Chapter 10 The Morning
I was awake before the sun.
Not because I'm disciplined, though I am. Not because I slept poorly, though I didn't sleep at all. I was awake because she was in my bed and sleeping women tell you things that waking women won't, and I intended to collect every one.
She slept on her side. Knees drawn up. One hand curled under the pillow, the other resting on her stomach.
Palm flat. Fingers splayed. The same position I'd seen through her apartment window.
The same protective gesture. Guarding the part of herself Dmitri had named.
Even in sleep, even after what I'd done to that body four hours ago, the muscle memory of shame was stronger than the muscle memory of pleasure.
I would fix that. Not gently. Thoroughly.
The grey sheets pooled at her waist. Her back was bare.
The auburn hair fanned across the pillow in the kind of chaos that only happens when a woman has been fucked hard enough to forget she owns a hairbrush.
I could see the marks I'd left. The bite on her shoulder.
The faint red tracks on her skin where my hands had gripped, pressed, held. Not bruises. Signatures.
Manhattan was turning pink outside the windows. The city waking up around us like it mattered. Like anything out there was more important than the woman in my bed who didn't know I'd been watching her breathe for the last ninety minutes.
Ninety minutes. I counted.
They say obsession fades after possession. That the wanting dies once the having begins. That the fantasy is always better than the flesh.
They haven't met Maeve Brennan.
The flesh was better. The flesh was worse.
The flesh was everything the fantasy had promised, multiplied by the reality of her sounds, her taste, the way she said my name like it was being ripped out of her, and now the fantasy was ruined because reality had replaced it, and reality was lying three feet from me with marks on her skin and shame in her sleep and I wanted her again with the same intensity I'd wanted her before I had her, which meant the having had solved nothing.
I was still starving. The meal had made me hungrier.
She stirred at 6:14. The body shifting first. Her shoulders rolling, her spine uncurling, the hand on her stomach sliding to the sheet.
Then the face. A frown. The frown of a person surfacing from sleep into a room they don't recognize, the few seconds of confusion before memory arrives like a freight train.
Her eyes opened.
Green. Bloodshot. The eyes of a woman who had cried and screamed and come and cried again, in that order, and hadn't slept long enough to recover from any of it.
She saw me.
I was sitting in the chair beside the bed.
Dressed. Black trousers. White shirt, unbuttoned at the collar.
No jacket. No shoes. A cup of black coffee in my hand, steam curling in the grey light.
I'd been sitting there since 4:47 a.m., watching her the way I'd watched her apartment through the window.
The way I'd watched her in the dark the night I broke in.
The way I watched everything I intended to keep.
"How long have you been sitting there?" she asked. Her voice raw. Scraped. The voice of a woman who had used her throat in ways it wasn't built for.
"Long enough."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
She sat up. The sheet slipped. She caught it. Pulled it to her chest. Holding it there with both hands, covering herself, rebuilding the fortress one piece of fabric at a time. The instinct to hide, alive and operational even after a night that should have burned it to the ground.
"Don't," I said.
"Don't what?"
"Cover yourself."
"I'm naked."
"I noticed."
"I'd like to not be naked in front of you right now."
"You were naked in front of me four hours ago."
"That was different."
"How?"
"Because I wasn't thinking."
"And now you are."
"Now I'm drowning in it."
She pulled the sheet tighter. Her knuckles white against the grey cotton. The same white knuckles from the windowsill, from the office desk, from every surface she'd gripped in this building while trying to hold herself together.
I set the coffee down. Leaned forward. Elbows on my knees. Hands clasped. The posture of a man about to deliver terms.
"We need to discuss the arrangement," I said.
"The arrangement."
"The rules."
She laughed. Short. Broken. The laugh of a woman who has just been told that the man who fucked her against a window is now going to present terms of engagement over morning coffee.
"You're serious."
"I'm always serious. You should know that by now."
"What I know is that I'm sitting in a bed that isn't mine, in an apartment I didn't choose, covered in marks from a man I work for, and my head is splitting open and my body is...
" She stopped. Swallowed. Whatever her body was, the word for it was stuck in the space between honesty and pride, and pride was winning. "Just say what you need to say."
"Three rules," I said. "Non-negotiable. The price of my protection."
"I didn't ask for your protection."
"You didn't ask for my brother either. Life is full of things we didn't ask for. The question is whether we survive them."
She looked at me. Searching for the angle. The trap. The cruelty underneath the calm. She would find all three, but not where she expected.
"Rule one," I said. "You don't leave without my knowledge. Not the penthouse. Not the office. Not the building. Not a restaurant, a bakery, a park. You don't step outside a door without someone knowing. Me. Pavel. Irina. I don't care who. But someone always knows where you are."
"That's a leash."
"That's a perimeter."
"It's the same thing."
"It's not. A leash pulls you back. A perimeter keeps them out.
Dmitri has people in this city. Men who owe him favors, men who owe the Council favors, men who would hand you over for the price of a forgiven debt.
You walked to your friend's bakery alone last Wednesday.
Three blocks. No escort. Do you know how many things can happen in three blocks? "
"I've been walking alone for three years."
"And I've been watching you for three weeks. You're not as invisible as you think."
She went quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when a person is calculating the distance between freedom and safety, between the life they want and the life that will keep them alive.
"Rule two," I said. "You don't speak to Dmitri.
If he calls, you don't answer. If he appears, you walk the other direction.
If he sends a message through someone else, you bring it to me.
Unopened. Unread. You don't engage. You don't respond.
You don't give him a single syllable to work with.
Dmitri doesn't need an invitation. He needs a foothold.
A returned call. A moment of curiosity. A single word is enough for him to rebuild the bridge you burned when you left, and he will cross it, Maeve.
He will cross it carrying everything he did to you and call it love. "
"I know what he is now."
"Knowing what someone is doesn't make you immune to them. It makes you informed. Immunity requires distance. Total. Absolute. Silence."
"Fine."
"Fine is not agreement. Fine is resignation. I want agreement."
"I agree."
"Good."
She shifted on the bed. Pulling her legs up. Making herself smaller. The posture of a woman bracing for the third thing because the first two were hard but the third would be personal.
"Rule three," I said.
She waited.
"You don't hide your body from me."
The room changed. Not the light. Not the temperature. The pressure. The atmospheric shift that happens when a man says something that crosses a line he drew himself, and the crossing is deliberate, and the deliberateness is the point.
"Excuse me?"
"The cardigans. The mid-calf skirts. The concealer on your freckles.
The hair tied so tight it's a punishment.
The way you suck in your stomach when someone looks at you.
The way you cross your arms over your chest when you're standing.
The way you fold yourself into corners and doorways and the edges of rooms because my brother spent two years telling you that your body was wrong. "
She stared at me. Her lips parting. Closing. The war between outrage and something else, something deeper, the sound of a man describing a wound she thought was invisible.
"Your body is not wrong, Maeve. Your body was never wrong. And you will not hide it from me. Not in this apartment. Not in my office. Not anywhere I can see you. I am not asking you to dress for me. I am telling you to stop dressing against yourself."
"That's not a rule. That's a violation."
"It's a correction."
"Of what?"
"Of every morning you stood in front of a mirror and chose the ugliest thing in your closet because a man who wasn't worth the air in your lungs told you beauty was a privilege you hadn't earned.
" I held her gaze. "You've earned it. You earned it the day you packed a bag in the dark and walked out the door.
You just haven't looked in the mirror since. "
She was quiet for a long time. The city brightening outside the windows. Manhattan going from pink to gold, the way cities do when they're performing for an audience that isn't watching.
"And what do I get?" she said. "For these rules. For this leash you're calling a perimeter. For giving up the right to walk three blocks without a bodyguard and dress however I want and exist without being monitored every second of every day. What do I get, Viktor?"
My name. She said it. Not Mr. Kotov. Not Monsieur Kotov.
Viktor. The first time she'd used it without a gun to her head.
Without anger, without defiance, without the emphasis that made it sound like a profanity.
Just my name. Spoken by a woman sitting in my bed, covered in my sheets, wearing my marks.
The sound of it in her mouth was worth more than anything the Bratva had ever put in my accounts.