26. Damir #2
“I am also relieved.”
She looks away quickly. I let her.
“For three days,” I continue, “I didn’t know if you were alive.”
Her hands tighten in her lap. “I was alive.”
“Yes. Now I can see that.”
Sofia ignores me. She turns her face toward the window as the car pulls away from the club, her shoulders stiff beneath my coat, her hands folded tightly in her lap as if she can hold herself together by force.
The streetlights move over her face in pale flashes, showing the red marks at her throat, the tired set of her mouth, the way she keeps swallowing as if something is still caught there.
I ask nothing. For almost a full minute, I manage it.
Then she shifts slightly, and the collar of my coat slips down her shoulder, exposing more of her throat. The marks are clearer now. Not enough to bruise badly, maybe, but enough to show the shape of another man’s arm, another man’s hand, another man’s attempt to control her breathing.
My hand closes around the edge of the seat. “Sofia.”
She doesn’t look at me. “I said I’m fine.”
“You also lied.”
Her jaw tightens, but she keeps her eyes on the window. “Then you should be used to it.”
Mikhail remains silent in the front seat. The driver stares at the road with the discipline of a man who values his employment and his life.
I lean closer. “Look at me.”
“No.” The answer is immediate, flat, and exhausted.
It should make me angry.
It does, but not in the way I expect. This anger has fear underneath it, and guilt under that, and something worse beneath both.
I have spent three days imagining every version of what could have happened to her, and now she’s sitting beside me alive, wearing my coat, refusing to look at me because if she does, one of us will have to admit the damage is not only on her throat.
“Sofia,” I say again, lower this time.
She turns then, not because I asked, but because she wants to make a point. “What?”
Her eyes are bright with temper and shock she has not fully processed. Her mouth is pale from being pressed into a hard line. She looks ready to fight, but the hand in her lap is trembling.
That breaks what is left of my restraint.
I move before I can talk myself out of it.
I catch her by the waist and pull her across the seat onto my lap.
She gasps, one hand flying to my shoulder, the other bracing against my chest as if she means to shove me away.
I give her the space to do it. I keep my hands at her waist, not trapping her wrists, not holding her throat, not closing any escape she needs to feel open.
For one second, she stares at me, furious and breathless. “Damir.”
It’s supposed to be a warning. It sounds too much like relief.
I kiss her. There is nothing calm about it.
I don’t make it gentle because neither of us is gentle in that moment.
I kiss her like I have been looking for her for three days with nothing but bad footage and worse possibilities in my head.
I kiss her like I’m angry she ran, angry she was taken, angry she was afraid, angry at myself most of all because some part of her believed leaving me was safer than staying.
She goes stiff for half a second. Then she kisses me back.
Her hand slides from my chest to the back of my neck, fingers gripping hard enough to hurt.
Her mouth opens under mine, hot and desperate, and the sound she makes is small but not weak.
It comes from somewhere she has been keeping locked since I walked into the club and found her with another man’s arm around her.
I pull her closer. She comes willingly.
Her knees shift on either side of my thighs, and my coat falls open around her.
She tastes like fear, anger, and the water she must have had at the club, and beneath all that she tastes like Sofia, familiar enough that the relief hits me harder than desire.
My hand spreads over her back, feeling the shape of her spine, the tension in her body, the proof that she is here.
Alive. In my arms.
Kissing me like she hates me and missed me and has no intention of admitting either.
She bites my lower lip. Not hard enough to draw blood. Hard enough to remind me who I am holding.
I groan against her mouth and deepen the kiss. Her fingers tighten in my hair, and she shifts on my lap, the movement making my body react instantly. I don’t chase that. Not now. Not when her throat is marked and her breathing still catches when my hand moves too high.
I keep my palm at her back. I keep the other at her waist.
At first, it’s anger. Need. Three days of fear breaking out in the only language we seem to understand without turning it into a war.
Then it slows. Her mouth moves over mine with less fight and more hunger, and I feel the moment she stops kissing me to prove something and starts kissing me because she wants to. Her body settles against mine. Her hand on my shoulder stops pushing. Her fingers curl into my coat instead.
When Sofia finally pulls away, it’s only by an inch. Her breathing is uneven again, but this time I know the cause. Her forehead almost touches mine. Her lips are swollen. Her eyes open slowly, and when they meet mine, the fight in them is still there, but it’s not alone anymore.
Something passes between us.
I don’t name it. Neither does she.
There are things that become weaker when spoken too early, and whatever this is has already survived too much violence to be handled carelessly.
Her hand remains at the back of my neck. Mine remains at her waist.
For once, she doesn’t move away first.
“You can’t do that every time I ignore you,” she says, but her voice is low and not steady enough to make the words convincing.
“No?”
“No.”
“I disagree.”
Her mouth tightens like she wants to be angry, but the shape fails halfway.
Almost a smile. Not quite.
Enough.
“You’re impossible,” she says.
“I have been told.”
“By many women, I’m sure.”
“Only one matters right now.”
Her eyes search mine. I don’t look away.
The car turns onto the road toward the house, and the city lights slide over her face again. The red marks on her throat are still there. The exhaustion is still there. The anger too. Nothing has been fixed by a kiss, and I’m not stupid enough to think otherwise.
But her hand is still on me. She’s still in my lap. And when I tighten my arm around her, carefully enough that she can leave if she wants to, she doesn’t.
She looks down first, as if that’s safer. “I still don’t trust you completely,” she says.
“I know, and that’s probably why you chose to hide instead of coming straight back,” I say.
She doesn’t look away. “I was angry.” There’s truth there. She isn’t lying anymore, or even trying to deflect. For a moment, I see her for who she really is.
I answer with the same. “Then I will have to give you fewer reasons.”
She looks back at me. There it is again, that unnamed thing between us, heavier now because neither of us can pretend we missed it.
Mikhail clears his throat from the front seat, very carefully. “We are ten minutes from the house.”
Sofia stiffens slightly, reality returning.
I don’t let my hold tighten. “Thank you,” I say.
Mikhail says nothing else.
Sofia shifts as if she’s finally remembering where we are, who is in the car, and how much dignity she left somewhere between the club and my lap. She starts to move away.
I let her. But before she returns to her seat, I catch her hand.
She looks at our fingers. She sees it, and for the first time since I found her, she doesn’t look away as if my face is another locked door.
Then she slides back into her seat, but she doesn’t pull her hand from mine.
I keep it until the house gates come into view.