9. Cass
CASS
My mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
Which, for me, is basically a medical emergency.
Matvei steps all the way into the curtained bay and pulls the fabric shut behind him. The little metal hooks scrape along the rod like nails on a chalkboard, raising goosebumps on the back of my neck.
The whole time, he doesn’t take his eyes off me. Not once.
“Say it,” he snarls again.
“Say what?”
“Say you’ve never seen me before. Look me in the face and say it.”
I open my mouth to say it again. I really do mean to. I had the balls to do it ten feet away while on a rolling gurney in front of two paramedics, so surely I can do it here, in private, with nothing but a crinkly blue curtain between us and the rest of the world.
But once again, the words won’t come. My tongue sits there in my mouth, useless. A wet, pink lump.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, nodding with savage satisfaction.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That smug thing. The ah-ha, I caught you thing.”
“I did, though.”
“You know what?” I decide. “You can leave whenever you want. The curtain’s right there. Don’t let the— the fabric smack you in the ass on the way out.”
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t move.
I pick at the edge of the hospital blanket. The fluorescents are doing me no favors; I can feel the swelling on my cheek throb in time with the buzzing bulb overhead. I can only imagine what I look like from his angle. Like a rotten slab of beef.
“How did you even find me in here?” I mutter.
“I followed the gurney.”
“Stalking is a crime, you know.”
“I don’t think you mind. In fact, I’d say you’re flattered by the attention.”
A long second passes. He’s looking at my face. Not at my eyes, but at my face , the bruise and the stitches, the mess that’s hiding under the medical tape. I don’t like how it feels to be under his microscope.
“Stop looking at me like that. I’m not, like, a wounded puppy, or whatever.”
Matvei shakes his head. “I don’t look at puppies like this.”
He takes a step closer. Just one. Then he pulls the little wheeled stool out from under the counter, sits down on it, and rolls himself right up to the side of my bed like he’s my goddamn gynecologist.
“Excuse me,” I object. “That’s presumptuous.”
He doesn’t seem to give a shit. Instead, he reaches out and touches the edge of the bandage on my cheek with one reverently gentle finger. “Who did this?” he whispers.
I pull my face away from his touch. “I tripped on the rug and fell.”
It comes out automatic. My neurons doing their little trained-monkey dance.
His eyes go somehow darker. I didn’t think that was possible. “Try again.”
“I tripped. On the rug. And fell.”
“Cassandra.”
“Matvei.”
“ Cassandra. ”
“That’s my name, yes, you can stop using it every ten seconds?—”
“Who.”
“Nobody.”
“Who.”
“Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The ghost of Christmas pa?—”
He reaches out and catches my wrist. Not hard. Not like Raymond. But it’s just forceful enough that I stop, mid-sentence, and feel every finger of his hand where it wraps around me. His thumb sits right where my pulse is.
He’s going to feel it skittering out of control. There’s no way he won’t.
“Don’t do the whole routine on me,” he whispers. “I watched you do it on the paramedics. I’m not as easily fooled.”
“Let go of my wrist.”
My breath catches in my throat when, instead of letting go, he brings my wrist to his lips and presses a gentle kiss to the soft underside there. Only then does he let go.
Damn. I was sort of hoping he wouldn’t.
I tuck my hand back under the blanket like I can hide it from him. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Probably not.”
“Someone will see you.”
“No. They won’t. I’m very good at not being seen when I don’t want to be.”
“Oh, well, how reassuring, Jason Bourne?—”
“Cassandra.”
“ What?! ”
“Who did this to you?”
And there it is again, that stupid, quiet-voiced persistence, like he’s going to ask it a hundred more times until I answer.
Which he will. I can see it on him. I’ve been married to a man who beats me to get his way, and Matvei isn’t even close to that, but he’s got something worse than repeated backhands.
He’s got patience .
I look at the ceiling so I don’t have to meet his eyes. “Does it matter?” I say finally.
“It does to me.”
“It’s kind of hypocritical, though,” I protest. “If I asked you who did something to you, you’d tell me to mind my business.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve learned that the world is unfair.”
I roll my eyes even as I laugh. It hurts my cheek, but I laugh anyway, because hurting at this point is just my default response. “Oh, I know. Unfair. And cruel. And dishonest.”
He raises a brow. “I’ll take two of those three things. But I’ve never been dishonest with you.”
At that, I glare at him. “Yeah, right. Maybe not dis honest, but definitely not honest honest.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re not exactly an open book, Matvei. I don’t even know your last name.”
“Satyrin.”
“What?”
“Matvei Satyrin. Now, you know.”
I blink at him. “That easy, huh?”
He nods. “That easy.”
I chew the inside of my cheek. Which also hurts. Everything hurts. I’m running out of parts of my face that aren’t on fire.
“Satyrin,” I repeat. It sounds nice in my mouth.
“Your turn.”
“You want my last name?”
“No, I want his name.”
He drags the stool another inch closer, until his knee bumps the side of the mattress. He’s close enough now that I can see the fine stubble under his jaw. He still smells like a forest river, even here in this land of disinfectant and plastic.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” he murmurs, those blue-black eyes fixed on me even though I refuse to look back at him.
“I want you to tell me who did this to you. You asked for honesty, so I’ll give it to you: Once you tell me, I’m going to hurt him.
I’m going to hurt them very badly. Because you were right that the world is cruel and unfair.
But I am the one who makes it that way, and I intend to make it crueler and more unfair to the ones who’ve made it that way for you. Let me do that, Cassandra.”
My eyes fill up. I try to keep them closed, to hold back the flood, but I can’t.
I just can’t anymore.
A tear slides down the side of my face and into my hair. “Oh, goddammit,” I whisper.
Matvei doesn’t move. He doesn’t say don’t cry or shh or any of the useless things people say. He simply sits there on his little rolling stool, hands on his knees, and waits.
Another tear follows the first. Then another. I’m not sobbing, not quite. It’s less dramatic than that. More of a slow, whimpering leak as I gradually lose control of my tear ducts.
“You don’t get to do this,” I whisper. “Show up and be… nice to me.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not nice.”
I turn my head on the pillow so I can look at him. He’s right there. Closer than I thought. Is he sneaking up on me when I’m not looking?
“I can’t tell you his name,” I warn.
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll do exactly what you said you’ll do. And then my whole life explodes.”
“Maybe that would be a good thing.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “But I don’t get to decide that tonight. I’m not exactly in a good decision-making space.”
He pauses, then eventually, sighs and nods. “Alright then. You don’t have to tell me. Not yet, at least.”
I wipe at my good cheek with the back of my hand. “You’re confusing the hell out of me, Matvei.”
“Understanding what’s going on is overrated, in my experience.”
I look down. His hands are still on his knees, though they’re twitching like he wants to put them elsewhere. His knuckles are scabbed over again, which means whatever he’s been doing in the last six weeks, it hasn’t been sitting still.
“Come here,” I beg.
He rolls the stool in until his thigh is against the mattress. I reach out and grab a handful of his shirt. He stands up off the stool and bends over me, one hand braced on the rail of the bed, the other on the pillow near my head. His face hangs above mine, breath feathering across my stitches.
“If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to kiss you,” he whispers.
My breath goes thin. I hadn’t realized that’s how I was looking at him. But now that he’s named it, I can’t un-name it. I can feel it humming in the back of my throat, in the little gap between us, in how my fingers are still knotted in the front of his shirt like I don’t plan on letting go.
“Would that be so bad?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You tell me.”
His free hand comes up, and I think for a second he’s going to cup my jaw, but he doesn’t. He hovers an inch away from my skin, like he knows better than to put pressure on any part of my face right now.
His mouth lowers toward mine.
And I turn my head.
Just an inch. Just enough.
“You’re right,” I breathe. “I can’t.”
He freezes.
“My face,” I say quickly. “The stitches. It’ll—it’ll pull. It’ll hurt. The nurse said don’t.”
That’s a lie. The nurse said nothing of the sort. Plus, despite all the violence that seems to follow people like Matvei and me, I can tell that this kiss, if we did let it happen, would be so soft as to be practically nonexistent. A hummingbird kiss. There and gone again.
But if I kiss him, that’s it. Game over. No take-backs. There’s no version of my life that survives putting my mouth on his in this curtained little bay, with Raymond’s ring still on my finger and his bruise still on my face.
If I kiss Matvei, I will belong to Matvei, and Matvei will belong to me, and everything else will have to burn up to make room for it.
I’m not ready for the fire.
Not yet.
Matvei starts to straighten up.
But I don’t let him. My hand tightens in his shirt, holding him where he is. He looks down at me, those blue eyes narrowed in confusion, and I don’t have the words for what I want. I don’t think there are any.
So I take his hand instead.
I peel it away from the cotton of my pillow where he was bracing himself and pull it down, down. He lets me, watching, waiting—until I find the hem of my hospital gown.