Chapter Seven
~ Iren ~
Waking up in a stranger’s bed is never supposed to be pleasant, but silk sheets have a way of undermining tradition. My first sensory impressions, in order:
One, there was no ceiling water stain shaped like a dinosaur, which was statistically impossible given my lifetime average.
Two, I was still alive, but possibly not in the conventional sense.
And three, the mattress underneath me was so soft it could have been engineered for royalty, or at least someone who’d shot their way into the upper tax brackets.
I blinked, expecting a headache, or at least the sour rush of regret. Instead, I got a low, steady heat from a working fireplace—actual flames, not a Netflix loop—the aftertaste of vodka in my mouth, and a physical sense memory of being split in half by a man whose idea of pillow talk was “say it.”
I had. I did. Now I was here.
For a full minute I lay motionless. There was a painting over the fireplace, the kind that came with a provenance and a security detail.
The walls were a rich, moody blue, so dark it felt like night even in the morning.
Heavy drapes covered one window, and the French doors at the end of the room let in a pane of icy white daylight.
The furniture was old—old as in “carved for a tsar, probably with the blood of peasants in the finish.” There were two armchairs by the fire, both upholstered in leather the color of black tea, and in one of them sat Vadim.
He looked exactly as he had the night before, except now he was in a full suit, slate gray and nearly black, with a white shirt open at the collar and no tie. The shoulder holster was visible for effect, not necessity, and the gun inside was not a prop.
His hair—how did he even manage this?—was slicked and perfect, not a trace of bedhead. He held a tablet in his left hand, thumb scrolling, and the only sign of animation was a muscle ticking in his jaw as he read.
The moment my eyes opened, he clocked me. I tried to pretend I didn’t notice, which was the same as playing dead in front of a wolf.
I was not very good at it.
He set the tablet down on the table next to him. “You’re awake.” Statement, not question.
I weighed the odds: respond, or fake sleep and hope he respected tradition. I went with respond. “What time is it?”
“Ten-thirty.”
I took inventory of my body. No major injuries, just the well-earned bruises of overachievement. My jaw ached from where he’d kissed me too hard, or maybe it was the bite on my shoulder. My ass—no, that was definitely a bruise.
He didn’t rise from the chair. He just watched, in the way men who own things watch to see if the thing is still worth owning. When I sat up, the sheet dropped to my waist and made a little static sound against my skin.
No point in being shy. He’d already seen everything, both in the classical sense and the post-apocalyptic.
“Coffee?” I said, more hope than expectation.
He stood. The motion had the same effect as watching a drawbridge go up: sudden, absolute, no question who had the right of way. He crossed to the bed and, without warning, put a hand to the back of my neck and hauled me upright.
Not rough. Just final.
He kissed me, open-mouthed and possessive, like a man checking the temperature of a steak before deciding if it was ready to eat. I made a noise, involuntary, and for a second I was sure I’d pass out again from the shock of it. Then he let me go and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“How do you feel?” he asked, which was an improvement over last night, when he’d skipped straight to “mine.”
I considered my answer. “Fine,” I said.
He looked at me with a kind of clinical patience, like he was waiting for the real answer to crawl out of my mouth and admit what it had done.
I tried again. “I’ve been worse.”
He seemed to find this satisfactory, because the corners of his mouth turned up in the approximation of a smile. He reached for my wrist and ran his thumb over the inside, checking the pulse, maybe, or just staking a claim. “You can stay in bed, if you want. I have business to attend.”
“What if I want to get up?”
He cocked his head, as if this was not a scenario he’d considered. “There’s a bathroom. Clothes are waiting. When you’re done, come to breakfast.”
Breakfast. The word hit me like a rock to the temple. I couldn’t remember the last time someone used it as an offer and not a code for “I’m leaving in five minutes, hope you have a good life.”
I didn’t trust it.
He stood again, this time slower, and left the room with the heavy, dignified stride of a man who’d never once tripped over his own feet. The door closed with a whisper.
I sat for a minute, letting the room re-solidify around me. There were no cameras. I checked, just in case. There was, however, a side table with a glass of water, a pack of Tylenol, and a note in crisp handwriting that read: “Take two. Lin.”
Lin.
I liked Lin, whoever he was. He was the only person in this house who seemed to appreciate how far out of my depth I was.
I drank the water, took the pills, and got out of bed.
My first three steps were fine. The fourth was a disaster, because I looked down and realized that not only was I naked, but I was also—how to put this—marked. There was a perfect semicircle of bruises at the top of my thigh, and a bite on my left collarbone that was already blue at the edges.
I inspected the damage in the mirror. If I’d wanted plausible deniability, it was already gone. I looked thoroughly debauched, which was probably the point.
The bathroom was bigger than my entire last apartment. Marble everywhere, the kind of tile that stayed cold even when you ran the water. The shower had six heads. I counted.
I tried them all.
I stood under the spray, letting it drill the sleep out of my bones. The soap was scented, something subtle and expensive, not like the two-in-one I stole from the gym. I used it liberally, watching the suds collect in the drain like evidence.
It was strange, being here. Being in a place where nothing was broken, nothing needed duct tape, nothing smelled like mildew or old food. There was a towel rack—heated—and the towels themselves were so thick I lost a hand in one by accident.
I wrapped up and stepped back into the bedroom. There, on the foot of the bed, was a pile of clothes: jeans, white T-shirt, button-down, and a pair of house slippers that looked custom-made for someone my size. There were even socks, rolled with military precision.
I dressed. The jeans fit perfectly, hugging my hips like a second skin. The shirt was soft enough to count as armor against the outside world. And the slippers had no right to be as comfortable as they were.
I checked the mirror again. I looked… not like myself. Not quite. More like an approximation drawn from a very expensive memory.
At the threshold, I hesitated. If I’d had any sense, I’d have locked myself in the bathroom and waited for this all to pass. But sense had never been my strong suit, so I opened the door and followed the smell of bread and coffee down the hall.
Somewhere, I knew, this Lin guy was already two steps ahead of me.
The smell of bread had a gravitational pull. It drew me through three hallways, down a set of stairs so polished I nearly face-planted, and into a breakfast room the size of a community college library.
There were floor-to-ceiling windows that let in enough morning light to power a glow lamp farm. The table was long enough to host the Last Supper plus the overflow seating, but only two places were set, both at the near end.
Vadim sat at the head, in a chair with the exact posture of an expensive throne.
The dark suit was tailored within an inch of its existence, and he wore it like a man who could kill you with the cufflinks alone.
Next to his left hand was a glass of mineral water.
Next to his right was a stack of what looked like—no, they were definitely—bank statements.
I took the seat across from him. The plate was already loaded with three types of bread: a crusty round, a seeded roll, and a slice of what I could only describe as “bread for people who don’t like bread.”
There was also a butter dish with a lid.
“Good morning,” Vadim said.
I stared at the spread. “I didn’t know bread came in this many forms.”
He did not smile, but there was a flicker at the corner of his mouth, like he was adding the observation to a private folder. “Eat.”
I did. The first bite was so perfect it made me angry. The butter was unsalted and probably cost more per ounce than Adderall. I tried each bread in turn, then circled back to the first, unwilling to admit that I was already strategizing the order in which to eat them.
Vadim watched the process with an expression usually reserved for high-stakes chess.
I broke the silence. “So. This is…some house.”
He nodded, as if I’d complimented the weather. “It keeps the rain out.”
“I’d guess it also keeps out most of the National Guard,” I said.
“That’s by design.”
I tore off another piece of bread, mostly to keep from saying something like, “Do you sleep in a coffin?” Instead: “How long have you lived here?”
“Eight years.” He poured himself coffee from a carafe. “Sugar?”
I shook my head, but he added sugar to my cup anyway. He slid it across the table, careful not to spill. I tried it. He was right. It was better with sugar.
He watched me eat, and I watched him watch me. It could have been awkward, but I’d done enough two-way mirror interviews to know when a man was running a diagnostic. Vadim’s eyes missed nothing. They watched every movement, every hesitation.
He went first: “Where did you grow up?”
I considered lying, just for fun. Instead, “Uptown. Or, like, the part of Uptown that exists in a different tax bracket than this.”
He nodded. “Parents?”
“Dead. Cancer and, uh, industrial accident.” I said it the way you snap a Lego piece in place. “Raised by an aunt. She’s still around, but not super into Christmas cards.”
“What do you do for fun?”