Chapter 5
DAISY
I wear the ivory blouse.
I tell myself it’s because it’s clean, because everything else is in the laundry basket, because the ivory blouse is professional and appropriate and has nothing to do with the fact that Anton Almazov’s eyes tracked it from collar to hem in the conference room on Wednesday and I caught the tracking and I catalogued the tracking and I’ve been thinking about the tracking at two in the morning with my pillow over my face.
I’m at the office early. The coffee cup is on my desk. I drink it without throwing it away and I hate myself for that too.
He arrives mid-morning. Grey suit. No tie.
Top button undone. He walks past my desk and his eyes find the blouse and his mouth does the half-lift and he doesn’t say a word, and the not-saying is louder than anything he could have said, and I grip my pen and stare at a spreadsheet I finished an hour ago.
At eleven, Kaye calls me in.
“There’s an event tonight at Ace Royale.
The Almazov casino.” She’s standing at her desk, sorting invitations into two piles with the efficiency of a woman who does this often.
“Mr. Almazov has requested you attend as his paralegal. It’s a networking opportunity.
Several of the firm’s clients will be there. ”
My stomach drops. “I don’t think—”
“The navy dress,” she tells me. “The one with the back. You’ll look beautiful.”
I don’t own a navy dress with a back. I own a navy dress that Kaye bought me recently that I’ve never worn because the back is open to the waist and I didn’t understand why my aunt would buy a paralegal a dress with no back until right now, standing in her office, understanding everything and nothing at the same time.
ACE ROYALE IS NOT A casino. Ace Royale is a cathedral built by men who replaced the cross with a diamond and the altar with a roulette wheel, and I’m standing in the entrance in my navy dress with my spine exposed to the air-conditioned air and I’m so far out of my depth that the depth has its own weather system.
Black marble. Everywhere, black marble, polished to a shine that reflects the chandeliers in long, liquid ribbons of light.
Frosted glass partitions etched with a crest I don’t recognise, a diamond wreathed in flames, repeated on every surface like a signature.
Rose petals in crystal bowls at every doorway, blood-red against the black stone, and the scent of them hits me as I walk through the entrance and it’s sweet and dark and carries an undertone of something I can’t name but that feels like a warning dressed as a welcome.
Crossed swords behind the ace of spades, cast in bronze above the main doors. I stand beneath them and I feel small and clean and Idaho in a room that is none of those things.
Anton is waiting.
He’s in black tonight. The first time I’ve seen him in black, and the difference between Anton in charcoal and Anton in black is the difference between a man who enters a room and a man who owns it.
The suit fits like it was sewn onto his body.
His hair is pushed back. His face is clean-shaven.
And when he sees me in the navy dress, in his casino, standing under his family’s crest with rose petals at my feet, his eyes do something I haven’t seen before.
They widen. One fraction. One beat. And then the performance slides back into place and he’s smiling and extending his hand and saying my name.
“Daisy. You came.”
“Kaye told me to.”
The half-lift. “Kaye tells you a lot of things.”
He places his hand on the small of my back and guides me into the room, and his palm is warm against my bare skin because the navy dress has no back and his hand is on my spine and every nerve ending in my body recalibrates to the point of contact and I forget how to walk for half a step.
He introduces me to people.
That’s the part I wasn’t prepared for. Not the casino, not the marble, not the chandeliers or the rose petals or the diamond crest. The people.
He walks me through the room with his hand on my back and he introduces me to men in suits who cost more than my education and women in dresses that cost more than my apartment, and every single one of them gives me the same expression: a smile, warm and knowing and faintly amused, that says they understand something I don’t.
A man with silver hair and a Swiss accent shakes my hand and holds it a beat too long and his eyes drop to the navy dress and back up and the knowing smile widens and he tells Anton something in French that makes Anton’s jaw tighten before the charm snaps back.
A woman in red touches my arm. “You’re the new one,” she tells me. “From the firm.” Her voice is kind. Her eyes are not. “He has good taste.”
I don’t understand. I smile and I shake hands and I stand beside Anton Almazov in his casino with his hand on my bare back and I’m introduced as his paralegal and everyone nods and no one believes it, and I can’t figure out why until a woman across the room catches my eye.
She’s standing alone, holding champagne, her dress cut lower than mine.
She gives me a look that is neither kind nor unkind.
It’s the look of a woman who used to stand where I’m standing.
My stomach turns.
I excuse myself. I find the bathroom. I grip the marble counter and run cold water over my wrists and I stare at my reflection and I’m a girl from Idaho in a backless dress in a Bratva casino and everyone in the room thinks I’m something I’m not and the man who brought me here is the reason they think it.
I go back out. What else is there to do?
HE DANCES WITH ME.
Not in the main room. There’s a smaller space beyond the casino floor, a lounge with dim lighting and a band playing something slow and European that I don’t recognise, and Anton takes my hand and leads me to the floor and I follow because refusing would draw more attention than accepting, and because his hand is warm and sure around mine and my body is a traitor.
His right hand settles on my waist. My left hand finds his shoulder.
We are close. Closer than the conference room, closer than the file room, closer than any distance we’ve maintained since the day he walked into Keyes and the air left my lungs.
His chin is above my head. His cologne is cedar and smoke and the darker thing underneath that I’ve never been able to identify and that I suspect is just him, just the scent of Anton Almazov’s skin, and I am breathing it in and I can’t stop.
We don’t speak for a while. The band plays. His thumb traces a circle on my waist, absent, and the circle sends heat through the fabric and into my hip and down my leg and I close my eyes because if I keep them open I’ll have to see his face this close and I’m not strong enough for that.
“You’re tense,” he murmurs. His mouth is near my ear. I can feel the shape of the words against my temple.
“I don’t dance.”
“You’re dancing now.”
“I’m standing in proximity to a man who’s moving.”
His chest vibrates against mine. A laugh, barely there, swallowed before it forms. “Is that what this is?”
“That’s what I’m telling myself.”
His hand tightens on my waist. Not a grip. A gathering. He pulls me a centimetre closer and the centimetre is the entire distance between professional and something else, and I let him, and I hate that I let him, and my hand on his shoulder curls into the fabric of his jacket and holds on.
“Daisy.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
Like it belongs to you. But I don’t say that. I can’t say that, because saying it would make it true and it isn’t true, it can’t be true, because this man propositioned me at a restaurant and every person in this room thinks I accepted.
The song ends. Another begins. We don’t stop.
THE BALCONY IS HIS idea.
“You need air,” he tells me, and I do, I need air so badly that my lungs are making decisions my brain hasn’t approved, and he takes my hand and leads me through a door I didn’t notice and we’re outside.
Monaco at night from the balcony of Ace Royale is obscene.
The harbour is a bowl of light, yachts strung with gold, the water black and still and reflecting everything twice so the city appears to go on forever, above and below, real and mirrored.
The air is warm and salted and carries the faint bass thrum of the casino behind us, and we are alone, and his hand is still holding mine, and I haven’t pulled away.
He leans against the railing. The black suit against the black sky. His face is half in shadow and half in the amber glow from the casino’s upper windows, and he is beautiful and I’m tired of pretending he isn’t.
“Why did you bring me here?” I ask.
“You know why.”
“As your paralegal.”
He turns his head. His eyes find mine. “Is that what you think you are?”
“It’s what I am.”
“It’s what you tell yourself. There’s a difference.”
I should leave. I should drop his hand and walk back through the casino and call a taxi and go home and hang the navy dress next to the green one and add them both to the growing collection of clothes my aunt bought me for purposes I’m only beginning to understand. I should do all of these things.
I don’t.
I step closer. I don’t decide to. My body decides.
My feet move and my hand tightens in his and I’m standing in front of him with the harbour below and the music behind and his face above mine and the distance between us is the width of a held breath and I can feel his heartbeat through our joined hands, that same fast beat from the file room, the one that wasn’t performance.
He lifts his free hand. His fingers find my jaw.
The touch is featherlight and it goes through me like voltage, temple to collarbone, and I don’t flinch, I don’t pull back, I tilt my chin up and his eyes are on my mouth and his thumb traces my cheekbone and I’m falling.
I’ve been falling since the conference room and the five thousand miles and the coffee that was black with one sugar, and I don’t want to stop.
He kisses me.
His mouth on mine. Warm. Certain. A man who has kissed before but not like this, not standing on a balcony with the city burning below and his hand trembling against my skin, and I feel the tremble and it undoes me because trembling is not what powerful men do.
Trembling is what boys do at school dances when they’re terrified the girl will say no, and Anton Almazov is trembling against my mouth and I kiss him back.
I kiss him back before I remember I shouldn’t.
His hand moves to the back of my neck and he pulls me closer and I let him and my free hand finds his chest, that same place from the file room, and his heart is hammering and mine is hammering and the harbour light is gold on the inside of my eyelids and his mouth tastes like champagne and need and something underneath both that is urgent and careful at the same time, and I’m kissing a man who offered me an arrangement at a restaurant and I don’t care.
For a breath I don’t care.
Then I remember.
I pull back. His hand stays on my neck for one beat, his fingers in my hair, and the loss of his mouth is physical. A cold spot where warmth was. I step back and the railing hits my hip and his hand falls and we are apart and breathing hard and his expression isn’t triumphant.
That’s what I expected. Triumph. The smile of a man who has proved a point, who has won a negotiation, who has kissed the girl and confirmed his thesis.
But his face holds none of that. What I see instead is raw and unguarded and gone in a moment, tucked behind the grey eyes so fast I almost miss it, but I don’t miss it, and what I see is fear.
He’s afraid.
Of what, I can’t tell. Of me, of himself, of the thing that just happened between us on this balcony with the harbour below and the music behind and the taste of each other still on our mouths.
He’s afraid and he’s hiding it and the hiding is so practised it’s nearly invisible, and I only catch it because I have been studying his face for weeks and I know every version of every expression and this one is new.
“I have to go,” I tell him.
He nods. Once. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t charm. He stands on the balcony of his casino with his hand on the railing and his eyes on me and he lets me leave, and the letting is the most confusing thing he’s done yet because a man running a game would follow.
I walk back through the casino. I collect my coat from the front. I pass the rose petals and the crossed swords and the black marble that reflects me like dark water, a girl in a navy dress walking alone through a world that was never hers, and I don’t cry until I’m in the taxi.
MONDAY MORNING.
I arrive before nine. The coffee cup is on my desk. I pick it up. I hold it. I drink it because it’s perfect and he brings it himself and I kissed him on a balcony and I can still feel the tremble in his hand against my face.
Blythe is at her desk when I sit down. She doesn’t greet me. She doesn’t ask about my weekend. She pulls her chair close to mine and her voice drops to a register I’ve never heard from her.
“We need to talk.”
I set the coffee down.
“Not here,” she tells me. Her eyes are dark and urgent and afraid. “Outside. Now.”