Chapter 2 - Mikhail
The penthouse is in a commercially unremarkable building—a tower like the thirty others visible from any fixed point in this city, glass-fronted and deliberately anonymous like all expensive things sometimes choose to be.
The elevator requires a key and a rotating code. The door at the top requires a second sequence. The man stationed in the corridor outside requires recognition, and receives it without a word exchanged.
She won’t notice any of it, of course.
People unaccustomed to this life rarely do.
The main room is clean, spare, well-lit to remove shadows from the corners.
There are two exits beyond the primary entrance, reinforced glass on every exterior panel.
The city sits below us in its gold and indifferent sprawl, towers lit against the dark like columns of fire that have agreed to behave.
Her jet black hair sits in a loose ponytail, strands tangled with the amount of manhandling she’s endured. Her brown eyes, wide and expressive—the first thing I noticed about her—are even wider, thick lashes sweeping shadows over her ruddy cheeks.
She stops in the center of the room as the door swings shut behind us.
The silence lasts three seconds before she turns around.
“Who authorized you to follow me?”
Like I expected, there is no exhale of relief that most people cannot suppress in the immediate aftermath of what I just saved her from. Not even the shaking that tends to arrive a few minutes behind adrenaline, when the body finally catches up with what just happened to it.
Just an insolent eyebrow raised, tone direct and hot.
The blazer she was wearing when I pulled her out of that alley has one shoulder seam slightly stretched from where she hit the wall.
A few people treat surrender as a language they will never be fluent in. I have met a handful of them in my life. They are always difficult, and always the ones left alive among the spineless.
Standing still, she straightens her shoulders.
“Answer me, Mikhail,” she demands, lips curling.
“Sit down,” I order.
The look she gives me could strip a coat of paint down to bare metal. She does not sit down, eyes set on me like a devious laser.
I cross to the far end of the room and pour two glasses of water. Setting them on the table, I know she won’t touch either. My eyes don’t stray from her as I bring the rim up to my mouth, taking a quick sip.
“You’re being hunted,” I grunt. “What remains of the Irish Syndicate after the Moretti collapse has placed your name on a very specific category of list. You should know by now it’s not surveillance.”
Her eyelashes flutter apprehensively, not a single ounce of fear in that petite frame of hers.
“Because of the Moretti coverage,” she adds expectantly.
“Partly.” I set the glass down. “You pulled their shit into public record that had been protected for a decade: names, accounts, routing codes. You handed the right people enough to start pulling threads that were never meant to be found. The syndicate is not the only organization that took notice of you; they just simply decided to act on it. Your name is stained now.”
“How do you know any of this?”
There it is.
“I’ve been watching you.”
Her lips part, a myriad of emotions tumbling over her expressive face: disbelief, shock, fear, disgust—all colors of the same hue.
“Excuse me?”
“Six weeks,” I deliver flatly. “I have been monitoring your movements since you began pursuing the Moretti angle—tracking your source contacts, intercepting communications that were routed toward you. You had two active threats in New York that you are not aware of because I redirected them before they reached you.”
She stares at me, throat bobbing.
“You had no right,” she states, voice shaking in either fury or fear.
“You entered my life without my consent.” She takes a step toward me as if to intimidate me.
Cute. “You tracked my movements, intercepted my work, made decisions about my safety that I never asked you to make. In what fucking world is that protection? It’s control. ”
“I did do that,” I agree.
The agreement throws her. She probably expected justification, deflection, or resistance. I only peer deep into those chocolate eyes as I take a step closer, towering over her.
“Because without it, you would already be dead. You would have been a paragraph. Just a name and an age and a brief account of what was found and where, and the story you are chasing would have died in the same moment you did.”
My voice is nothing more than a silken murmur, but her jaw clenches like she’s holding back a terrorizing scream. She still does not step back, doesn’t take her eyes off me.
That is the thing about her I noted in week one and have not been able to stop noting since. She receives hard information the way stone receives rain—lets it run across the surface without cracking, processing it somewhere I cannot see, which is pretty annoying.
“So you decided,” she grits, slow and careful, “without asking. Without once considering that I had the right to know about the danger I was in so I could make my own choices about how to respond to it.”
“You would have continued regardless.”
“That is not the point.”
“It is the only point that matters.”
She takes another step, closing the little distance left between us. She smells like the city outside, heat and something hedonistically floral. Those brown eyes are darker than they appear in surveillance photographs, and they are sharper, not letting go of mine.
“I don’t need a handler,” she says poisonously, her chest rising and falling in barely suppressed rage.
She looks… very sexy when she’s mad.
“You need to be alive. That’s all I’m concerned with.”
The silence that follows is not an argument finding its end. I can nearly feel something sizzle between us, a small spark that can very easily turn into an all-consuming flame if I’m not careful. By the changing color in her cheeks, I can tell she feels it too.
But she stands her ground, wanting to be burned.
Little bird, you don’t know what this flame can do to you.
“You’re staying here tonight,” I grunt.
Her chin lifts defiantly.
“Am I?”
“We leave for New York in the morning,” I state, clipped.
She stares at me.
“No.”
Like she’s in any place to offer resistance.
I already knew she’d say that. I just didn’t know how snobbishly she’d say it, like I didn’t just save her life, like her life isn’t in my complete control right now.
Most people, after what happened in that alley, are grateful for a room. Something solid that protects them from what just tried to reach them through a narrow street.
She is not most people. I have known this for six weeks, but still, it comes as a surprise.
“Your investigation can go on,” I wave her little ’no’ off. “Your life won’t if you remain in Dubai.”
“You don’t get to make that call.”
“I already have.”
Her jaw sets. She turns toward the table, picks up the glass of water I poured, and for one moment, I can’t tell if she’s going to drink from it or smash it on the floor in a fit of rage.
She sets the glass down untouched.
“I came here because the answers are here,” she begins. “The financial trails, the routing network, the designations—they all trace back to Dubai. If you take me to New York, you remove me from the only tangible lead I have found in two months of looking. I am not leaving.”
“You are under the assumption that this was a request. It’s a direct order.”
She darts towards me, her hands pushing against my chest. I only raise a brow, not moved in the slightest as she uses all her force. She grunts, her palms warm against my chest.
My hand closes around her wrist. She resists, grunting, before her head leans back to glare at me.
The look on my face makes her go still, the fight draining out of her momentarily. Every muscle of hers is pulled taut, her chin already jutting out.
The pulse beneath my thumb is fast. Her lips are bitten red like cherries, slightest shade of hazel in those defiant eyes. The warmth of her, and the press of her tits against my body nearly distracts me.
I should release her.
She tilts her head, her lashes fluttering as those brown eyes heat up darkly.
She is not frightened of me. Instead, I know she feels exactly what I’m feeling.
"Let go of me," she whispers.
I release her wrist, leaving her standing right where she is.
“The room at the end of the hall,” I manage roughly. “Sleep.”
Even as I step away from her, my palm still feels the ghost of her pulse, the way her curves pressed against me, even under that shitty blazer.
She is no longer a variable. She is standing eight feet behind me in a place I built to be secure, and her refusal to step back when I released her is sitting somewhere in my chest in a position I do not have a name for.
She has introduced something into this operation that I did not prepare for.
The room is mine; the situation is mine. I control what happens next. I have done what I came to Dubai to do. She is alive, she is contained, and she is no longer in a position where the Irish syndicate can reach her.
But she is in it now.