Chapter 2 #3
With a relenting sigh, I shrug off my jacket and shove it at him.
He takes it with one hand, unbothered. Then takes off his own jacket — dark grey, clearly expensive, clearly built for a man with considerably broader shoulders than I have — and he holds it open between us, a curtain of fabric blocking his sightline to my lower half, without comment, which is somehow more irritating than if he'd made a production of it.
Because it requires him to step closer.
Very close. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him and smell his cologne.
A musky, intoxicating smell that I shouldn’t even be noticing, given my current circumstances.
I am shrugging my pants off and pulling on the pair of coverall pants he hands me, which I have no idea where he pulled from, and frankly don’t care, in the fastest thirty seconds of my life.
"You're blushing," he comments.
"I am not."
"You're extremely red for someone who isn’t going to sleep with me."
"Stop talking." I hop slightly as I get my second leg in and pull the waistband up. "Just stop talking."
He lowers the jacket. Steps back. His expression settled back into its previous unreachable shield, but the very edges of it are slightly softer now.
He holds the grey jacket out, offering it to me.
I take it because I have no better option, when I shrug it on, it falls to my mid-thigh.
Still warm from being on his shoulders only moments ago, and it smells like that intoxicating musky smell that I’m already associating as uniquely him.
He turns to the back wall of the room and does the same thing he did with the door before — a precise, practiced movement — and a panel opens outward to a passage so narrow it makes the service corridors look generous. Cold air breathes out of it, damp and close.
"Walk," he says, nodding to indicate I step out before him.
I walk without further comment.
The passage runs along what must be the outer edge of the building, and it goes on long enough that I stop counting steps and start cataloging every turn, trying to build a map I can use later if I need to.
When it finally ends, we are outside, on the south side of the building, a completely different street from the one the club's entrance faces, the sound of police sirens carrying clearly from the other side of the block.
I breathe in the cold air and feel, briefly, like I might actually survive this evening. A car is parked at the curb. Black, clean, expensive. He moves toward it, the lights blipping to life with the press of his hand against the door handle as he opens the passenger door.
"Get in," he says. "I'll take you home."
"You don't know where I live."
He looks at me, a look that is all command, and no retreat.
"I'm not getting in your car," I argue.
"It's the quickest—"
"I appreciate what you did in there." I mean it, and I need him to know I mean it before I say the next part. "Genuinely. But I am not getting in your car and I am not telling you where I live and I am not—"
I pause dramatically, looking over his shoulder, at something invisible, watching his attention shift, very abruptly, his head turning on a swivel, eyes moving to a point above and behind his left shoulder.
It is the oldest misdirection in existence, I know it, but I’m relieved when he falls for it nonetheless.
By the time he’s turned back, I've already taken three steps sideways. I turn those three steps into a dead run.
Six blocks. I know this route, I've taken this bus a hundred times, I know every turn between this street and my building, and I run all of them without stopping, without looking back to see if he's following.
He's not following. Something in me already knows he's not following, and that is almost worse than if he were, because a man who doesn't chase you when you run is a man who already knows he doesn't have to.
I hit my building door with enough force to bounce off it slightly, even as it opens.
Skipping the elevator and taking the stairs at a steady pace.
My keys are in my hand, and I'm in the door with every lock secure behind me, leaning against the door in the dark before I finally collapse to catch my breath.
The building is asleep. Down the hall, Evie is in her room behind her locked door, safe, exactly where I left her. And I’m home, wearing a stranger's jacket, with blood staining my shirt, and my hands shaking uncontrollably.
I push off the door, heading to the bathroom, running the water cold, and holding my hands under it until they stop shaking. I stare at my face in the mirror, and I look like someone who has had a hell of a night, which is accurate.
Staring at my reflection, thinking about everything I just witnessed, and Evie asleep in the next room, and everything I have built since we came here, about the promise I made her, and everything that I am not going to lose.
Not to Pavel, and whatever threat might have come next.
And not, I tell myself firmly, to a Victor Rozovsky with his blue eyes and intoxicating scent.
I take the jacket off, but I don't throw it away; instead, I stuff it in the back of the towel cabinet. I tell myself I’ll deal with it later.