Chapter 10 The Morning #2
"Protection," I said. "Absolute. The kind that doesn't ask permission.
The kind that doesn't negotiate terms or wait for approval or consult your feelings about the method.
Pavel and his men outside your door. Inside your building.
On your subway platform. At your friend's bakery.
Between you and every threat that exists in this city, including my brother, including the Council, including the things you haven't imagined yet because you don't know this world well enough to fear it properly. "
"And you? Who protects me from you?"
"No one. That's the arrangement. You get protection from everything in the world except the man providing it."
"That's not an arrangement. That's a trap."
"Every arrangement is a trap. The question is whether the trap is worse than the alternative.
Your alternative is walking out that door, going back to your studio apartment with four locks that I picked in forty-five seconds, and waiting.
For Dmitri. For the Council. For someone who knows what you translated and what you know and what you've seen.
Waiting alone. In a fourth-floor walk-up with no security camera in the lobby because your landlord is too cheap to install one. "
"You'd let me leave?"
"I told you before. The contract is the contract.
But the rules, the protection, this..." I gestured between us.
Between the chair and the bed and the ninety minutes of watching and the four hours before that and the three weeks before that.
The entire architecture of obsession that had brought us to this room.
"This is a choice. Your choice. Stay or go. "
"Why?" she said. The word quiet. Simple. The most dangerous question in any language. Not what or how or when. Why. The question that demands the truth from men who have built empires on avoiding it.
"Because you are my cruelest addiction," I said.
"Because I have spent forty-five years wanting nothing that couldn't be bought, killed, or negotiated for, and then you walked into my building in a cardigan held together with a safety pin and I wanted something I couldn't acquire through any method I understood.
Because you speak three languages and none of them are enough to describe what you do to me.
Because I am not a good man. I have never been a good man.
I will never be a good man. But I am a man who wants one thing badly enough to tell the truth about it, and the truth is ugly, Maeve.
The truth is possessive and predatory and unapologetic and it looks exactly like me sitting in a chair at five in the morning watching you breathe because the breathing is the most important thing I have ever witnessed. "
She stared at me. Green eyes in gold light.
"You should run," I said. "From me. From this apartment. From everything I am about to make your life. You should run and not stop until you're somewhere I can't reach, which doesn't exist, but you should try anyway because trying would be the sane response and you have every right to be sane."
"Running got me here," she said. Quiet. The words falling from her mouth like stones dropped into water.
"I ran from Dmitri. Changed my name. Changed my city.
Changed everything. I ran for three years.
And I ended up in your office on the forty-second floor being told that running was the thing that brought me to you. "
"Yes."
"So running doesn't work."
"Not from me."
She looked at the sheet in her hands. At her white knuckles. At the fabric she was holding to her chest like a wall.
She let go.
The sheet dropped. Pooled at her waist. Her body bare in the morning light.
The marks I'd left. The freckles. The soft stomach.
The breasts. The skin she'd been hiding for three years, exposed now.
Not for me. Not for defiance. For something else.
The decision of a woman who has run out of places to hide and is choosing, for the first time, to stop.
"I'm staying," she said. "Not because you've convinced me. Not because the alternative is worse. Not because you're different from him."
"Then why?"
"Because you're not lying about what you are.
He lied. Every day. Called it love. Called it protection.
Called it normal. And I believed him because the lie sounded like what I wanted to hear.
" She looked at me. Steady. Clear. The greenest thing I had ever seen.
"You're not lying. You're a monster. You've told me you're a monster.
You've shown me. And that's the first honest thing a man has given me in five years. "
"Honesty isn't kindness."
"No. But it's something I can work with."
She sat there. Bare. In my bed. In the morning light of a penthouse she hadn't chosen, on sheets that smelled like sex and salt and the collision of two people who had no business touching each other.
I stood up. Picked up a shirt from the closet. One of mine. White. Oxford cloth. Three sizes too large for her. I walked to the bed. Held it out.
She took it. Put it on. The fabric swallowed her. The sleeves hung past her hands. The hem hit her mid-thigh. She looked like a woman wearing the flag of the country that had just conquered her.
"Coffee?" I asked.
"Black."
"Хорошо." Good.
I walked to the kitchen. Poured two cups. Black. No sugar. The way I'd taken it since I was seventeen. The way she took it because she was the kind of woman who swallowed the world as it was.
I brought the cups back. Handed her one. Our fingers touched. Neither of us pulled away.
We drank in silence. The city below. The light changing. The morning doing what mornings do. Arriving whether you're ready for it or not.
She was staying.
Not because I'd trapped her. Not because the contract held her. Not because the protection was worth the price or the rules were reasonable or the arrangement made any kind of sense.
She was staying because the monster told her he was a monster, and she was tired enough, strong enough, broken enough to find that honest. To find that useful. To find that, after three years of running from a man who lied, the truth was the only shelter left.
My cruelest addiction.
Sitting in my shirt.
Drinking my coffee.
Choosing to stay.
The most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me.