Chapter 2
Dominik
There are three bodies on my living room floor. Blood in the grout between my Italian hardwood planks. A bullet hole in the Rothko above the fireplace. But the only thing I can think about is the smudge I left on her forehead.
Blood. Transferred from my lips to her skin in a moment of weakness I didn't plan and can't undo, and she sat there on the edge of the bed and looked at me with those dark eyes and didn't wipe it off.
She didn't wipe it off.
I stand in the shower in the guest bathroom, the one she's never been inside because I took her to my room, and I watch pink water spiral down the drain and I think about that. About the fact that I kissed her forehead with a dead man's blood splattered on my mouth and she let it stay.
The hot water hits the split on my knuckles and I flex my hand.
The second man, the one who got close enough to make it personal, I broke his jaw with my right hand before I put a round through his temple.
The third went down clean, two in the chest from across the kitchen island, but the first one, the one by the front door, he was the problem.
He had a suppressor and he almost got a shot off before Ilya's men intercepted the stairwell team.
Almost. The difference between almost and actually is about three inches and a reflex I've been training since I was fourteen years old.
Three inches from a bullet finding Wren through the bathroom wall.
I turn the water hotter and stand under it until my skin is red from heat instead of blood.
Ilya calls while I'm getting dressed.
"The apartment is clear. My team has the bodies. Cleanup crew is on-site."
"The Rothko."
"What?"
"There's a bullet hole in the Rothko. Above the fireplace. Have it repaired or replaced with something else. I don't want her seeing it."
A pause. "You're worried about the painting."
"I'm worried about every visual reminder in that apartment that three men came to kill me while she was in the next room. The painting. The blood on the floor. The dent in the kitchen island where Petrov's skull hit the sink. All of it. Gone by tonight."
"Dominik, we need to talk about who sent them."
"Kir."
"Obviously Kir. But the fact that he knows where you live, that he found the service entrance, that he had the codes for the lower levels. That means he has someone inside our--"
"I know what it means."
Silence.
"Handle the leak," I say. "Find out who sold the access codes and bring them to the warehouse on Atlantic. I'll deal with them after I deal with her."
"After you deal with her," Ilya repeats, and his voice carries the particular brand of exhaustion that I've been hearing from him a lot lately. The exhaustion of a man who has watched his best friend rearrange an entire criminal empire around a woman he's known for eight days.
"Ilya."
"What."
"She reached for my hand tonight. In the hallway. Before the attack. She reached for my hand and then pulled back."
Silence. Then: "And?"
"And I need you to understand that what happened tonight, the breach, the bodies, the three inches between a bullet and the bathroom wall, that cannot happen again.
I don't care what it costs. I don't care how many men you need to hire.
I don't care if you have to put a sniper on every rooftop between here and the East River.
I will burn this city to the foundation before I let anyone take her from me. "
"You're talking about one woman."
"I'm talking about the only woman that matters."
He hangs up and I button my shirt. I look at myself in the mirror, and the man looking back is clean and sharp and wearing a face that gives away nothing, and underneath that face is something feral and absolute that I stopped trying to control about six days ago.
I go back to my room. The room I gave her when I first brought her back from the auction.
She's sitting on the bed in my cashmere sweater with her hair tucked behind her ears and her hands wrapped around her knees. She's stopped shaking but she hasn't stopped being pale, and her eyes track me as I walk to the chair in the corner and sit down.
I don't stand over her. I don't loom. The chair puts us at eye level and I give her the geometry of equals, because what I'm about to say requires her to believe that she's being spoken to, not spoken at.
"Three men broke into the apartment," I say. "They were sent by a man named Kir Belov. He's a rival of mine. He was at the auction. He was the one bidding against me for you."
Her face changes. Goes paler.
"He didn't send them for you," I say. I don't know if it's true, but I say it anyway because the alternative is her believing that she's the reason three men died on my living room floor, and I won't let her carry that. "He sent them for me. You being here was incidental."
"Incidental," she repeats. Her voice is flat. Shock-flat.
"Kir has been a problem for a while. Before you. Before the auction. This was coming regardless. The timing is unfortunate."
"Unfortunate." She almost laughs. The sound a person makes when the gap between reality and language becomes too wide to bridge. "Three people just died in the other room and you're calling it unfortunate."
"Would you prefer I call it something else?"
"I'd prefer it hadn't happened at all."
"So would I. But it did, and now we adjust."
She looks at me, and I can see her trying to assemble the pieces of me into a coherent picture.
The man who cooks her dinner. The man who kneels between her legs every night.
The man who just killed three people and then kissed her forehead.
None of these pieces fit together in a way that makes sense to her, and I understand that, because they don't make sense to me either. I have never been all of these men simultaneously. I’ve never needed to be.
"Are you hurt?" she asks.
The question surprises me, even though it probably shouldn’t.
"No," I say. "I'm not hurt."
"Your hand."
I look down. The knuckles on my right hand are split and swollen, bruised purple around the breaks in the skin. I hadn't noticed. The adrenaline has been doing its job.
"It's nothing."
She unfolds herself from the bed and walks to the bathroom and comes back with a damp washcloth and she stands in front of me and takes my right hand, my killing hand, the hand that broke a man's jaw less than an hour ago, and she presses the cool cloth against the torn skin and holds it there.
I let her.
I let her tend to me because the act of refusing would require me to pull my hand away from hers, and I am physically incapable of doing that.
Her fingers are small and careful around my knuckles, and the cloth is cold.
She's standing close enough that I can smell the cashmere sweater, which smells like me, and underneath it the warm, clean scent that is purely her, and the combination of those two things, me and her, blended together in the same breath, does something to my brain chemistry that I am certain no pharmaceutical could replicate.
"Wren."
She looks up. We're close. Closer than we've been face to face, because every other time we've been this close my face has been between her thighs and eye contact was limited to whatever she could manage through the haze of what I was doing to her.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
She waits. The cloth is still pressed against my knuckles. Her thumb is making a small, unconscious circle on the inside of my wrist, over the vein, and I don't think she knows she's doing it.
"What happened tonight is going to happen again."
Her hand stills.
"Not the breach," I say. "I'll make sure the breach never happens again. But the violence. The blood. The world I operate in. It won't stop pressing against the walls of this apartment, and eventually, no matter how many men I put between you and it, something will get through."
"Then let me go."
The words come out of her quietly, almost like a reflex. Like she said them because she's supposed to, because it's the obvious response, but her hand hasn't moved from mine, her eyes haven't moved from mine and her body hasn't taken a single step toward the door.
"No."
"Dominik--"
"No." I turn my hand over under hers so that my palm is facing up, and I close my fingers around her wrist, gently enough to just hold. I can feel her pulse under my thumb. Still fast. Still that hummingbird rhythm that I've become addicted to like a drug I didn't know I needed.
"I'm not letting you go," I say. "Not because of a contract or a transaction or a debt your father sold you into.
Those are paper. Paper burns. I'm not letting you go because you are the only thing in my life that I have ever wanted badly enough to ruin everything else for, and if you leave, the man I'll become in your absence will be worse than anything you've seen so far. "
She swallows. I watch it travel down her throat.
"That's not a reason to stay. That's a threat."
"It's not a threat. It's a fact. I'm giving you the fact and letting you do with it what you want."
"What I want is a choice."
"You have a choice. You've always had a choice. The lock on your door. The fork beside your plate. Every night when I put my mouth on you and you can feel that I'm waiting for you to stop me, you have had a choice." I tighten my grip on her wrist by a fraction. "You haven't stopped me."
Her breath catches.
"You haven't stopped me," I say again, quieter. "And I haven't stopped wanting to give you a reason not to."
The room is very quiet. The city hums outside the windows, and somewhere in the apartment Ilya's cleanup crew is scrubbing blood out of hardwood and patching bullet holes.
"I want something from you," I say.
She watches me. Wary. Steady.
"I want you to marry me and carry my child."