Chapter 5
ELLE
Irarely, if ever, get angry. But right now I'm the kind of angry that comes with an arson charge and zero regrets.
I'm sitting in the black SUV between two brick-wall men while Jeffrey rides shotgun and Nik lies sprawled across the third row like evidence at a crime scene, and all I can think is: I hate everyone in this car except innocent, unconscious Nik. And also maybe my entire life.
"Is he breathing?" I snap.
"He's fine," Jeffrey says without turning around.
"From where I'm sitting he looks extremely unconscious, and that feels like the opposite of fine, Jeffrey."
"I said he's fine."
But I don't buy it. Over and over, I glance behind me, my heart hammering. I know I fucked up, but why the fuck did they do this to him?
I twist, kneeling backward on the seat to check Nik again. His chest rises. Falls. Rises. There's a smear of blood at his hairline, dark against that silver hair, and my stomach turns because I put him in this position.
Well, technically, Jeffrey did.
"You hit him too hard," I say, flipping back around, my hair slapping the seat. I stare at the back of Jeffrey's neck and imagine stabbing him with a basil stake from the rooftop garden.
Jeffrey exhales. "He was trying to shoot us, Ellie-girl."
"Don't Ellie-girl me. You concussed my... friend." Something tells me calling him my hookup won't land well with this crowd.
The tower looms ahead, black glass swaggering up into the sky. As we step out of the car in the basement, an unconscious Nik held between two men, a valet startles and looks away because even he knows this is above his pay grade.
They hustle us through the private entrance and straight into the elevator that will take us up to the penthouse. I stand taller, spine straight, refusing to be embarrassed for wanting one night.
We ride up and I know Gayle's fury will hurtle toward me the moment the doors open. My mother doesn't do waiting. She makes the world follow her calendar or burn trying.
The elevator hums, and I can only imagine how I look. Hair wrecked, makeup smeared, dress that screams bad decisions. There's a sting between my thighs, a soreness that whispers you did it, you finally did it.
Only, you got the guy destroyed in the process. Fuck.
"Hey," I whisper as we reach our floor, dropping beside Nik as they lift him, hoping he can hear me in some alternate universe. "Wake up soon, okay? Before my mother orders your head on a tray."
"Stay back," Jeffrey says, and I bare my teeth at him like a feral cat.
The penthouse doors open.
Mother's waiting in the living room. Of course she is. Black suit, white blouse, lipstick the exact red of punishment. Gayle Donovan looks at me like she's scraping gum off a Louboutin.
"Explain," she says to Jeffrey. Not to me. Like I'm furniture that has offended her by moving.
Jeffrey tells her everything, but doesn't add the part where I begged. Doesn't add the part where, for the first time in years, I felt like a person instead of a package, and he smashed that feeling with the butt of a gun.
Mother listens with her arms folded, jaw set somewhere between homicide settings one and five. When Jeffrey finishes, a vein pulses at her temple.
"You just ruined your future," she hisses. The words hit like thrown rocks. "The husband I selected for you will not want damaged goods."
My face goes hot. "I am not goods."
She turns her head just enough to slice me with a smile. "You are what I say you are."
"Great. So we're going back to when they burned women at stakes and called them witches, huh?" I say, because I'm furious and my mouth is a suicide note.
Mother ignores me. Her eyes slide past me to the men depositing Nik. Something flickers across her face when she sees him. Recognition. Cold and immediate, like a match catching.
It makes no sense.
She whirls on me, striding forward. "You stupid, naive girl." Her voice is low enough to skin me alive. "Do you have any idea what you've done? Do you know who this man is?"
"His name is Nik," I say, utterly confused. "He's the guy I picked."
She laughs. It's the ugliest sound I've ever heard come out of her mouth. "His name is Nikolai Ivanov, you fool. And he works for Viktor Ivanov."
I stare. Both names could easily be a brand of vodka. They mean nothing to me.
"Okay? And?"
"And," she says, eyes bright like a blade catching light, "you brought a wolf into my house."
"Bind him," she orders, flashing her hand like a conductor.
The men move with zip ties, dragging his wrists behind his back.
I want to scream. I want to lunge forward and tear the ties off him myself.
But her wrath has me frozen, and I know, with the instinct of a girl who's spent twenty-six years reading this woman's moods, that if I show I care, she'll only hurt him worse.
"Raphaella, sit," she orders.
I want to get away from here. Away from her sight. Maybe if I do, I can figure out a way to free Nik. Nikolai. Whoever the hell he is.
"I want a shower."
"Sit."
"Please, Mother." There is a brand-new spine in my voice that surprises both of us. "Can't I just take one shower?"
"Did I tell you to go around spreading your legs like a street whore?" Her words are so vile, so deliberately chosen, that every muscle in my body locks. "Did I tell you to go defile yourself? You will stay right here. I want Viktor to see exactly what his man did to you."
The air leaves the room. She stares at me like I'm something filthy. Something she needs to bleach off her floors. I feel my heart racing, my legs begging to run, but where? Mother always finds me. Mother always wins.
"Make the call," she says to one of her men.
I drop into a chair, too hollowed out to fight. My mother has always had this talent. Not just for cruelty, but for timing it so precisely that by the time you realize you've been gutted, you're already sitting still and bleeding quietly.
My pulse hammers everywhere at once. In my wrists, in my throat, in the places his mouth was only hours ago. I fold my arms so I don't shake apart while we wait for Viktor.
Nik groans. The sound slices straight through me.
"Hey," I breathe, already halfway to my feet. Jeffrey's palm appears, blocking me. I glare around it and find Nik's eyes as they crack open. Blue. Pale, furious blue, and suddenly very, very awake.
He takes one look at the ceiling, the chandelier, the crowd, my mother, and his face shifts into something that looks a lot like oh, hell.
"Of course," he says, and his voice is lower when he's angry. A scraped-metal sound that does terrible things to my spine. "Of course you're behind this, Gayle."
He knows my mother. He knows my goddamn mother.
If I thought tonight was already insane, the fact that Nik and Gayle know each other launches this straight into the loony bin. I step closer anyway, because apparently I'm a moth, and this is the flame that's going to kill me. "Nik?"
His head snaps to me, and for one strange beat, something in his expression flickers. Like he's trying to place me somewhere else. Somewhere that doesn't match this room. Then it's gone, swallowed by something much worse.
Fury.
"You set me up," he says. Voice low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that's louder than any scream. "You picked me at that club. Dragged me to the hotel. Had them waiting. Cute act."
"What?" I blink. "What are you talking about?"
He strains against the ties, like he can shear himself free by will alone. "Of all the men in New York, you just happened to find me? And now I'm here, in Gayle Donovan's living room? That's one hell of a coincidence."
My jaw drops.
"I didn't know who you were!" I look between him and my mother, searching for something that makes sense. "I snuck out for my birthday! I just wanted to go dancing!”
"Nikolai Ivanov," my mother says coolly, "meet my daughter. Raphaella."
Nik stares at me. Horror replaces anger in slow, sickening degrees.
"Daughter." His voice goes flat.
"Yes," my mother answers for me. "My only child. Whom you just deflowered in a hotel room."
Nik's jaw tightens, eyes never leaving mine. "She approached me. Set the whole thing up."
"I did not!" I'm nearly shouting now, frustration and confusion cracking my voice wide open. " I just wanted one night!"
"And I'm just supposed to believe," Nik says with lethal quietness, "that of all the men in this city, you just happened to pick me?”
“Here?” Gayle snaps. “When were you here?”
Neither I nor Nik answers.
The honest answer is worse than a setup. I did recognize him from the stairwell of this very building but I assumed he was someone else. The truth is messier than a conspiracy and twice as hard to believe.
"I swear, I have no idea who you are."
"Cunning, aren't you?" he hisses, and each word is a small, precise wound.
I look at him. At the fury and confusion in his eyes. At the blood drying on his temple. At the zip ties cutting into the same wrists that held me an hour ago like I was something worth being careful with.
What have I done? What have I stumbled into?
I wanted freedom, and instead I set the city on fire. All because I wanted to feel alive for one night. All because I picked the wrong man in a crowded room, or maybe the right one at the worst possible time.
And I thought being a virgin was hard.