37. Cass
CASS
They’re gone.
After the wedding planner shuffles off with the outraged senator and the security men have frog-marched Matvei through the exit, there’s no one left behind but me.
Well, except for the drunken creep who thought whispering “Don’t scream” in my ear was a good pickup line, but to say he doesn’t count is to really overstate his importance.
The walls are starting to close in, so I do my best to take a deep breath and stave off the impending panic attack. It’s not a cure-all, but it at least keeps me upright for the time being.
One thing’s for certain: The plan is over. It has been ripped to shreds and scattered around this gaudy ballroom like confetti. There will be no execution at this wedding. Tomorrow morning, I’ll still be married—and that much closer to a one-way trip to the Cayman Islands.
Okay. Okay, okay, okay.
Breathe. Breathe, girl, just ? —
Ah, shit. I’m panicking.
My chest constricts like someone’s cinched a belt around my ribs. The air I just dragged in won’t go anywhere useful. It pools behind my sternum, useless and sticky, utterly unbreathable.
I press one palm to the wood paneling and one to my stomach, like I can hold the two of us steady from the outside in. But my head is already several steps down a road I do not want to walk. It’s imagining all the horrible things that are waiting for me if we should fail.
I see the Caymans. A white room with shuttered windows and a ceiling fan that stirs air that’s too humid and hot to really go anywhere. I see a bathtub, and me slumped beside it, bleeding all over the tile, just like Giana. The light in my womb flickering, fluttering… gone.
I dig my fingernails into the wood paneling of the wall until the half-moons hurt. My little fruit basket baby can’t hear me, but I think it anyway: We are not dying, okay? Not here. Not today.
That is enough to ground me. I straighten up and press a knuckle to the corner of each eye to dab away whatever moisture is threatening to ruin the illusion that I’m still a woman who has her shit together.
Then I walk back into the ballroom like nothing happened.
Raymond is where I left him. He’s standing by a column wreathed in white roses, swirling his bourbon, watching the bandstand, unusually quiet. Brittany is nowhere to be seen, and the other partners have drifted into their own little eddies of small talk. It’s just Raymond, alone, sipping his drink.
I touch his elbow. He turns slowly. “There you are,” he says, and it’s just this side of tender. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost think he cared about me. “I was starting to worry.”
“I’m not feeling well, Raymond.” I let a little tremor sneak into my voice. It isn’t even hard. “I’m so sorry. I’d really like to go home.”
His eyes drift down over me, taking in the pallor, the way I’ve curled in on myself just slightly. He doesn’t look concerned so much as he does interested .
“Go,” he says.
I blink in surprise. “… Really?”
“Of course. Take the car. Tell the driver to drop you and come back for me.” He raises his glass to his lips, watching me over the rim. “I’ll be late, though. Don’t wait up.”
“How late?”
He smiles mysteriously. “Very.”
There is a brittle something inside me that wants to pry. But I know better than to do that. “Okay,” I say instead. “I’ll see you later, then.”
“Feel better, dear.” He bends and kisses the top of my head.
His mouth is warm and bourbon-damp and there’s a half-second where I’m certain his nose lingers an inch too long in my hair, like he’s smelling for something.
Then he pulls back, and it’s once again that same flat gleam in his eyes. “Go on. Get some rest. You’ll need it.”
He turns back to the bar and lifts his glass to flag down someone to refill his drink. Just like that, I’m dismissed.
The town car pulls away from the Plaza into the snow-slushed brightness of Fifth Avenue. I rest my forehead against the cold tinted window and cry without sound.
The driver, bless him, pretends not to notice. He’s one of Raymond’s usuals, which means he’s been trained to pretend he is incapable of witnessing human suffering. For once, I’m grateful for that.
I don’t cry for long. There isn’t time for that, and self-pity will not change a damn thing. Once the tears dry up, I scrub my face with a tissue from my clutch and fix my mascara in the little mirror. By the time we pull up to the building, I’m halfway decent again.
The doorman tips his hat and greets me as I slip in. One quick elevator ride later, I let myself into the penthouse and stand in the foyer with my back against the door for a count of ten.
Then I kick off my heels and walk barefoot across the cold marble of the foyer. I go to the gas fireplace and turn the dial, and a ring of flame whooshes to life behind the glass. I drop down onto the rug in front of it in my midnight-blue dress and let the heat work on my goosebumps.
I’m still sitting there, nearly an hour later, when I hear the soft click of the front door opening.
I’m not surprised. Not really. It’s not that I knew he was coming. It’s that, somewhere under the panic, I had hoped , and the hoping had calcified into certainty by the time he turned the knob.
Of course Matvei would come.
Footsteps in the foyer. Then he appears in the archway of the living room. Tuxedo. Bowtie undone. Hair a little mussed, but no less beautiful for it.
He stops just inside the room. “How did you get in here?” I ask.
Matvei shrugs. “Does it matter?”
“I guess not, no.” I look back at the fire. “You picked a good night for it, though. He’s not coming home tonight.”
“I know.”
I look up at him and frown. “You know?”
“I followed him out of the ballroom. He left thirty minutes after you did, with a bridesmaid on his arm. I sat in my car across the street and watched them walk into the St. Regis.”
“That would be Brittany,” I say. “Am I a bad feminist if I didn’t warn her away from him?”
Matvei’s face darkens. “You can’t save everyone, Cass. Especially not from themselves.”
That draws a snort from me. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black if I’ve ever heard it. Only one of us assaulted a sitting congressman tonight, and it wasn’t me.”
He broods. Then: “I thought he had you.”
I exhale slowly. “So you’re telling me,” I venture, picking at the hem of my dress, “that the lawyer of the year, the cool-headed assassin, the Blue-Eyed Bastard himself, lost his shit at a black-tie wedding because he was scared for me?”
He nods.
“Huh,” I say.
“Huh?” He lofts a brow.
“I don’t know what to do with that, Matvei. Nobody’s ever lost their shit over me. Not since Giana died.”
He comes toward me, finally, and sinks to a seat on the floor at my side. “Then I’d say it’s overdue.”
I look down at my hands. My ring is catching the firelight in fractured bursts, ugly and bright.
I think about how much I have hated this hideous chunk of platinum and ice over the last four years.
I’ve wanted, on many occasions, to swallow it, or drop it down the toilet, or take a hammer to it on the kitchen counter, just to relish the crack .
“So what now?” I ask. “Tell me what we do now.”
Matvei takes his time answering. First, he strips off his bowtie, the black silk hissing through his collar, and lays it across his knee. Then he undoes the top button of his shirt, like he needs a little more room to breathe before he tells me whatever he’s about to tell me.
“Now,” he says, “we don’t panic.”
“Ha. Little late for that.”
“It’s never too late to take a breath together.”
My whole life, I’ve felt like a victim of my own anxiety, my own swirling thoughts. But when Mat looks at me like he’s doing now, it’s as if the volume dial on all that nasty ruminating gets turned down.
Ahhh. I can breathe again.
And yet…
“You say that as if everything is okay.” I sweep an arm around my head to encompass the whole, y’know, everything. “What on earth is okay, Mat?”
He doesn’t seem fazed, though. “What happened tonight was bad. But it wasn’t the worst it could have been.”
My eyes nearly bug out of their sockets. “Matvei. You assaulted a senator. ”
“He’ll wake up tomorrow with a headache and a story he’d rather not tell his wife. The Plaza wants this buried more than he does. There won’t be any fallout.”
“What about Raymond?”
“That’s slightly more problematic,” he concedes, jaw working side to side. “Raymond saw something he didn’t see before.”
“Which is what?”
“Me,” Matvei replies. “Looking at you the way I look at you.”
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until little stars appear. Behind them, I see Raymond at the column with his bourbon, the cold shine of him.
What does he know? What will he do with that knowledge?
“How much of a problem is that going to be?” I whisper through the gap between my palms.
Matvei peels my hands away, his fingers gently encircling my wrists, and sets them down in my lap. “None,” he says forcefully. “Because one week from now, Raymond ceases to be a factor in either of our lives. Three times now, he’s gotten away. I swear to you, dikarka: There will not be a fourth.”
“You sound so confident.”
“I am.”
“But how?”
“If he were sure of the things he suspects, then you wouldn’t have ridden home in the back seat of his car—you’d have ridden home in his trunk. And if he’d tried that, then I’d have killed him on the spot, consequences be damned.”
“Even if it meant going to prison for the rest of your life?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
“Don’t be ridic?—”
“I would,” he interrupts, almost angrily, like he thinks I’m doubting him. “Don’t ask me to lie about it or pretend otherwise. I would. It’s a statement of fact, not a line to get in your bed.”