22. Cass
CASS
Raymond shakes the bottle again. “I asked you a question, Cassandra.”
There’s a high, thin whine inside my skull, like the sound a microwave makes right before it dings. It’s panic. So much panic. An ocean of it, lapping at the inside of my ribs.
But I can’t show it. One wrong micro-expression and he’ll know everything that matters.
“Oh!” I clutch the towel tighter against my chest. “Those. God, you scared me.”
Raymond doesn’t blink. “These are prenatal vitamins, Cassandra.”
“Right. Yes. Okay, look—” I push wet hair off my forehead and force out a laugh that doesn’t quite land. “I know what it looks like, but they’re a beauty thing. I swear.”
He stays planted at the threshold of my closet with the orange bottle clenched in his fist.
“Hair and nails,” I babble. “Every girl at Pilates has them in her bag. There’s a whole thing about it online.
Hailey Bieber posted about it back in, I don’t know, October?
November? She does this whole get-ready-with-me where she’s like, here’s my collagen, here’s my biotin gummies, here’s my prenatal—and it blew up.
Sephora sold out. The folate makes your hair grow, you can ask anybody. ”
Be calm, Cass. Be the boring wife who buys things off TikTok Shop. “My friend Janie has been taking them for like a year. She told me about them at brunch. I thought, sure, why not, what’s the harm? They’re cheap, they’re at CVS, it’s not like?—”
“Get over here.”
I freeze.
“What?”
“I said, Get over here, Cassandra. Now.”
My feet don’t want to move, but they do. I cross the dressing area in the towel. Water is still dripping from my hair down the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades.
I stop maybe three feet from him.
He shakes his head. “Closer.”
I step closer.
He shakes the bottle. The capsules rattle inside. “Look me in the eye and tell me again what these are for.”
“Hair,” I whisper. “And nails.”
He takes a step into my space. I don’t take a step back, even though every cell in my body is screaming at me to. HIs right hand is still tight around the bottle. Not balled up and flying at my face. Not yet, at least.
“You are full of shit.” His pupils are huge. There’s a vein on his forehead I haven’t seen in days, because he’s been so weirdly nice lately. Now, it’s back, and angrier than ever. “How dare you fucking lie to me?”
He looks at me a beat longer, the bottle still in his fist. Then his work phone goes off in the pocket of his pajama pants. The ringtone is the old-fashioned brrr-brrr he insists on, like we’re all answering rotary phones in 1956.
Raymond holds up one finger. “Don’t move.”
He pulls the phone out without taking his eyes off me. He looks at the screen. Whatever’s on it makes the vein on his forehead pulse harder.
“What,” he barks into the receiver.
I don’t move.
I hear a man’s voice on the other end, garbled but urgent. Raymond’s eyes flick from me, to the floor, to the window, and back to me again. He pivots toward the bedroom and walks out into the hallway, the vitamin bottle still in his hand.
“When?” he demands. A pause. “ When? Who told you that? No. No, you do not do anything until I am there. Do you hear me? Nothing. I am leaving right now.”
His voice gets further down the hall as he moves toward his study. Doors open and close. Drawers. The metallic clang of the forbidden safe in the back of his closet.
I stand where he left me, water still trickling down my back, cold now.
But he doesn’t come back in. A moment later, I hear the front door slam. Just like that, he’s gone.
I count to twenty in my head. Then I count to twenty again. Then I make it to the bathroom and lock the door behind me before I collapse to the floor.
I sit on the frigid tile with my back against the tub and my knees pulled up to my chest. My teeth are rattling like I’m a windup toy that some sadistic little kid keeps cranking to the breaking point. I can’t make it stop.
He didn’t kill me, which is the only good news I have right now, and only because somebody called him about something bigger.
This has to be related to what Matvei told me about: Raymond’s secret alliances.
The phone rang, and he flipped into Mob Boss Raymond, not Beat My Wife Raymond.
Lucky for me, Mob Boss Raymond had to be somewhere else.
But Beat My Wife Raymond will be back. Probably tonight, as soon as he’s done with whoever’s on fire.
I dig the burner out from behind the hatbox. I can’t get my fingers to work right, so I type the message three times because I keep hitting the wrong letters. When it finally comes out clean, I look at it: I need you. Now.
I hit send before I can talk myself out of it.
The dot-dot-dot is instant. I almost cry.
M.S.
Where?
Not here.
Central Park. Greyshot Arch. 20 minutes.
I throw the burner back behind the hatbox and lurch to my feet.
I take a cab to the park because I don’t trust myself to drive.
I have the driver let me off at Columbus Circle and walk the rest, because Raymond pulls the credit card statements on the second of every month, and even cabs have to be accounted for.
Coffee dates with Dani I can sell. A car ride into Central Park on a Tuesday morning with no destination, I cannot.
Greyshot Arch is in the southwest corner of the park, a low stone passage cut into one of the carriage paths. I went under it once with Dani on a walk last fall. She said it always made her feel like she was in a Henry James novel, and I said that was very on-brand for her.
I see Mat before he sees me.
He’s standing at the mouth of the passage in a long black wool coat with the collar turned up, hands in his pockets, scanning the path.
The trees are bare. A film of snow covers the ground, and his breath puffs out white in the cold air.
He’s pale and very still, and somehow, he manages to look like he’s been carved out of the park itself.
He spots me and starts walking. So do I. We meet halfway, just inside the mouth of the passage where the air goes cold and damp and the sound of the city gets muffled by stone.
His hands come up to my face before I can speak. “Hey,” he murmurs. “Hey. Look at me.”
I look at him. His blue eyes make me shiver. Under his gaze, I feel like I’ve been pulled out of a freezing river.
“He found the vitamins,” I get out.
“What did he do?”
“He didn’t— Maybe he was going to, but before he did, there was a phone call. He left.”
Mat’s thumbs stroke under my eyes, soft and steady. He’s checking my face for marks. He’s done this before, in the alley behind Khaza, with these same hands. Once he’s satisfied, he tucks me into his coat and folds his arms around me and just holds me.
I shake. I can’t seem to stop.
“I’ve got you,” he says against my temple. “I’m here. I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I breathe. He smells like rain on pine trees. I press my forehead into his sternum and stand there inhaling him in until I am more or less a person again. “I’m sorry to bother you. I just didn’t know where else to go,” I mumble into his coat.
“You did the right thing.”
He walks me deeper into the stone passage. Above us, the old masonry is dark and damp, somewhere a ghost would haunt, and there’s a dead-end alcove just off the main passage where the carriage path bends. Out of the sightline of either entrance.
He puts his back to the stone and pulls me in against him.
“I keep thinking he can smell you on me,” I whisper.
Mat’s hands move into my hair. “You did good. You handled it. You’re here. He doesn’t know anything.”
“Mat…”
“What?”
“Can you make me forget for a minute?”
I don’t even have to explain what I need.
He understands me. He always has. His mouth finds mine, slow and warm, and the shaking in my hands starts to ease.
He kisses me like Raymond doesn’t exist. Like I was made for Matvei alone and he was made for me, and everything that brought us here was nothing more than prologue to the real story.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “Are you sure?”
“Please.”
He sinks down.
He goes onto one knee, then both, right there on the cold stone with his black coat pooling around him.
He looks up at me. I have never seen anything as terrifying or as beautiful as Matvei Satyrin on his knees in a freezing stone passage in Central Park, looking up at me like I am the only thing he’s going to put in his mouth for the rest of his life.
He works open my coat, then peels my tights down my thighs with shaking fingers.
His hands are warm against the cold of my skin.
He guides the fabric past my knees, then drapes the hem of my coat forward over his head so we are both inside it, my body and his face, in a tent of black wool that smells like him.
He doesn’t tease. Not today. He knows I don’t have it in me.
His mouth goes where I need it to and he gets to work, slow, patient, and devastating.
One of his arms wraps around the back of my thighs to hold me up against the wall.
The other braces my hip. I have one hand fisted in the wool of his collar and the other pressed flat against the cold stone above his head.
I bite the inside of my cheek to stay quiet.
I can hear voices on the path beyond the passage. The mundane traffic of a weekday morning passing six feet away from us. None of them look in. There’s no reason to. We’re just a murky shape in the dark inside an old stone underpass.
Soon, the shaking stops. Something else takes its place.
Mat hums against me when he feels me get close.
I make a sound that comes from somewhere in the bottom of my lungs, and the wool of his collar muffles it just in time.
I shake apart on his mouth in a long, near-silent rush, and he stays where he is until I’m done.
He resurfaces. The coat comes off his head. He rests his cheek against my belly for a long moment, his eyes closed, his arm still around the back of my thighs.
Then he works my tights back up for me and reassembles me. He kisses the place over my belly, just once, soft enough that I feel it in my throat.
“I’m gonna fix this,” he murmurs. “All of it. Do you hear me?
I nod against his chest.
“If he raises a hand to you again before this is done—if he so much as looks at you wrong—you call me. I don’t care what time. I don’t care where I am. I’ll come and find you and I’ll do what must be done.”