there—
I spit toothpaste into the sink with perhaps more force than necessary.
That’s the part that won’t file away neatly. Everything else I might eventually manage to package into something containable. A momentary weakness, the lateness of the hour, the tension of the office yesterday… it all boiled into something else.
But I can’t forget how he said my name. Not his voice in the dark, moaning Molly like it was something he’d been carrying deep inside of him.
I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. My pale red hair is a disaster. There’s a mark below my collarbone that I immediately button my collar over without fully looking at, because looking at it will not be productive.
He is your boss, I tell my own reflection. You are his employee. That is the entire sum of what you are to each other, and last night was an aberration, and today you will walk into that building and you will be competent and professional and you will not think about his hands.
My reflection doesn’t look convinced.
“It was a mistake,” I say out loud. My voice is steady, which feels like a victory.
The word sits in the steam of the bathroom. Mistake.
The way he looked at me afterward was something else.
Not the look of a man dealing with a mistake.
Not sheepish or regretful or reaching for distance the way I’d expected—the way I’d braced for, because I know how men like Pavel operate, and I have watched him conduct business long enough to know how he seals off anything inconvenient.
This wasn’t that.
Instead, he tucked my hair back from my face with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with everything I thought I knew about him.
The scrape of his rough fingertips there sent a shiver through me.
There was something in his expression that I didn’t have a clean word for, something that made my chest feel too small for everything inside it.
Then I gathered my dignity, and I left on legs that barely remembered how to work. I didn’t look back. I was terrified of what I’d see if I did.
By the time I’m dressed and holding a coffee I’m not tasting, I’ve constructed a plan.
Straightforward. Manageable. I will walk in.
I will be professional. I will not avoid him.
Avoidance reads as guilt, and guilt implies there’s something to feel guilty about, and I have decided there is nothing to feel guilty about because it was a mistake, and mistakes are finite. They have edges. They end.
Last night was complete. We made a mistake together, then went our separate ways, ending the mistake. That’s all it was.
I will look him in the eye. I will be perfectly, serenely fine.
My coat is by the door. My bag is packed.
I have reviewed the morning’s agenda, which includes a nine o’clock briefing with Pavel about the Vasiliev acquisition, and I am not thinking about that, I am simply…
I’m simply a professional woman going to her professional job, and the fact that her employer touched her like she was the most significant thing he’d encountered in a long, long time is simply not—
Is simply not relevant.
I button my coat.
It can never be more than that, I think firmly. Boss. Employee. That’s the math.
I pick up my bag.
Can it?
The question punches through my facade before I can stop it, quiet and treacherous. I stand in my cozy apartment in the morning light and let it hang there for exactly three seconds before I lock it away somewhere deep and sensible and responsible.
Then I open the door. Today won’t get easier by avoiding him. The reality is, I fucked up.
So did Pavel.
He’s the one who has authority in this situation. If I didn’t pump the brakes on our shenanigans, he should have. I said yes, and that was stupid of me, but he’s the one who posed the question.
This is our mistake. Pavel’s not the type to avoid responsibility, so I will approach it from the angle of a shared error if he brings it up. He will accept his part in this, as I have, and we will collaborate on the next steps to never let this happen again.
Cold, clean, simple math.
I can do this.
I lock the door behind me and head out. When I double-check the doorknob to make sure the lock took, the memory of his cock in my hand shoves forward, and I stumble.
But I don’t fall, which feels like a significant achievement. It’s a low bar to cross, but as long as I keep my threshold for significant achievements that low, today will go great.