Chapter 1 #2
I hear the elevator, the keypad, the heavy sound of the front door, and when I look up from the book he's standing in the foyer. Something is wrong.
I know it immediately. Not because of anything obvious.
He looks the same. Dark suit, sharp jaw, hands at his sides.
But there's a tension in his body that I haven't seen before, a tightness in the way he's holding his shoulders that reads less like control and more like containment.
Like something inside him is pressing against the walls and he's using every muscle he has to keep it in.
"Dominik?"
It's the first time I've said his name unprompted. Not in response to a question, not in the dark with his face between my legs, but in the daylight, in the living room, with concern in my voice that I didn't plan to put there.
He looks at me, and for one second the containment slips and I see what's behind it, and it's rage. The deep, tectonic rage of someone who operates at a level of violence I can't fathom, and something has happened today that pushed a button I didn't know he had.
"Come here," he says.
I go to him. I don't think about it. My body just stands up and crosses the room until it stops in front of him, and he looks down at me in his sweater with my bare legs and my hair messy from the couch, and something in his face shifts from rage to something else.
Something possessive and desperate and barely leashed.
"I need to make a call," he says. "Stay in the living room. Don't go near the windows."
"Why? What's--"
"Wren." My name in his mouth like a period at the end of a sentence. "Stay away from the windows."
He takes out his phone and walks to his study and closes the door. I hear his voice through it, low and in Russian. I don't understand a word but I understand the tone. That's a man giving orders that involve consequences for failure.
I sit on the couch. I pull my legs up and wrap my arms around my knees and stare at the windows he told me to stay away from. The city looks the same as it always does. Bright and distant and indifferent.
Twenty minutes pass.
He comes out of the office and he's taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves and my eyes widen involuntarily at the gun in his hand.
I've never seen a gun in person before.
That's probably strange, given where I grew up.
Given the kinds of people my father owed money to.
But the truth is I lived a small, careful life.
The type of life spent keeping my head down and my hands busy and my body out of the path of anything that might break it.
I've never seen a gun held by someone who clearly knows how to use it, and the casual way he carries it, the way it sits in his hand like an extension of his own bones, does something to my understanding of who this man is that no amount of penthouse luxury or hand-feeding or oral sex could have accomplished.
This man kills people.
I knew that. But seeing the gun in his hand, seeing the way he moves through the apartment checking windows and angles and sightlines with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this before, turns the abstract into something real and heavy and impossible to unfeel.
"Dominik, what's happening?"
He's at the window, standing to the side of it, peering through the edge of the curtain at the street below.
"Someone is coming," he says. "It's being handled. You're safe."
"Someone is coming here ?"
He looks at me, and the look is so steady and certain that it almost works. It almost convinces me that whatever is happening, he has it under control.
"No one is getting into this apartment," he says. "But I need you to do something for me."
"What?"
"Go to the bathroom. The guest bathroom, not the one in your room. Get in the tub. Stay below the rim. Don't come out until I come for you."
"Dominik--"
"Now, Wren."
I fight the urge to stay beside him, wondering where it even came from, and go.
The guest bathroom is in the interior of the apartment, no windows. The tub is a deep freestanding soaker in white porcelain, and I climb in fully clothed and pull my knees to my chest and sit there in his cashmere sweater in a dry bathtub and try to understand what is happening to my life.
Nothing happens for a while. Long enough that my heartbeat starts to slow, long enough that I begin to feel ridiculous sitting in a bathtub in the middle of the afternoon, long enough that I almost climb out.
Then the first gunshot cracks through the apartment and the world splits open.
It's not like television. It's not a clean, contained pop.
It's a physical force that I feel in my teeth and my sternum and the base of my skull, and it's followed by another, and another, and then a sound that isn't a gunshot at all, a heavy, wet, crunching impact that I will hear in my nightmares for the rest of my life.
Shouting. In Russian. Multiple voices. The sound of furniture breaking, something heavy hitting the floor, glass shattering. Another gunshot, closer this time, so close that the bathroom door vibrates in its frame.
I press my hands over my ears and push my face into my knees and I am making a sound, a thin, high, continuous sound that I don't recognize as my own voice. It's the sound a small animal makes when the trap has already sprung and the only option left is to wait.
It goes on forever.
Then silence.
Silence so complete it roars. The only sound is the ringing in my ears and my own ragged breathing.
Footsteps. Coming down the hallway.
The bathroom door opens.
Dominik is standing in the doorway, and he is covered in blood.
Not just splattered. Covered. His white shirt is soaked through, the fabric clinging to his chest and stomach in a way that makes it impossible to tell where the blood ends and the cotton begins.
His hands are red to the wrists. There's a spray pattern across his face, fine droplets that arc from his jaw to his hairline, and his eyes are burning through it, pale and bright and absolutely, terrifyingly alive.
He looks like a painting. He looks like a nightmare. He looks like the thing that mothers warn their daughters about, the thing that lurks in the dark spaces between streetlights, and he is looking at me with an expression that contains not one atom of remorse.
He steps toward the tub and I press back against the porcelain and a sound comes out of me that I don't authorize. A whimper. Small and pathetic and involuntary.
He stops.
His expression shifts. The burning intensity dims by a single degree, and he looks at me. A girl in an oversized sweater curled in a dry bathtub with her hands over her ears and tears streaming down her face and her whole body shaking so hard her teeth are clacking together.
He extends his left hand.
His right hand, the one that's redder, the one that did whatever it did out there, stays at his side.
"It's over," he says. "Give me your hand."
I stare at his left hand. It's still bloody, but less so. It’s smudged and thin, not the thick, wet coating like on his right. He's offering me the cleaner hand. The hand that wasn't directly involved.
I take it.
His fingers close around mine and he pulls me up out of the tub, gently, and when I stumble over the rim he catches me with his left arm around my waist and holds me against his chest, and his shirt is wet and warm against my cheek and I know the warmth is blood but I don't pull away.
I don't pull away.
Because the apartment behind him, the parts of it I can see through the bathroom door, looks like a war zone.
There's a body on the living room floor.
I can see one leg, the sole of a boot, a dark pool spreading slowly across the hardwood.
There's another shape further back near the kitchen, and I think there might be a third but his body is blocking my view and I think he's doing that on purpose.
His left hand comes up and covers my eyes.
Just his palm, warm and broad, settling over my face the way you'd cover a child's eyes during the scary part of a movie.
His fingers curve against my temples and his thumb rests against my cheekbone.
The world goes dark and I can hear his heartbeat, steady, so steady, not even elevated, the heartbeat of a man who just killed multiple people in his own living room and isn't even breathing hard.
"Don't look," he says against the top of my head. "You don't need to see this."
He guides me out of the bathroom with his hand over my eyes and his arm around my waist. I let this blood-soaked man lead me blind through the aftermath of violence because the alternative is seeing it, and I have already heard it, and hearing it is enough.
He takes me to my bedroom. I know because I count the steps, fourteen from the bathroom to the hallway, six down the hall, and then the specific sound of the bedroom door opening.
He walks me to the bed and sits me down and removes his hand from my eyes and I blink in the light and his face is right there, inches from mine, blood-streaked and calm.
"Stay here," he says. "I'm going to clean up. Then I'm going to come back and I'm going to explain. Okay?"
I nod. I can't speak. My throat is closed and my body is still vibrating at a frequency that doesn't feel sustainable.
He looks at me for one more second. Then he does something he hasn't done before.
He presses his lips to my forehead.
It's brief. A contact that lasts maybe two seconds.
His mouth is warm and his breath is warm and the blood on his face transfers to my skin in a faint smudge that I feel, and the intimacy of it is so jarring, so misplaced, so completely insane in the context of what just happened, that it short-circuits something in my brain and the tears stop.
He leaves.
I sit on the bed and stare at the wall and I think about the fact that three men just died in the other room.
Three men came to this apartment to kill Dominik, or me, or both, and Dominik killed them with a calm efficiency that suggests he's done this many times before, and then he walked to the bathroom and offered me his hand and covered my eyes and kissed my forehead.
I think about what would have happened if those men had come on a day when Dominik wasn't here.
I think about what would have happened if Dominik hadn't come home early. If he'd arrived at his normal time and found the apartment breached and me gone or me dead or me in the hands of whoever sent those men.
I think about the world outside this penthouse.
The world I came from, the world of my father's debts and Morozov's auction and men with viper tattoos who look at girls and say she'll do .
That world didn't stop existing because I'm on the top floor of a glass tower eating salmon and reading books and coming on a stranger's tongue every night.
That world is still out there, pressing against the windows, testing the locks, sending men with guns to take back what they think belongs to them.
And in this apartment, between me and that world, there is Dominik.
Blood-soaked, dead-eyed, forehead-kissing Dominik, who kills with his right hand and shields me with his left.
I pull the cashmere sweater up over my nose and breathe in, it smells like him, and I close my eyes, and for the first time since the van, I am not pretending when I think: I am safer here than anywhere else in the world.
That's the most terrifying thought I've had yet.
Because I think it might be true.