51. Cass
CASS
It is, in retrospect, the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.
Given my track record over the last eight weeks, that is really saying something.
I am five-foot-three in heels and one hundred and twelve pounds with my coat on. DeMaris is a two hundred and fifty pound male. The math, as Giana would say, is not mathing.
But I lunge anyway, because the alternative is just standing there and letting him stick me, and I refuse to go quietly into the maroon polyester night.
I get one good swipe at his wrist. My nails catch skin, and I feel a thin rip open up under my middle finger. Then his free hand catches me by the throat and the back of my skull cracks against the cinderblock hard enough that little black floaters explode in the corners of my vision.
“There, there,” he croons. “There, there, sweetheart. None of that.”
He’s stronger than he looks under that suit. His thumb pushes up under my jaw and my feet skid on the linoleum as he walks me sideways, two steps, three, until the backs of my knees hit the edge of the mattress and gravity does the rest.
The coverlet, drawn tight as a drum, doesn’t even give as I land on it. DeMaris follows me down with one knee planted between my thighs, his weight pinning my hip to the bed.
“Easy, darling. Easy.”
“Get off me?—”
His hand leaves my throat just long enough to find the elastic waistband of the gray prison-issue sweatpants. He yanks, and the cheap fabric peels down my hips and my thighs and bunches around my knees . Cold, institutional air kisses the bare skin of my exposed legs.
“It won’t hurt,” he murmurs. He has the syringe in his right hand still, held up and away. “One little pinch. It’ll be just like going to sleep.”
I thrash and buck, but it doesn’t accomplish a damn thing. The bed doesn’t even creak, because it’s made of metal and screwed into the floor.
The needle lowers.
And then the door behind me explodes inward.
The bolt that Collins so smugly slid home a few minutes ago tears straight out of the frame in a snowfall of splintered wood and concrete. My ears are ringing with the sounds of my own screams.
Through the ringing, two shapes pour into the room.
The first one is tall. Black coat. Black hair. Pale, pissed-off face that I would recognize from the surface of the moon.
Matvei.
The second one is shorter, broader, older.
Salt-and-pepper hair, leather gloves, with a still-lit cigarette dangling from his lip.
There is a family resemblance in the set of the jaw and the slope of the brow that’s impossible to miss, even with my brain as preoccupied with things like imminent death by senatorially-administered poison.
DeMaris has just enough time to widen his eyes, and just enough time to open his mouth, and just enough time to start to say, “What the f?—”
And then Matvei is on him.
I’ve seen Matvei do violence twice in my life. Once in an alley behind Khaza, and once in a hotel hallway to this very same man, funny enough. Both times, it was efficient and surgical. Bored, almost.
This is not that.
This is something else entirely. This is a man who has been holding a very specific feeling on a very high shelf, in a very small box, for several weeks, and has just now decided to take the box down and rip it to fucking shreds while we all watch.
Matvei’s hand closes around DeMaris’s throat and lifts. The senator is a big man, but he’s basically a child in Matvei’s grasp. His Ferragamos scrabble for traction on the linoleum as Matvei slams him against the cinderblock wall.
The syringe goes flying. It clatters into a corner, intact and still full of whatever fast and oh-so merciful death DeMaris had picked out for me.
Afon strolls past the two of them, unhurried. He stops where the syringe has landed, crouches, and produces a phone from inside his coat to snap a quick picture.
“For the media,” he explains to me with a wink. “They always like to see the gory details.”
I’m too speechless to respond.
Besides, there’s a nasty assault about to take place right above me.
DeMaris’s face is going an interesting color. Matvei has him pinned at the throat with one hand. His other hand is curled into a fist down by his side.
“Senator,” Matvei snarls. “I think you’ve wandered a bit far out of your jurisdiction.”
DeMaris emits a terrified gargle in response.
“I was going to kill you if I found you doing something like this,” Mat continues.
“You didn’t disappoint in that regard. But I’m not going to kill you.
Do you want to know why?” He leans in close and snarls, “Because killing you is the kindest thing that could happen to you now. And I am not a kind man.”
I’m not breathing much more than the senator is. Matvei hasn’t looked at me yet, but I’m unable to look at anything that isn’t him. He’s more beautiful than ever. A dark angel of wrath. Those eyes are hot, hot, hot with rage.
“In just a few minutes” he says, “an investigative reporter at ProPublica is going to receive an email containing, among other lovely attachments, a complete copy of the ledger Bill Oglethorpe kept on you. I’ve seen it myself; it is quite damning.
Around the same time, that packet will also be arriving at inbox at a dozen or more different newspapers and media outlets around the country.
By tomorrow morning, my friend, you will be the most famous senator in America. ”
DeMaris’s eyes do a frantic little jitter.
“And then,” Matvei goes on, in that same soft, dreadful voice, “my uncle here is going to circulate some information to a smaller, much more private audience.”
The smile on his face is one of the most haunting things I’ve ever seen, and it makes me love him that much more. He’s what I wanted to be so badly for the last five years: a man capable of committing horrible sins for all the right reasons.
My shadow.
My savior.
“Your people are not going to be happy when they see just what a mess you’ve created. I imagine they’ll reach a very quick decision on what to do with you.”
Matvei is so close now that his nose almost touches DeMaris’s.
“ I’m not going to kill you,” he whispers.
“I’m going to let you live just long enough to watch them come for you.
Selfishly, I hope they make you wait for it.
Imagine, as you deal with all the court drama and the congressional investigations, that you’ll also have to check over your shoulder every time you walk down the hall.
You’ll cry every time you have to turn the key in your car’s ignition.
Hungry? Good luck eating a meal without wondering if it’s poisoned.
Every shadow becomes your worst nightmare.
Hell, at that rate, the fear might kill you before they do. ”
DeMaris has started crying. I notice it only when one of his fat, pathetic tears rolls into the seam of Matvei’s thumb against his throat.
“Look at me,” Matvei croons. “ Look at me. Are you listening?”
DeMaris nods as much as he can with a hand on his neck.
“You came here to hurt my family,” Mat says. “You will not get to do that twice.”
He holds DeMaris there for one more beat. Then he steps back and lets go.
The senator crumples to his knees, gagging, both hands at his throat, drool roping out of his mouth and onto his red tie. He retches once, dry. The half-Windsor is ruined. Even from across the room, I can smell the sour panic coming off him.
Afon ambles over, and then, almost nonchalantly, slaps DeMaris across the face so hard that he’s out cold before he even hits the ground.
“I get sick of the crying, you see,” he explains to me. He smiles. Then he turns his attention to Matvei. “Now, nephew, I’d say it’s time to go. I’ll wait in the hall.”
Then he steps out, pulling the broken door shut behind him as much as the busted frame will allow.
Which leaves Matvei.
And me.
Matvei is still at first. He stands there, breathing through his nose, looking at me like he is afraid that, if he moves too fast, I will dissolve. His hair has fallen over at the front and is hanging over one eye. I can’t tell if I’m imagining things or if his hand really is shaking.
Then he goes down on his knees in front of me.
Not the way he did in Greyshot Arch, with my coat over his head and the dog walkers passing six feet away. And not the way he did on my living room rug, undressing me an inch at a time.
He kneels like he would in a church pew.
He puts his hands on his thighs, palms up.
“ Dikarka, ” he rasps. “I am so sorry. I should never have left you in here. I told myself the cell was the only place he couldn’t reach you, so I left you behind while I went to find a way to get you out.
I’d rather you hate me from in here than love me out there, where there was a chance that the world could take you away from me again. ”
His face falls to my lap for a moment. Then he pries himself back up and stares hard at me. “I swear to you, on my father’s grave, on my mother’s, on every grave I’ve ever stood over, that I did not abandon you. Not even for a second.”
I’ve prepared so many speeches for this exact moment. I had a Furious speech. I had a Cold speech. I had a Charmingly Sarcastic speech with several really decent zingers in it. I had, for emergencies, a Quietly Devastated speech where I just glared at him until he wept.
Now that the moment is here, every single one of them has gone out of my head.
I reach down and put my hand in his hair. “Get up,” I tell him.
He shakes his head, eyes shut. “Not until you say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you’ll let me try again.”
In a different life—one where I am a better, harder, smarter woman—maybe I’d make him work for it. I’d be cold for a week. Make him grovel. Make him crawl.
But I am not that woman. And it turns out, in the end, that I don’t actually have it in me to make Matvei Satyrin pay for the crime of trying to save me the only way he knew how.
“Get up here,” I say, “and look at me.”
He raises his head. He does it slowly, like he’s still not entirely sure he has permission. When his eyes find mine, they are red around the rims, and there is a single tear track down one cheekbone.
He’s still beautiful. It’s almost offensive.
“I forgive you,” I say. “You beautiful, blue-eyed bastard. I forgive you.”
I put both hands on his face. His skin is so pale that you’d almost expect it to be cold, but in truth, it’s so warm under my palms. He’s the hottest part of the fire. Always has been, always will be.
“I love you,” I tell him. “I’m sorry it took me until now to say it without a but afterward.”
He closes his eyes. A second tear escapes and runs along the bridge of his nose. “I love you, too, Cassandra Madden.”
In the hallway, somewhere, I can hear Afon clear his throat meaningfully. Time to go.
Mat kisses my forehead, then the corner of my eye, then the place on my jaw where Raymond used to grab me. Like he’s erasing the past. Then he stands and pulls me up with him, and starts walking us out of the room.
We step over the unconscious DeMaris on the way, his blood-red tie hanging limply from around his throat.
Mat doesn’t look down.
Neither do I.
We don’t need to worry about him anymore.