24. Kane
KANE
What am I to you?
What a fucking question.
There are plenty of easy answers I could have given her.
My debtor. My collateral. My property. The last white square on a map colored green.
All that is true.
But none of it explains why I did all the things I did tonight.
And none of it passes my lips, either.
She doesn’t know this about me, because Lilah doesn’t know anything about me yet. But I do not explain myself for an audience.
That’s a rule I’ve had since I was a boy with an armful of dishes, watching my father explain himself in a laughing speech to a room full of his cronies.
I won’t fucking be like him.
So I say nothing.
And she takes my silence for an answer.
“It’s okay,” she says. “No need to elaborate. I understand the situation perfectly.”
But of course she doesn’t. How could she? She doesn’t know what shaped me, what broke me, what scarred me…
“Lilah—”
“Happy New Year, Kane.”
Then she turns on her heel and walks away.
I’m left standing idiotically in place, with a champagne glass in my hand and enough anger in my chest to hurl it through the nearest wall.
Blyat’.
Fuck!
I could have stopped this. One true thing would’ve been enough to make her stay. She wasn’t asking for much.
Instead, I let a rule I have followed for most of my life send her running.
I put the glass down before I crush it.
Then I go charging after her.
Most people move out of my way. A few drunk fools try to speak to me, get one look at my face, and think better of it.
I reach the lobby just as the coat check girl starts to duck into the closet.
“Stop!” I call ahead. “Don’t get that coat.”
The girl sees me coming and her face goes pale. “M-Mr. Makov,” she stutters.
“Go take a break,” I order, hurling a hundred-dollar bill at her from my pocket. “Make sure no one else comes in.”
“Y-Yes, s-sir.”
She catches the bill and flees without looking back.
When she’s gone, I grab Lilah by the crook of her elbow, drag her into the closet, and shut the door behind us.
Outside, the crowd is bellowing.
“Five! Four!”
In the low light in here, her eyes are shadowed, but the anger in them is still obvious.
“Do you have a closet fetish or something?” she snaps. “We keep ending up in tight spaces, and I’m starting to think it’s not an accident.”
“Ask me again,” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“Your question. Ask it again.”
Lilah’s upper lip stiffens. “No thank you.” She adjusts the shawl around her shoulders. “I got my answer earlier. It came immediately and had some public humiliation mixed in for good measure, so I’m all set on doing it again.”
“Two! One!”
The doors shake with the cacophony. Two hundred voices going up at once, and horns, and the band starting in loud and sloppy behind all of it, and glass tinkling on glass.
“You got nothing. Silence isn’t an answer.”
“It absolutely is. It’s the most common one I’ve ever gotten.” She squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them again. “Can I go now?”
“I don’t answer a question like that in front of people.”
That gets her. Her eyebrows come down. “What?”
“You asked me in front of two hundred guests,” I say. “I don’t explain myself in front of an audience. Ever. Not to my brother, not to my captains, not to a room full of drunks. Never. That will never change.”
“You and your stupid rules,” she mutters.
“Did you get cursed by a witch at birth or something? What happens if you break it?” She flings a hand out toward the ballroom doors.
“Does the ceiling collapse? Do the little brass men come down off the staircase and bop you over the head? Because from where I’m standing, it looked a lot less like some ironclad ethical rule and more like a fuckboy liar who couldn’t come up with a smooth answer on the spot. ”
She wants my rage.
But I won’t give her that.
It would only confirm that everything she thinks about herself is true.
And I won’t give her that, either.
“Ask me here,” I rasp. “Ask me now. When there’s no one but us around to hear it.”
She stares at me in obvious disgust.
“That’s your big offer?” she scoffs. “You chased me down and manhandled me into a coat check room so I can schedule a private appointment to get rejected?”
“Ask me,” I insist. “I’ll answer.”
“You realize how ridiculous that is?” she says. “A normal person would just say, Hey, Delilah, you’re a nice lady, I enjoy your company, please stop having a nervous breakdown next to the caviar.”
I grab her wrist. “Sladkaya,” I say in the most serious, honest, transparent voice I can. “Ask me what you mean to me.”
She wriggles her hand free of my grasp and tucks it to her chest. But her face looks lost, deep in thought. Not quite so angry anymore.
She rubs her wrist even though I did not hold it hard.
“What if I ask again and you still don’t answer?” she whispers, almost to herself.
“Then you’ll know I’m a coward,” I tell her. “And you can leave me behind with a clear conscience.”
She looks at the floor. Takes a deep inhale. Then looks up at me.
“Fine,” she says. She’s braced from head to toe like she’s about to take a punch. “What am I to you?”
I don’t have a speech.
I never have and never will. I saw my father sever my mother from his life with a few pretty words, and I decided then and there that I’d rather bite off my own tongue than spew bullshit like that.
So all I tell her is the truth.
“You’re the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted.”
Then I take her face in both hands and I kiss her.
“Happy New Year!” screams the crowd in the ballroom.
Lilah goes stiff for a second. Her hands come up between us like she’s going to shove me off. She’s got one fist closed around that borrowed shawl and the other pushing against my chest, and I feel her heart going, or maybe mine, hard enough to shake both of us.
Then the fist opens.
Her hand slides up to my shoulder and she pulls.
Just like that, she is kissing me back.
Her mouth opens under mine and she whimpers in the back of her throat. I claim that sound like it’s mine, like she signed it over. A debt she owed me that I’ve spent my whole life waiting to collect.
She tastes like champagne.
Underneath it, faintly, like sugar.
I get my hands off her face and put them where I’ve wanted them all night. One at the small of her back and one on her hip.
I feel the give of her under my palm, the real shape of her, and I press her into me until there’s nothing left between us but that dress Ekaterina cut in the back of her shop.
The shawl slides off her shoulder and falls to the floor. She doesn’t notice, but I do. So I pull her closer to me to share my body heat.
Her fingers work into my hair. She goes up on her toes in those heels, and I put my arm under her to make it easier for her.
She’s warm and fragrant and soft in my arm. I’d stand here holding her and kissing her until the coats rotted off the hangers.
I bite her bottom lip until she gasps. Her hand fists in my shirt, first in shock, then in pleasure.
It’s only our first kiss, but if it’s the last first kiss I ever have, I’ll be fine with that. She’s too fucking sweet to ever let go.
I want her.
Here. Now.
I want to rip that dress to shreds and fuck her to within an inch of her life.
Then wrap her in my coat with nothing underneath it, take her home, throw her across my bed, part those perfect thighs, and lick her until she screams before doing it all again.
She’d be as sweet between the legs as she is between her lips. There’s no part of her I wouldn’t savor and linger over.
She’d moan.
She’d yield.
She’d be soft and submissive and perfect and womanly, she’d explode for me at the flick of a tongue…
I’m turning her, walking her back into the coats to bring all my fantasies to life, when the door bursts open.
The hallway light interrupts first.
Then the flash.
It’s white and blinding in a room this small. Pop! Pop!
It goes off once, twice, and the third one catches me with my hand still on her hip and my mouth on hers.
Delilah rips herself back so fast she stumbles. I catch her elbow before she can fall, set her on her feet, and then put myself in between her and whoever the fuck dared to sneak up on us.
When the starbursts clear from my eyes, I see who it is.
Little guy. Cheap jacket. A camera up in both hands, and he’s backing across the marble taking pictures the whole way. The smug smile on his face says he can’t believe his good luck.
He’s fast.
But my men are faster.
Anton comes off the wall by the ballroom doors and Yuri arrives from the front. They swallow the photographer up.
Anton snatches the camera strap from around the man’s neck and Yuri immediately replaces it with his arm in a chokehold. The man squeals as Yuri lifts him off the ground by his throat.
Anton looks at me with the camera hanging off his fist.
I straighten my cuff. Then I look at him and give him a nod. Grimacing, Yuri hauls the man off his feet and starts marching him toward the service corridor at the back of the lobby.
“Wait,” Delilah says. “Wait— what are they— where are they taking him?”
“To the back.”
“To the back for what?”
“To ask him questions.”
They go through the swinging door at the end of the corridor. The door swings twice and stops.
I turn around. Delilah’s got the shawl back up over her shoulder. Her lipstick is smeared and messy, her mouth is swollen, and her hair has come loose from its pins on one side. On her collarbone, the red imprint of my thumb shines bright.
I bet the picture of her melting into me is fucking priceless.
She presses the back of her hand to her mouth, then takes it away and looks at it like she expects to find blood.
She’s breathing hard. So am I.
I reach out for her. “Come here.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think I should come anywhere near you right now.”
So I go to her, because there’s another part of this evening we haven’t arrived at yet.
I reach into my inner jacket pocket, take out an envelope, and hold it out.
She looks at it, but doesn’t take it.
“What is that?”
“A gift.”
“I don’t like gifts. We’ve covered this. Gifts are how you end up—”