31. Cass
CASS
I told Susan I needed a minute to freshen up. She squinted at me briefly, like she wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. But in the end, she just smiled, patted my elbow, and told me to come rejoin everyone downstairs when I was ready.
“Of course!” I’d said brightly. “Be right down.”
Then I slipped inside, shut the door behind me—and collapsed onto my knees.
You’re so stupid, I think. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How much dumber can you get?
I went off-script. Matvei told me, very specifically, very plainly, that the plan was his. All I had to do was let him work. I had a job: Stay out of the damn way. And what did I do?
Uh… not that.
I lifted a shotgun in the woods. I almost shot the man my partner is supposed to shoot…
In a clearing crawling with witnesses…
With a baby in my body.
The worst part isn’t even Raymond. It’s the look on Matvei’s face down at the end of the lunch table.
The smallest fraction of a nod. I interpreted it as a promise of solidarity, like, Don’t worry, I’m with you.
But what if it was more along the lines of, This dumb bitch just torpedoed the whole damn thing ?
Downstairs, Raymond is getting into his car. I’m pretty sure he knows. Not totally sure. But pretty.
And if he knows, then in some Cayman hotel six weeks from now—or in some quieter, closer-to-home place even sooner—he’s going to make sure I’m never able to raise another shotgun again.
I don’t realize I’ve started crying again until a tear lands on my wrist and slides into the cuff of my sweater.
That’s when I hear something.
I look up—and see the knob of the adjoining door turn.
The hinges sigh. The door opens an inch, then enough for a shoulder, then enough for the rest of him.
Matvei.
He shuts the door behind him very quietly. He crosses the room in long, effortless strides, drops to his knees in front of me, and puts his hands on my shoulders.
“You’re here,” I say. “You’re— How? Why are you here?”
“For you,” he replies simply.
“But I don’t deserve— I mean, I almost killed him!” I blurt. “I had the gun and I— I almost did it. I— I’m sorry, I know I wasn’t supposed to, I know we had— I had a plan, you had a plan, and I?—”
“Hush now,” he says as he drags me onto his lap. “None of that matters.”
“How can it not matter?” I wail. “You should’ve let him take me! This whole fucking thing is so dumb, so unbelievably stupid, I don’t know how I ever thought I’d be capable of?—”
“Hush,” he says again. He puts a finger to my lips, then rearranges me in his embrace until my tear-stained cheek is resting on his shoulder.
Stroking my hair, he whispers, “He doesn’t get to touch you.
Do you understand me? Not now. Not ever again.
I don’t care what you tried to do or what he thinks he has the right to do—that doesn’t fucking matter.
I’ll put him in the dirt before he ever touches you again. ”
I hiccup, kind of a laugh, kind of a sob. “Normal people don’t say things like that, you know.”
“I think you understand by now that I’m not a normal person, dikarka. ”
He keeps stroking my hair. His palm is warm against the back of my skull, his fingers spread wide enough that I can feel each one, and I let myself lean into it.
Just for a second. Just until I remember how to breathe.
“You had him followed, right?” I mumble into his lapel. “Tell me you have someone on him, or a tracker, or— I don’t know, a guy in a van. Because if he’s gone, and we don’t know where he went, or why, then we’re— Mat, we’re so screwed, we’re?—”
“No.”
I lift my head in surprise. “Huh?”
“I didn’t follow him,” he says.
I blink. “You— What?”
“I heard you crying through the wall.” His thumb brushes the hinge of my jaw. “And I made a choice.”
The wind wails louder. Out on the parkway, Raymond is getting farther away by the second, taking whoever was on the other end of that phone with him.
And Matvei is here on the carpet with me instead.
“Mat,” I whisper, “that was the wrong choice.”
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.”
“It was, though. Mat, come on . That was our chance!”
“There will be other chances.” He kisses my forehead. “There will be other windows. There won’t be another you.”
That stuns me speechless.
Pulling back off his chest, I look up at him.
He’s got snowmelt at his hairline and his pupils are blown wide enough to swallow all but the thinnest ring of the blue.
There’s a tendon ticking in his jaw that hasn’t stopped since he walked in.
He has come down off Murder Mode Matvei by maybe two percent, and the other ninety-eight percent of him is still vibrating with unspent violence.
And yet he still chose me.
I don’t understand.
He chose me over that. How? Why?
So in the end, there’s only one thing you can do with a man like that. You show him what it means, for him to take all that bloodthirsty rage and lock it up so that he can give you something tender instead.
I lean forward and put my mouth on his.
His hands come up to my face, both of them, and I wonder briefly if he’s about to push me back— Not now, Cass; you thought I wanted you?!—and then he tilts my head a different way and kisses me like he’s trying to keep me from sliding off a cliff.
It’s the first proper kiss he’s given me. Not a forehead. Not a knuckle. Not the brush of his mouth against the corner of mine in The Ice Room. This is a real one, with his tongue against mine and his teeth catching the soft of my lower lip until I’m whining into him.
“Mat,” I manage, when he lets me breathe.
“Yes.”
“I need?—”
“I know what you need.” His mouth slides to the place under my ear, where my pulse is rabbiting. “I always know what you need.”
The arrogance of that. Truly. I should kick him off me on principle.
Instead…
“Show me, then.”
He stands with me in his arms and carries me to the bed. After settling me gently on the duvet, he stands at the foot of the four-poster and looks at me, just looks , with that calm, deep blue, and starts taking off his clothes.
The coat first, dropped over the chair.
The jacket.
The shirt, button by button, slow enough that I almost start drooling.
Underneath, his torso is a map I keep wanting to explore and never have time to.
The rose tattoo. The dagger. The Cyrillic along the forearm.
The wide, raised pucker on his side where the oyster-shucking blade went into him, and where, in another timeline, if things had gone just slightly different, he died in the backseat of my Audi.
When he’s shirtless and beltless, he kneels at the foot of the bed and takes off my boots one at a time, easing the zipper down the calf of my left and then my right with maddening care. He sets them aside, then comes back to peel off my socks.
He runs his thumb along the arch of my foot, watching my face when I gasp, then sets it gently down. He repeats the gesture with the other one.
Once my feet are bare, he climbs onto the bed, moving up over me on his hands and knees, slow as melted honey, until his face is hovering above mine. He kisses me again, softer this time, and his hands start their work.
The hem of my sweater first. He slips two fingers underneath it, just two, and drags them in a single unhurried line from the waistband of my pants up to the bottom of my ribs.
Goosebumps follow his fingers like he’s calling them forward.
He lets the fabric bunch in his fist, peels it up an inch, kisses the strip of skin he’s uncovered, peels another, kisses again.
By the time the sweater is off my arms and tossed somewhere over his shoulder, I’m breathless.
He sits back on his heels to look at me.
“It’s a miracle that something like you even exists in this world , ” he murmurs, more to himself than to me.
He undoes the button of my pants with one hand, unzips them, and hooks the waistband. He lifts my hips a careful inch off the bed and slides them down my thighs an inch at a time.
Past the knee. Past the calf. Off.
He turns away to lay them down with the other discarded items. When he comes back to me, he leaves the underwear for last. He runs the backs of his knuckles up my shin, my thigh, the soft inside of my hip.
He reaches behind my back and finds the bra clasp, pops it one-handed, and slides the straps down my arms with two fingers, kissing the dent each strap left on my shoulder.
Then, finally, the last thin scrap of cotton. He hooks his fingers in either side, glances up to check my eyes, and waits for me to nod.
I do.
The next part is the slowest journey yet. Slowly, slowly, so unbelievably, agonizingly, beautifully slowly, he takes away the last barrier between me and him. Then his hands settle on my thighs, fingertips digging in just enough to be noticed, and he says, “Spread for me, pretty girl.”
I do.
He bends his head between my legs and kisses, once, the crease where my thigh meets the rest of me. Then the other one. Then he says, against the skin of my hipbone, “I can’t believe I almost lost you today.”
I stutter out, “Wh-wha?—”
“Don’t ever do that again.” His mouth moves to the soft of my belly. The baby is in there. He kisses the spot, very gently, then again. “If he ever tries to take you from me again, swear you’ll come find me. Come hell or high water, you’ll find me. Yes?”
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Say it again.”
“I’ll find you.”
“Good girl.”
He says it without thinking, and this time, for the first time, I don’t flinch. I just close my eyes and let the sweetness of his kisses transport me to somewhere else entirely.
They roam up and down, left and right, taking sweeping passes closer and closer to my center. He’s not fast. I keep expecting him to be all impatience and forward motion, this beautiful, violent man whose default speed is kill the thing now.
But in bed, he is patient as a saint. It feels like hours before he finally goes to where I need him most, and even then, he nibbles and flicks his tongue around my outer lips for a long, long time.