Chapter Three - Janice
The text comes three days after the site visit.
I’m sitting in my shoebox apartment, trying to make sense of zoning regulations that read like they were deliberately written to be incomprehensible, when my phone buzzes against the desk.
Unknown number.
Dinner tonight. I’ll send a car at seven.
There’s no signature or name, only the assumption that I’ll know who it is and that I’ll say yes.
Dimitri Rudenko is dangerous in ways I’m only just beginning to understand—powerful, connected, the kind of man who rearranges the world to suit himself and expects everyone else to fall in line.
I type back before I can stop myself.
Who is this?
The response is immediate.
You know who this is.
My heart kicks against my ribs. I stare at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard. Every rational part of my brain is screaming at me to refuse. To make an excuse. To remember that men like him don’t invite girls like me to dinner without expecting something in return.
Why?
Three dots appear, disappear, appear again.
Because I want to.
The honesty of it catches me off guard. No pretense. No elaborate justification. Just want, stated plainly, like that’s reason enough.
It should terrify me. It does terrify me.
I type okay and hit send before I can change my mind.
***
The car that arrives at seven is sleek and black, the kind with tinted windows and a driver who doesn’t make small talk.
I’ve changed three times, finally settling on a dress that doesn’t scream intern—deep green, fitted through the waist and hips, hem falling just above my knees.
It’s the nicest thing I own, and it still feels inadequate.
The driver opens the door without a word. I slide into leather seats that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe and try to calm my breathing.
We don’t go to a restaurant.
The car winds through Manhattan, then Brooklyn, finally stopping in an area I don’t recognize. Industrial. Abandoned-looking. The kind of neighborhood guidebooks tell tourists to avoid after dark.
The driver opens my door. “He’s waiting inside.”
“Inside where?”
He gestures toward a warehouse with blacked-out windows and no visible signage. Music thrums faintly from within, bass so deep I feel it in my chest.
I walk toward the entrance.
A man built like a wall checks my name against a list, nods once, and pulls open a heavy metal door. Sound crashes over me—engines roaring, crowd noise, the sharp smell of gasoline and burnt rubber.
Inside is chaos.
The warehouse has been converted into some kind of track—concrete floor marked with paint, barriers set up to create a winding course. Cars line the perimeter, low and aggressive, engines rumbling. People crowd the edges, money changing hands, voices raised over the noise.
I scan the crowd, heart pounding, and then I see him.
Dimitri leans against a sleek black car near the far wall, arms crossed, watching me. He’s dressed down tonight—dark jeans, leather jacket over a black shirt—but he still carries himself like he owns the room. Maybe he does.
I make my way over, dodging spectators and trying not to look as out of place as I feel.
“This is dinner?” I ask when I reach him.
His mouth quirks. “This is before dinner.”
“What is this place?”
“Entertainment.” He pushes off the car, turning to face me fully. “You said I move through the world too easily. I thought I’d show you the parts that aren’t easy.”
“Illegal street racing is your idea of difficulty?”
“Legal racing is boring. This has stakes.”
As if to prove his point, two cars peel out from the starting line, engines screaming, tires smoking. The crowd roars. I watch them disappear around the first turn, then look back at Dimitri.
“You race?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Because I can. It’s the only place where money doesn’t matter, only skill does.” He studies me, gaze sharp. “You disapprove.”
“I don’t know yet.” I glance around at the crowd. It’s a mix of people who look like they belong here and others who are clearly slumming. “It’s reckless.”
“So is agreeing to meet a man you barely know in a neighborhood you don’t recognize.”
My cheeks heat. “Fair point.”
“You came anyway.”
“You invited me. It didn’t sound like I had much of a choice.”
The admission hangs between us, charged with meaning I’m not ready to examine. The cars thunder past again, completing their first lap, and Dimitri’s hand settles lightly at the small of my back, guiding me closer to the action.
His touch burns through the fabric of my dress.
***
We stay for two hours.
Dimitri doesn’t race, but he watches each heat with the same intensity he’d brought to the business negotiation I’d witnessed weeks ago.
Reading angles, calculating risks, predicting outcomes.
When I ask questions—why that car is faster, how the betting works, who organizes this—he answers without condescension, treating my curiosity like it’s worth his time.
It’s intoxicating.
Between races, we argue. About gentrification and community displacement. About whether progress requires sacrifice or if that’s just what powerful people tell themselves to justify taking what they want. About the difference between risk and recklessness.
“You think I don’t care about the people I displace,” Dimitri says at one point, voice low enough that only I can hear over the engine noise.
“I think you care about profit more.”
“You think caring changes anything? The city doesn’t reward sentiment, Janice. It rewards results.”
“That’s bleak.”
“You said that before.” His gaze holds mine. “You keep coming back anyway.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
When we finally leave, the driver takes us to a restaurant in SoHo—small, intimate, the kind of place that doesn’t have prices on the menu. The host greets Dimitri by name, leads us to a corner table that offers privacy without isolation.
I should feel out of my depth. Should be hyperaware of every fork, every word, every gesture that marks me as someone who doesn’t belong in places like this.
Instead, I feel seen.
Dimitri asks about my research, my theories on urban development, what brought me to New York in the first place. He listens when I answer, actually listens, arguing points he disagrees with and conceding others.
He tells me about growing up between two cultures, never quite fitting in either place, learning early that power was the only language everyone understood.
“Is that why you do this?” I ask, gesturing vaguely. “The developments, the empire-building?”
“I do it because I’m good at it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
The food is incredible—courses I can’t pronounce, flavors I’ve never experienced—but I barely taste it. My entire focus narrows to the man across from me, the way candlelight catches in his gray eyes, the controlled precision of his movements.
Somewhere between the third course and dessert, I realize I’m in trouble.
It’s not the kind of trouble Marissa warned me about. Something deeper, more dangerous.
I’m starting to care about him.
***
We don’t go back to my apartment.
Dimitri’s penthouse overlooks the city from a height that makes my stomach drop when I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Everything is clean lines and expensive materials, curated emptiness that feels more like a showroom than a home.
“Drink?” he asks, already moving toward the bar.
“Sure.”
He pours something amber into two glasses, hands me one. Our fingers brush, and electricity shoots up my arm.
I take a sip to cover my reaction. The liquor burns smooth and warm, nothing like the cheap wine I usually drink.
“You’re nervous,” Dimitri observes.
“I’m terrified.”
“Of me?”
“Of this.” I gesture between us. “Whatever this is.”
“What do you think this is?”
“I don’t know. That’s the terrifying part.”
Dimitri sets his glass down, takes mine and does the same. Then he steps closer, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact. Close enough that I can see the faint scar along his jaw, smell the subtle scent of his cologne mixed with something uniquely him.
“I’m going to kiss you,” he says quietly.
His mouth meets mine, and everything else disappears.
The kiss starts controlled—careful, almost tentative, like he’s testing boundaries. Then my hands find his shoulders, his settle at my waist, pulling me closer, and control shatters.
Heat floods through me as his tongue sweeps against mine, as his fingers dig into the soft flesh of my hips hard enough to leave marks. I’ve been kissed before, but never like this. Never with this kind of focused intensity, like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
Dimitri walks me backward until my shoulders hit the window, cool glass against overheated skin. His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, finding the spot where my pulse hammers and lingering there.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs against my skin.
“No.”
His hands slide up my sides, thumbs brushing the underside of my breasts through the dress. I gasp, arching into the touch, and he makes a sound low in his throat that sends liquid heat pooling in my belly.
“Bedroom,” he says, voice rough.
I nod, incapable of words.
He takes my hand, leads me through the penthouse to a room dominated by a massive bed. The city glitters beyond the windows, a million lights bearing witness.
Dimitri turns to face me, and for a moment we just stare at each other. I can see the tension in his shoulders, the rigid control he’s maintaining, the want that mirrors my own.
“I’ve never—” I start, then stop. Swallow hard. “I haven’t done this before.”
His expression shifts. “Sex?”
“Any of it. Not… not seriously.”
I expect him to pull back. To change his mind, maybe realize I’m too young, too inexperienced, too much trouble.
Instead, he cups my face in his hands, tilting my head up. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”
“I want to. I want this. I just… I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Then I’ll teach you.”
The promise in those words makes my knees weak.
Dimitri kisses me again, slower this time, thorough and devastating. His hands find the zipper at my back, lowering it inch by careful inch. The dress pools at my feet, leaving me in nothing but my underwear and sudden, crushing self-consciousness.
I fight the urge to cover myself, to hide the soft curve of my stomach, the generous swell of my hips and thighs. Every insecurity I’ve ever had about my body surfaces at once.
“Look at me,” Dimitri commands softly.
I do.
“You’re beautiful.” He says it like fact, not flattery. “Every inch of you.”
His hands map my body with reverent precision, tracing the curve of my waist, the flare of my hips, the soft flesh of my thighs. Everywhere he touches sparks to life, nerve endings I didn’t know existed suddenly screaming for more.
He guides me to the bed, lays me back against expensive sheets, and I watch him strip with the same controlled efficiency he brings to everything. His body is lean and hard, marked with scars I want to catalog with my fingers and mouth.
When he settles over me, the weight of him feels right in ways I can’t explain.
We kiss until I’m dizzy with it, until my hips are rocking against his without conscious thought, seeking friction, seeking more. Dimitri’s hand slides between us, finding me through the fabric, and I moan into his mouth.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmurs against my lips.
“I don’t know. Everything. You.”
“Not yet.”
Frustration spikes through desire. “Why not?”
“You deserve better than rushed and reckless.” His thumb circles, slow and maddening, and my back arches off the bed. “I want to take my time with you.”
He strips away my remaining clothes with careful hands, then his own, and returns to map my body with his mouth. He learns what makes me gasp, what makes me writhe, what makes me beg in broken syllables.
When his mouth finds me, I nearly come apart immediately.
He takes me apart piece by piece, building pleasure so intense it borders on pain. I come twice under his mouth and hands, trembling and gasping.
Then he pauses, lifting himself off of me to rest on the mattress beside me.
I don’t understand. Don’t understand why he’s stopping when we’re both clearly desperate for more. Don’t understand the sudden distance in his eyes even as he holds me close.
“Dimitri?”
“Sleep for now. We have time.”
Even as he says it, I hear the lie underneath. We don’t have time. Whatever this is, it exists in borrowed moments, stolen hours that can’t survive daylight.
I curl into him anyway, feeling his heartbeat against my cheek, his hand stroking lazy patterns down my spine. Exhaustion pulls at me, the kind that comes from emotional overload more than physical exertion.
I’m already half asleep when I feel him press a kiss to my hair.
“This was a mistake,” he murmurs, so quietly I’m not sure I’m meant to hear it.