Chapter 11 - Zara
It has been four days since the attack.
Four days of waking up to find the bandaging on my arm replaced, clean and precise, while I was asleep because Mikhail does not ask to do things. Somewhere in the past week, I have stopped finding him exhausting.
Four days of a different quiet between us, the charged combative electricity replaced by something lower and more complex.
On the fourth morning, sitting at the kitchen counter with my notebook open and the city performing its gray, mid-morning routine below the glass, I decide I am done letting it all happen to me passively, done observing the change.
That is the habit of a journalist and the defense mechanism of a girl who spent most of her life thinking that the safest relationship with any situation is an analytical one.
It has served me well, but from now on, I have a feeling it no longer will.
I close the notebook and start making calls.
By seven that evening, the penthouse dining table, which has only been used for operational documents and tactical maps, has been transformed.
The food came from a restaurant four blocks away. Three candles, tall and simple, sit unlit beside the Tupperware. The overhead lighting is dimmed to the level that makes the city outside the glass look close and warm.
I’ve taken extra care to make it not look like something extravagant.
The elevator engages its ascent at quarter past seven. Pouring two glasses of water, I stand by the kitchen counter when he comes through the door.
The sound of his steps echoing against the marble disappears. I hear him set down whatever he was carrying, then nothing.
“You did this…?”
“I did,” I confirm, and turn around with both glasses and set one on the table in the position that will be his and keep one in my own hand, meeting his eyes across the room steadily, He looks at the table, the candles, the food laid out carefully.
Something lights up his face—brief, unguarded, the shadow of something he reclaims quickly but not before I have caught it.
He sits down without saying anything else. His hands plate the food while I light the candles. We eat for several minutes before I say what I arranged this dinner to say.
“After the attack,” I begin, setting my fork down, looking at him directly.
“And before that, when I—when I told you about growing up, you didn’t try to manage it or make it smaller or redirect it into something more comfortable.
You just stayed. And I need you to know that I noticed. That it mattered.”
It’s all quiet except for the city’s low, constant hum beyond the glass.
Mikhail sets down his spoon. He looks at me for a moment, dark eyes alight with an emotion I’ve been seeing glimpses of recently.
“You don’t need to thank me,” he says gently. “It was not a duty.”
The air turns softer, like everything has turned into molten wax.
We keep talking—and this is the thing I have not experienced before with him. We have exchanged information, yes. We have negotiated and challenged and tested each other much of the time.
But this is different, quieter and more vulnerable than we’ve ever been.
He tells me, in the spare way he talks, that he grew up understanding loyalty before he understood almost anything else. It was the first moral category, the thing that came before and above and beneath everything.
It’s in his eyes that he truly believes it, and something tells me he is examining it now, possibly for the first time in a long time.
We move onto journalism, where it all began for me. About understanding that the only power available to a person with no family, no money, and no anchor in the world is the power of knowing things, and knowing what to do with them.
He listens with his fingers steepled beneath his chin, attention unabashedly on me.
The evening moves around us slowly, and somewhere between the dinner and its aftermath, between the conversation and its silences, the distance across the table begins to feel restrictive.
His right hand reaches for the edge of my hand, two fingers resting against the back of my knuckles lightly.
In answer, I turn my hand over beneath his.
The candles burn on, and the city holds its breath below us; the thing that has been building between us finally begs us to acknowledge it.
Mikhail’s left hand sets his fork down on the plate with a soft clink, and the sound ricochets through me like a stone skipped across still water.
“You’re not eating anymore,” he observes lowly.
“I’m watching you.”
The candle between us gutters in some invisible draft, and the shadows crawl up the ink on his throat. Vines. They curl around the column of his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt, and I’ve spent the last forty minutes remembering where they end and where they begin.
“Watching me?”
“Yeah. Just you.”
His dark eyes—nearly black in this light—flicker with something I can’t name. His hair is a mess, pushed back from his forehead like he’s been running his hands through it all day. There’s the slightest ridge of a scar above his left eyebrow I haven’t asked about yet.
Mikhail pushes his chair back, hand withdrawing from mine.
The scrape of wood against tile sends a shiver up my spine, and my fingers tighten around the stem of my wine glass. He doesn’t stand yet, just sitting there, legs spread slightly, forearms resting on his thighs. The posture is so effortlessly predatory that my breath catches.
“Come here,” he orders.
Not a command like before, but an invitation because of the way his voice softens at the end, the way his head tilts just so.
I should hesitate. Every rational part of my brain is screaming at me to hesitate, to protect myself, to remember that men like Mikhail don’t build things—they burn them down. But my body is already moving, rounding the table, and the rational part of my brain can go to hell.
He reaches for me before I’m close enough to touch.
His fingers find my wrist, encircling it completely, and the heat of his palm is a brand. He tugs me into the V of his legs gently, dark eyes looking up at me with something that resembles awe.
“Zara.”
My name in his mouth is a prayer.
“Your pulse is racing,” he murmurs, thumb pressing into the tender underside of my wrist.
“I don’t understand you sometimes.”
The honesty spills out before he can catch it, and I brace myself for his retreat, for the walls I’ve watched him build brick by brick every time I get too close. But he doesn’t pull away. Instead, his free hand settles on my hip, and the weight of it anchors me to the floor.
“Good,” he says. “I don’t understand you most of the time. I don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Be gentle.”
The confession cracks something open in my chest. I lift my hand—the one he isn’t holding—and touch his jaw. The stubble there is rough against my palm, and he leans into the contact like a starving man offered bread. His eyes close. The lashes are dark smudges against his cheeks.
“Then don’t be gentle,” I whisper. “Just be here.”
His eyes open, a decision and surrender.
He stands, and the movement forces me back a step, then another, until my spine meets the edge of the table. His body follows, not quite pressing, not quite pinning, but close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off him in waves.
The tattoos on his neck are more intricate up close—leaves and thorns and tiny blossoms I didn’t notice before. I want to trace them with my tongue.
“Mikhail.”
“You have no idea,” he says, and his voice is wrecked, “how long I’ve wanted to hear you say my name like that.”
“Like what.”
“Like I’m already inside you.”
The admission sends a pulse of heat straight between my thighs, and I know he feels the way my breath stutters because his mouth curves into the ghost of a smile.
His hands find the hem of my blouse. His knuckles brush the bare skin of my stomach, and the contact is so light it’s almost unbearable. I arch into him, a wordless plea, and he answers by dipping his head.
The first kiss lands on my collarbone.
He’s mapping me with his lips, trailing up the column of my throat, pausing at the hollow beneath my ear; when his teeth graze the lobe, I make a sound I’ve never made before—a whimper, a plea, something animal and honest.
“Look at me,” he growls.
I do.
His face is raw in a way I haven’t seen before. The danger is still there—it lives in the set of his jaw, the blades of his cheekbones—but beneath it, something fragile is unraveling. He’s terrified. I can see it now, and the recognition makes my eyes sting.
“I’m not going to break,” I tell him.
“I might.”
The admission hangs between us. I reach for the buttons of his shirt, and he lets me. Each one reveals more ink—vines that twist down his sternum, across his ribs, disappearing into the waistband of his jeans. His chest is lean and muscled.
“Beautiful,” I breathe.
His laugh is a broken thing. “You’re the first person who’s ever said that.”
“Then everyone else is blind.”
I press my palm flat against his heart. It’s pounding harder than my own. The realization undoes me—this man, this dangerous, untouchable man, is as undone by me as I am by him.
His mouth is softer than I expected when it captures mine, though the desperation beneath it is anything but.
His tongue sweeps against my lower lip, and I open for him without thought.
The taste of wine and something darker and metallic, like he’s been biting the inside of his cheek to keep from devouring me whole.
His hands find the clasp of my bra. He fumbles and curses under his breath. I reach behind to help him, and then my breasts are bare and his mouth is on them and I can’t think.
My fingers fist in his hair. The strands are silk, cool and slippery, and I pull harder than I mean to. He groans against my nipple, and the vibration travels through me like a plucked string. His tongue circles the peak, slow and deliberate, and my knees buckle.
“Bedroom,” I gasp.
He lifts me effortlessly. My legs wrap around his waist, and I can feel him through the denim, hard and insistent, and the friction makes me bury my face in his neck. The vines there taste like salt.
The bedroom is dark. He doesn’t bother with the light. He lays me down on the mattress like I’m made of glass, and then he’s above me, and the weight of him is the safest thing I’ve ever felt.
He peels my jeans down my thighs, my underwear following, and then his mouth is on my hip bone and I’m gasping. He kisses the soft curve of my belly, the inside of my thigh, the crease where my leg meets my body, and every touch is a promise.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.
“Because I need you.”
“Not yet.”
His thumb finds me, wet and slick. He spreads it slowly, painting circles that make my hips buck. One finger slides inside, then two, and he watches my face the entire time, cataloging every reaction.
When he finally settles between my thighs, when I feel the blunt pressure of him against my entrance, he pauses.
“Zara.”
“I’m here.”
He pushes in. Inch by agonizing inch, and the stretch is exquisite. My nails dig into his shoulders, and he hisses, and then he’s fully seated and I can feel him everywhere.
He doesn’t move.
Just stays there, buried deep, his forehead pressed to mine, and the intimacy of it is overwhelming. Our breath mingles as our hearts beat in tandem. The vines on his throat are dark rivers in the moonlight, and I trace them with trembling fingers.
“I didn’t know,” he whispers, “that it could feel like this.”
“Like what.”
“Like I’m not alone.”
He moves slowly. His body speaks a language I didn’t know I understood, and I answer with my hips, my hands, the broken sounds spilling from my throat. The pressure builds, not like a wave but like the moment before a storm—electric and heavy and inevitable.
“Mikhail, oh my God,” I gasp.
“I got you, baby,” he says, and the endearment shatters something in my chest.
We climb together, slow and then not slow, and when I finally break it’s with his name on my lips and his fingers laced through mine. He follows moments later, a guttural sound ripping from his throat, and I feel the heat of him spill inside me like an offering.
Silence.
We lie tangled in the sheets, our bodies still humming, and Mikhail’s thumb traces lazy circles on my hip. His face is buried in my hair. It’s only some time before his thumb goes stationary, his breathing deep below my head.
The last time I felt anything like this, I was twenty years old and sitting in a park in Brooklyn in October with my first paid byline in my hand; the feeling had lasted approximately eleven minutes before I had started thinking about the next story.
My phone lights up on the bedside table.
The screen illuminates the room in a brief, cold wash of blue-white. Sneaking my hand out, I reach towards the screen, barely managing to grasp it. The notification sits on the screen in a preview that shows enough to read without unlocking it.
You are digging in graves that were sealed for good reason. The next warning will not arrive by message.
My body jerks up, phone now close to my face, the screen bright against the dark.
The number is unregistered, untraceable, a door with no handle on the outside.
Graves that were sealed for good reason.
Sealed.
Whatever my parents disappeared into was not a closed chapter. It was a locked room with people still inside it, and I have been standing outside it with a notebook and a disregard for warning signs.
Somewhere on the other side of that door, there is a person who has now decided that I am a problem they long ago should’ve dealt with.
The phone screen dims and goes dark in my hand. I sit in the dark with it, and the warmth that was in this room twenty seconds ago belongs to a different version of this night that I cannot go back to.