Chapter Three — Elena #2
The service corridor was dim and my heels were loud on the concrete floor. I told myself I would walk to the end of the corridor and back and that if I saw nothing, I would accept that I had imagined it, and I would go back to my life and leave the door closed where it belonged.
I made it approximately thirty feet.
The door at the far end of the corridor opened.
He came through it the way he moved through everything—without hurry, with that total and unnerving economy of motion, like a man who had never in his life taken a step that wasn’t deliberate.
Dark suit. White shirt. The same quality of stillness that had stopped me in the middle of a choreographed number from fifty yards away.
He looked up and saw me.
We both stopped.
The lighting was inadequate and the bass from below was a low, constant pressure and somewhere a door was drifting shut with a hydraulic hiss, and the man who had held me while I cried was standing ten feet away looking at me with an expression that I could not read and that frightened me slightly because of how much I wanted to.
For a full three seconds, neither of us moved.
Then everything I had spent two weeks folding and flattening and putting in closed rooms came open at once, and what came out of it wasn’t relief or want or any of the softer things I might have expected.
Anger.
“You left,” I said.
He continued to look at me.
“You shouldn’t be in this corridor,” he pointed out, his face impassive.
“You left without a word. Without—there wasn’t even a note, there was just—” The money, I didn’t say. I hadn’t decided about the money yet. “You disappeared. Like it was nothing.”
“You were safe.”
“I didn’t feel safe. I felt—” I stopped. I felt discarded, I didn’t say. I felt like something you dealt with and then tidied away. “Who are you? You still haven’t—I don’t even know your name.”
His silence told me what his words didn’t: It was intentional.
The flatness of it hit me like a door.
“I protected you.” The control in his voice was absolute, but there was something below it, something compressed and pressurized. “Those men—”
“Were going to come back, you said so yourself, and then you left me with nothing but—” I stopped again, because we were circling the envelope and I wasn’t ready for that yet. “You had no right to make decisions about my life.”
“I don’t. And that was why I had to leave,” he declared. “It was the safest choice. For both of us.”
“For you,” I said. “Don’t dress it up as something you did for me.”
Something flickered in his face. He moved, and then the corridor had rearranged itself and he was closer than he’d been and the wall was at my back and I wasn’t entirely certain when that had happened.
He wasn’t touching me. He was a careful foot away, close enough that I could smell the specific, expensive quiet of his cologne. Close enough that I was acutely aware of how much space he occupied.
“You know nothing about my world,” he said. Quiet. Precise. “About what you walked into that night or what it costs to be connected to it. I left because staying was more dangerous to you than disappearing. You want an apology for that. I won’t give you one.”
“I’m not asking for an apology.” My voice was steady, which surprised me. “I’m asking for the truth. I deserve that much.”
“What you deserve,” he said, “and what is safe for you to have are not the same thing.”
I hated that I had to look up. I hated the way proximity to him rearranged the available air — as I said, “That is the most arrogant thing anyone has ever said to me.”
His jaw tightened. The compressed thing below the surface moved again. “You followed me into a restricted corridor. Alone. In costume. After a show in my casino.”
“Your—” The word landed wrong. I replayed it. “This is your casino.”
He said nothing.
The corridor seemed to tilt slightly under me. I looked at him—at the bespoke suit, the watch, the particular authority of someone who didn’t ask rooms for permission—and I did the arithmetic I should have done weeks ago, and it came out to a number that made my stomach drop.
I work for him.
“I didn’t know you were here,” he said, and something in his voice shifted just enough to tell me it was true. “Not until tonight.”
The distance between us was not a foot anymore. I wasn’t sure when it had closed, whether I’d moved or he had or whether it had simply collapsed under its own weight, but the wall was solid at my back and he was close enough that the warmth of him was palpable.
I looked at his mouth, which was a mistake, and then back up at his eyes, which was a different kind of mistake, and I asked,“So what happens now?”
Again, I didn’t know which of us moved.
The kiss was nothing like two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago there had been softness in it, intention slowed down to consideration.
This was not that. This was everything the argument had wound tight and then let go—sharp and claiming and not particularly gentle, his hand at my jaw, my fingers finding the lapel of his jacket without my permission.
And then he pulled back an inch. His hand hadn’t moved.
In the silence, both of us breathing differently, he looked at me with those pale, unreadable eyes.
“Your name,” he said. His voice had changed register. Lower. Something in it that had not been there before.
I blinked. “What?”
“Your full name.” A pause. “Tell me.”
“Elena. Elena Morozova.”
The effect was immediate and strange. He went very still—stiller than his usual stillness, which was already extreme—and something moved across his face that I couldn’t interpret.
It was not surprise exactly. It was more like recognition.
Like a man who had been doing a calculation and had just received the final number.
His hand dropped from my jaw. He took a step back.
I watched his jaw clench before he turned around and walked away.
What I knew, walking down that corridor in the aftermath of four seconds that had rewritten the last two weeks entirely, was this: he was not a stranger passing through Vegas.
He owned the casino.
And I, apparently, danced in his house.