Chapter 24 Zatanna
ZATANNA
When we finally step out of the suite, everything changes.
Inside, it had been just the two of us. Heat. Truth. His body. My body. His voice low against my skin and my own moans still trapped somewhere in the room we left behind.
Outside, the hallway is cool and polished and full of distance.
Aleksei puts his mask back on so fast it gives me whiplash.
He walks half a step ahead of me, expression unreadable, shirt replaced, jacket back on, every line of him composed again. If I didn’t know what his mouth had just done to me, what his body had felt like inside mine, I might believe he was always this controlled.
It’s weird. No, worse than weird.
It hurts.
Because the sex had been… incredible. Mind-blowing. Better than anything I’d imagined in all the books and scripts and stupid private fantasies I’d ever had. There had been no pain, not really. Just heat and stretch and being so overwhelmed by him that my body forgot to be afraid.
And now he’s acting like none of that changed anything.
His men are waiting at the far end of the corridor. Sergei first, then Anton, both of them grim and efficient and deeply uninterested in whatever happened between the boss and the assistant in the suite upstairs. Or pretending to be.
The sight of them brings every doubt from last night roaring back.
The guns. The scars. The organized crime confession that wasn’t really a confession so much as a whole terrible reality sliding into focus.
My steps slow slightly.
Aleksei notices immediately, because of course he does, but he doesn’t look back. He just says, low enough that only I hear, “Keep walking.”
Something in me bristles.
I am not a package he can order around just because he put me on my back ten minutes ago.
Still, I keep walking.
We make it to the elevator. Sergei presses the button. Anton scans the hall. Aleksei stands in front of me just enough to block the view from anyone passing, but he never touches me. Doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t give me anything.
And that, somehow, is worse than the bullets.
The elevator arrives. We step inside. His men do not. That surprises me enough that I look up.
Aleksei finally meets my eyes. “They’ll take the stairs.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
Right. Of course.
The doors close, and suddenly we’re alone again in a too-small space that should feel different now, softer maybe, but doesn’t. It feels strange. Off-balance. Like he’s already putting walls back up and I’m just standing here trying not to notice.
I hate how much I notice.
When the elevator opens into the lobby, his car is already waiting outside. The rain has slowed to a fine mist, turning the city lights into smears of gold and white.
He holds the door for me. I get in. He follows a second later, and the silence in the backseat is unbearable.
I stare out the window, willing my pulse to settle, willing my thoughts not to spin out into things I don’t want to feel. Used. Confused. Angry. Embarrassed for caring this quickly, this stupidly.
I can still feel him between my thighs. I can still hear him laughing low in that suite when I called his whole life complicated.
And now he won’t even look at me.
That’s what gets under my skin the most.
Not the silence. Not the careful distance he puts back between us the second we leave the suite. It’s the way he acts like whatever happened in that room belongs there, sealed off, locked away, while my whole body is still lit up from him.
The entire ride back is quiet.
I sit angled toward the window, watching rain slide down the glass and city lights smear into gold and white streaks.
Aleksei sits beside me, one hand resting near his knee, the other occasionally tapping once against the leather seat, the only sign that something is still moving under all that control.
I keep waiting for him to say something.
Anything.
Something about the suite. About Alena. About the fact that I just learned he comes from a family that does things outside the law and then had some of the best sex of my life with him ten minutes later.
Instead, I get nothing.
His expression is unreadable. Closed.
So, I turn away and focus on the window because the alternative is asking a question I’m not sure I want answered.
By the time the car turns onto my block, my mood has gone from shaken to irritated to something dangerously close to hurt.
The neighborhood is dim, mostly quiet at this hour.
My building looks exactly the way it always does—tired brick, one flickering light over the entrance, windows reflecting the wet street back at us.
The car slows.
Aleksei finally speaks. “You’re home.”
The words are neutral. Polite. Like he’s dropping off a colleague after a meeting.
That does not improve my mood.
“Yes,” I say.
The driver pulls to the curb. For a second I think Aleksei might get out. He doesn’t.
I reach for the door handle and pause. The unease that’s been skittering around the back of my neck since we left the hotel sharpens suddenly into something more specific.
The street. The windows. The feeling of being watched.
I don’t open the door.
“What?” Aleksei asks, noticing immediately.
I glance through the rain-streaked glass toward the building entrance, then back down the block. “I don’t know.”
His voice changes at once. More alert. More present. “What is it?”
I hate how relieved I am to hear that tone. “I’ve had this weird feeling since we turned onto the block,” I say quietly. “Like…” I hesitate, feeling stupid the second the words form. “Like someone’s watching.”
He goes still, and then he takes out his phone, tapping away at a text and sending it off. A second later, another. His gaze lifts to the building, to the parked cars, to the shadows under the awnings.
Then he looks at me.
“When you go upstairs,” he says, “I want you to look out your front window. The one facing the street.”
I blink. “Why?”
“Just do it.”
That’s not an answer, but I’m too tired and too rattled to fight him over it.
The car door opens from the outside before I can reach for it. The driver stands there with an umbrella, face professionally blank. Aleksei steps out on my side after all, scans the sidewalk once, then nods for me to move.
Well… That should not make my stomach flip the way it does.
He walks me to the entrance, one hand light but firm at the small of my back. Not possessive, exactly. Just enough that I know he is tracking everything around us while pretending not to.
Inside the building lobby, I turn to him. The harsh fluorescent light is deeply unflattering and does nothing to diminish how devastating he still looks.
“You’re not coming up?” I ask before I can stop myself.
His eyes hold mine. “No.”
Right. Of course.
His hand slips away from my back. “Go upstairs. Lock the door. Then look out the window.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but his expression tells me not to waste the breath.
So I nod once and head toward the stairs. I can feel his gaze on me all the way up.
By the time I get into my apartment, my pulse is a mess again. I lock the door, then the chain, then stand there for a second with my hand still on the handle, listening to the rain and my own breathing.
This is ridiculous. He’s ridiculous. Tonight is ridiculous.
Still, I do what he said.
I cross to the window at the front of the apartment and pull the curtain back just enough to see the street below.
For a second, nothing looks unusual. Then I notice them.
A dark sedan parked across from my building. Another farther down the block. And in the first one, just visible through the windshield under the streetlamp glow, two men in suits.
Not random men. Not neighbors.
His men.
I stare. The realization settles in with a thud.
Security. For me.
Permanent or temporary, I have no idea, but definitely there.
“Well,” I say out loud to my empty apartment. Then, because there is really nothing else to say at this point, I let the curtain fall and mutter, “Well, shit.”
I stare at the parked cars for another ten seconds, just to make sure I’m not hallucinating from exhaustion and whatever chemical cocktail my body is still running on.
Nope. Still there. Still very much real.
I grab my phone and call him before I can talk myself out of it.
He answers on the first ring. “Yes.”
No hello. No explanation. Just that same calm, impossible tone like posting armed men outside my apartment is the most reasonable thing in the world.
“This is excessive,” I say.
“No.”
I actually laugh. “No?”
“No.”
“That is not a proper defense.”
“It doesn’t need one.” I pace away from the window and then back again, because apparently my body has forgotten how to sit still tonight. “You have two cars outside my building.”
“Yes.”
“With men in them.”
“Yes.”
“Do they… live there now?”
A pause. “Don’t be dramatic.”
I stop pacing. “I am not being dramatic. I am trying to understand if your security detail is going to follow me into the grocery store.”
“If necessary.”
“Oh my God.”
His silence on the line feels suspiciously amused.
I lower my voice, though there is no one here to overhear me. “Are they going to follow me into work, too?”
“No.”
That comes too fast.
I blink. “No?”
“Take the day off tomorrow.”
I sit down hard on the edge of my bed. “Excuse me?”
“I know you’re tired.” That, annoyingly, lands a little softer than the rest. Then he adds, in the same maddeningly even voice, “First time can be strenuous.”
I close my eyes. My entire face heats up instantly. “You are so irritating.”
“And yet,” he says, “you keep calling.”
I roll my eyes so hard it almost hurts. “This is not flirtation. This is protest.”
“Noted.”
There’s a beat of silence.
Then, because apparently I hate myself, I ask, “You’re serious about tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I have work.”
“You have security outside your apartment and have been shot at twice in forty-eight hours by proximity. You are not going to work tomorrow.”
“That’s not how employment usually functions.”
“It is for you.”