Chapter 22
Nico
Touch Her And Die
* * *
Six days since the safe house.
Six days since my mother prayed in a stranger's bedroom while four of my men went home in boxes. The war has settled into a state worse than violence: silence. Viktor quiet. Dmitri unreachable. The kind of calm that precedes the kind of storm that levels cities.
Tonight, we show them it didn't work.
Elysium, transformed for an alliance function.
Every family represented. Greeks, Irish, the Romanos who fall in line when the wind blows our direction.
Security tripled: Lex at the east entrance, Cormac working the bar with a glass of water and eyes that miss nothing, Declan roaming the perimeter, Stavros outside with three men and a clear sightline to every exit.
Siobhan is in a black dress. Not the green from the Ricci function.
Black. Fitted. A neckline that follows her collarbone and stops just short of decent.
She did her own makeup tonight and the result is devastating.
War paint. She looks like a woman who's done being afraid, and the men in this room are recalibrating her in real time.
She catches me staring. "Eyes on the room, Mr. Konstantinos."
"I'd rather keep them on you."
"Later."
Our word. The one that means: I want you, I know you want me, and the waiting is half the pleasure. The promise embedded in a single syllable that has been keeping me half-hard since she walked out of the bedroom.
I scan the room and catalog what's wrong.
She's unarmed. Formal event, no concealed carry.
My rule. She's been at the range every morning for six days, her grouping tight at fifteen yards, the Beretta an extension of her hand in a way that makes me proud and terrified simultaneously.
But tonight, the gun is on the nightstand and she's working the room with nothing but her mind and her spine and the training I can't strap to her thigh under a dress like that.
I note Elena's absence. Her chair at the Greek delegation table is empty. Alexandros Drakos sits where he always sits, but he's diminished. Subdued. A man carrying a daughter's choices like stones in his pockets. No one mentions Elena. The silence has weight.
Siobhan works the room beautifully. I watch her from across the floor and see what I saw eight months ago at the Ricci function: a woman who belongs in a room full of powerful men, not because she defers to them but because she outperforms them.
She's talking to a Romano cousin about supply chain logistics and the cousin is nodding like he's taking notes.
A man approaches her. Mid-forties. Tailored charcoal suit.
Warm smile that reaches his eyes in a way that suggests practice rather than sincerity, though you'd have to know the difference to catch it.
Sergei Volkov. I've seen him at three previous functions.
Import-export. Pleasant. Forgettable. The kind of man who moves through rooms without disturbing the air.
He brings Siobhan a drink. I watch from the bar. The conversation looks normal. Business. Pleasantries. She's gracious, professional, Ward Risk Advisory in every polished syllable. He says something that makes her smile. Not her real smile. The public one.
He leans closer. His hand touches her lower back. A social gesture. Appropriate. I've seen a hundred men do it at a hundred events and the jealousy it triggers is manageable because she's mine and everyone in this room knows it.
Then his hand shifts. Presses.
Her smile doesn't change. Her body does. A micro-stiffening in her shoulders. A fractional widening of her eyes. The kind of physical tells that only someone who's spent twenty-five days memorizing her body would catch.
Her eyes find mine across the room.
She doesn't scream. Doesn't signal. She looks at me with the steady focus of a woman who assessed her own surveillance photograph over breakfast, and I see everything. The angle of his arm. The pressure at her ribs. The small hard shape concealed between his body and hers.
Knife.
I'm moving before the thought completes.
Four strides. The crowd parts without knowing why.
My hand closes around Sergei's wrist and I rotate.
Not a clean break. A grinding separation of bone and tendon that I feel through his skin, the joint giving way with a sound like a branch snapping underwater.
The knife clatters to the marble. Small.
Surgical. The kind designed to slip between ribs.
Sergei's mouth opens. I cover it with my palm before the scream escapes. Lex is beside me. Between us we walk Sergei toward the back corridor. Smooth. Unhurried. Two men helping a friend who's had too much. The party continues. No one notices. That's the skill.
The back room. Door closed. Lex outside.
Sergei is on his knees. The wrist hangs at an angle that says it will never work properly again. His face is gray. Sweat beads along his hairline.
I roll my sleeves. One fold. Two. Methodical. The ritual of a man who keeps blood off his cuffs because dry cleaning is expensive and killing is frequent.
"You touched my wife."
I hit him. Not the jaw. The solar plexus. The punch that collapses the diaphragm and makes the body forget how to breathe. He folds.
"You held a knife to my wife."
The second blow splits his lip. Blood sprays across the concrete floor in a pattern I've seen a hundred times and never tire of.
"You put hands on what's mine."
He sags. Wheezes. Tries to speak through the blood filling his mouth. "Reznikov will — he'll send more —"
"Let him. I'll do this every time. To every man. Until Viktor runs out of men or runs out of courage. Tell me, Sergei. When he gave you the knife, did he mention what I did to the last man who threatened her?"
Silence. The particular silence of a man understanding that he was sent to die. That Viktor didn't expect him to succeed. That he was a message, not an assassin.
I look at Siobhan. She's in the doorway.
Black dress, bare shoulders, the collarbone I've kissed a hundred times exposed in the fluorescent light of a back room.
She could leave. The hallway is behind her.
The party is behind her. The world where men don't bleed on concrete floors is three steps away.
"Turn away if you need to."
"No."
The word is quiet and absolute. The word she used in the kitchen after the warehouse. The same word she'll use every time I ask. The answer that means: I see you. I see what you are. I'm here anyway.
I draw the knife. Sergei's knife. The blade that was pressed against my wife's ribs sixty seconds ago. There's a symmetry to this that satisfies a part of me I don't examine closely.
I cut his throat. Not fast. A controlled line drawn from left to right with the deliberation of a man signing a document. The blade parts skin and then deeper. Sergei's eyes go wide. His hands come up to his neck. The blood is immediate and total. He makes a wet sound. Then quiet.
I stand. The blood is everywhere. My hands. My shirt. A spray across my jaw that I can feel cooling on my skin.
I look at my wife.
"Are you afraid of me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you'd never hurt me. And anyone who tries won't live to try twice."
I cross to her. Blood on my hands, my shirt, my jaw.
She doesn't step back. Doesn't flinch. She stands in the doorway in her black dress and watches me come with an expression I've been trying to read since the first night I saw her and I finally understand it.
It's not fear. It's not horror. It's not even acceptance.
It's…hunger.
I kiss her.
I don't ask. My hand cups her face. The blood on my fingers smears across her cheekbone and my palm settles against her jaw and my mouth finds hers and I take.
For the first time since our wedding kiss, I don't give her time to decide.
I don't step back. I don't check. I kiss her because if I don't kiss her right now, I will come apart and the only thing holding me together is her mouth against mine and the taste of her underneath the copper.
She kisses me back. Her hands grip my shirt.
She pulls me closer. Her tongue meets mine and the taste of blood doesn't make her recoil.
She makes a sound into my mouth. Involuntary.
Damning. Honest. A moan that says everything her words haven't: that watching me kill made her wet.
That the blood on my jaw is the most erotic thing she's ever tasted.
That she is as damned as I am, and she doesn't care.
I pull back. Her lips are smeared red. Not lipstick.
"We need to leave."
"Yes."
Lex handles the room. We leave through the back. The car is waiting. Twelve minutes to the penthouse.
She sits beside me, and her hand grips my thigh.
Knuckles white. She's shaking. Not from fear.
I can smell her arousal in the closed space of the car.
The scent of a woman who is soaked through her underwear and trying to hold herself together for twelve more minutes.
My hand covers hers on my thigh. Presses down.
Neither of us speaks. The city blurs past.
We barely make it to the elevator.