37. Cass #2
“Well,” I murmur in a shaky voice, halfway between scared out of my skin and femme fatale in a cheesy detective noir movie , “if you wanted into my bed, Mr. Satyrin, there are easier ways than offering to spend the rest of your life behind bars. A drink would’ve worked.
A coffee, even. Hell, you could’ve just said ‘please.’”
The corner of his mouth twitches—just barely, just enough to crack the seriousness wide open. “Noted,” he says.
“I mean, it’s a queen, not a king, so it’s nothing to write home about. And the sheets are some kind of silky satiny thing Raymond picked out, which, it goes without saying, ick . But…” I lift one shoulder. “There’s room.”
“Room for what, specifically?” he teases, stealing my life from the Ice Room.
“I’m just saying, if you’ve come all this way…” I tug at the hem of my dress. “… it seems a waste to make you sleep on the rug.”
He huffs a quiet laugh into the fire-lit dark. “ Dikarka, ” he says, “are you propositioning me?”
“Maybe. I’ve never done it before. How am I doing?”
“Terrible.”
I swat at his shoulder. “Rude. I’m trying my best here.”
He catches my wrist before it lands, brings it to his mouth, and presses his lips to the soft underside where the veins run blue.
“Lucky for you, I don’t need to be talked into anything.
” But then the smirk slides off his face.
“Listen to me, Cassandra. I’m not inclined to repeat myself, but I still think you’re doubting that I mean what I say.
So I’ll say it one more time: I’m not letting you go.
There’s no version of this where I leave you behind.
Not in the Caymans. Not in this apartment.
Not in a hotel bathtub, not in a courtroom, not in a hospital bed.
Wherever you go, I go. If your road runs through fire, then I’ll walk it with you, and if it runs through hell, I’ll carry you across it on my back.
You and the baby. Both of you. Until my last breath leaves my body. ”
I stare at him in slack-jawed disbelief. It’s so strange and surreal that this beautiful, terrifying man is sitting on my husband’s silk rug, in my husband’s penthouse, telling me he’d trade his life for mine without blinking.
“You can’t say things like that,” I murmur at last.
“Why not?”
“Because nobody says things like that to me. And I’m silly enough to believe you, because you look like you mean what you say. So, if you say things like that to me, I’m going to start believing them, and then where will we be?”
“Free, I hope.” He brushes a strand of hair off my cheek with one knuckle. “Eventually.”
Free. That word is a coin dropped into a wishing well. I close my eyes and try to picture it. Some far-off room with sun in it. A baby on a hip that isn’t bruised.
“Stay with me tonight,” I hear myself whisper. “Just until morning. He won’t be back.” I open my eyes. “Please. Just one night.”
I drag my thumb along his knuckles. There’s a faint scrape at the base of one—senatorial in origin, I’m guessing. It’s already scabbing.
We sit in front of the fire for a while, not saying much. I’m dying to know what he’s thinking, but Matvei’s face shows no signs, no hints. He’s beautiful and remote there in the fire, his blue irises dancing with reflected gold flames.
He doesn’t try to touch me, and he doesn’t try to fix the growing dread in my chest with another speech. He just sits beside me, his shoulder warm against mine, and lets me marinate in his presence until the dread peaks and then starts, slowly, to feel a few sizes smaller.
After a while, he speaks. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“That’s my line.”
“I’m borrowing it.”
I think for a moment, lips pursed. “Okay. When I was nine, I tried to dye my hair with Kool-Aid. Cherry. Giana caught me with the packet open over the bathroom sink and laughed so hard she almost puked. Then she went out and bought me real dye from Sally Beauty, and we did it together.”
“Your sister sounds wonderful.”
“She was the best.” I swallow. “Now, your turn.”
It takes him a second to gather his thoughts.
“When I was six, my father took me to a man’s apartment for what he said was a business meeting.
He told me to wait in the hall. I waited four hours, sitting on the floor outside the door.
When he came out, his knuckles were bloody.
We stopped on the way home and he bought me a stuffed rabbit. ”
My throat closes up. “Do you still have it?”
“No,” he says. “I burned it after he died.”
“Why?”
“Because it was a lie.” He looks at me, very calm. “I didn’t want any of those kinds of lies in my life anymore.”
I look around and think about how full my life has become of lies.
Lies multiply when you’re not looking—like rabbits, funnily enough.
One leads to another, leads to another. Giana lied to me about what she was doing for money, and Raymond lied to the police about how she died, and I lied to Raymond about who I was, and on and on.
Now, my life is just muddy with lies everywhere I look.
Yellow tulips on the counter—lies.
This ring on my finger—an ugly, ugly lie.
“Matvei,” I say slowly. “I don’t want any of those kinds of lies in my life anymore, either.”
My gaze falls to my left hand lying in my lap. Matvei follows it, sees what I’m looking at. Then he reaches over and plucks my hand up.
He brings it up between us, palm down.
The ring catches the firelight. It’s particularly grotesque tonight, as if all the nastiness of these four years have made it fester and grow like a tumor. A fat, monstrous ring chosen by a man who wanted to advertise his ownership of me to the world.
Matvei looks at it for a long moment. Then he looks at me.
“May I?” he asks.
I don’t know what he means, exactly. But I nod anyway, because at this point, I’d nod at anything he asked me.
He brings my hand to his mouth. He parts his lips and slides them down over the tip of my ring finger, and then further, until the cold metal of the band hits the warm, wet edge of his mouth. He sucks, very gently, and the ring slides up over my knuckle and onto his tongue.
I feel the platinum drag against the soft inside of his cheek. Then he pulls his mouth off my finger entirely, the ring still inside, his eyes never leaving mine.
He turns his head, parts his lips, and lets the ring drop into his cupped palm.
My finger is suddenly weightless. After four years of that weight, the lightness feels almost unsettling.
“Better,” he decides.
“Matvei, I don’t—” I have to stop to clear my throat. “I don’t know what to do with myself when you do things like that.”
“Then don’t do anything.” He closes his fist around the ring. “Just sit there and let me.”
Then, to my shock, he rears back his arm and flings the thing across the room like he’s skipping a stone on a pond.
It hits the floor with a tiny ping, bounces twice, and skitters under the couch.
“ Matvei! ” It’s half a yelp, half a hiccup. I’m up onto my knees before I even realize I’m moving. “What the hell — You can’t just—Matvei, he’s going to notice ?—”
“He’s not going to notice a damn thing tonight.”
“You don’t know him like I do!” I clamp my palms on my thighs to keep them from shaking. “He notices things. He found the vitamins , Mat! You don’t understand, he—he… You just—you just flung a four-carat diamond under the sofa and you think he…”
Matvei smiles darkly. “It’s just a ring.”
“Yeah, but it’s worth?—”
“Listen to me.” His thumb traces the shell of my ear.
“It is a piece of metal with a rock attached. That’s all.
The man who put it on your finger doesn’t own you.
Not a single cell of you, nor the cells you’re growing.
As far as I’m concerned, he’s not here in this room with you right now. Only I am.”
My eyes fill up. Dammit. I know a checkmate when I see one.
But after all these years of fighting, I hate the sensation of being cornered.
I want to argue. And even if I lose that fight, then I want to crawl under the couch and put the ring back on, because the smooth, naked, ringless skin of my finger feels so terrifyingly exposed, like Matvei peeled off a layer of armor and left me out here in the cold.
Instead, I make a wretched whimper and pitch forward into his chest.
He catches me. His arms come around my back and one of his hands cups the base of my skull, fingers threading into my hair, holding me there against the warm, dark fabric of his tuxedo shirt.
“Hush now,” he murmurs into the crown of my head. “I’ve got you.”
His mouth moves against my hair. The kiss is so light I’m not sure it’s a kiss until it happens again, and then a third time, at my temple. He smells like he always smells. Rain on pine trees. A river in a forest somewhere that I’ve never been but that I keep dreaming about anyway.
I tilt my face up. His eyes are right there. Blue, tired, and completely, ruinously focused on me.
Then, when my lips are there for the taking, he finally takes mercy and kisses me.
Slow.
So slow.
Not like in the hospital, when he was angry and starving, proving a point. Not like any other time, either.
This kiss is something else. This kiss is the kind of kiss a man gives a woman when he isn’t trying to take anything from her, when the only thing he wants is to give her something back that’s been stolen.
His lips brush mine. Pull away an inch. Come back. His hand at the nape of my neck guides me closer, and his other hand spreads wide and warm at the small of my back, right at the spot where Raymond’s hand has lived for four years.
Replacing it. Overwriting it.
I imagine the skin under his touch sloughing off and regrowing as something new, something that has only ever known this touch.
I open my mouth and he licks into it gently, like he has all night to learn the shape of it. Which, I realize, he does. He’s not running anywhere. He’s not on a clock. He’s not going to disappear out a service exit and leave me wondering if I imagined him.