Chapter 4
CINDY
The Cullinan stops outside my building, which looks worse than usual through a window worth more than the building.
Cracked stucco. The dead palm nobody waters.
The security door that hasn’t latched since March.
Sevastian sees all of it. That’s the name I have for him now, Sevastian Volkonsky, because a man doesn’t put a bullet in someone right in front of you and stay a stranger for long, not when half the Strip flinches when you say it.
I watch him take in the place I call home, this man in a suit that probably has its own tailor on retainer, and I wait for the curl of the lip. It never comes.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say, which is insane, because he didn’t give me a ride. He annexed me. “You can go now.”
He gets out of the car.
“That wasn’t an invitation,” I tell him over the roof.
“I’m walking you up.” He says it the way other people say the sky is blue.
Not a request. His driver stays behind the wheel, eyes front, a man who has clearly learned to see nothing on command.
Then it’s just the two of us crossing the cracked lot toward my door, my heart back to that hard knock against my ribs I keep mistaking for fear.
It is not entirely fear. That’s the problem I’ve had since the desert.
That’s the problem I have climbing two flights of stairs with him a step behind me, close enough that I can feel the size of him at my back, close enough that the hair on my neck stands up for reasons that have nothing to do with the dead man I watched him make three nights ago.
On the landing my upstairs neighbor’s TV leaks through the wall, a laugh track, canned and cheerful, the most normal sound in the world.
It feels like it’s coming from a different planet than the one I’m standing on.
I get my key in the lock on the second try.
My hands aren’t steady. I tell myself it’s the cold, the same lie I’ve been telling myself all night, the one I’ve stopped believing.
Inside, my apartment is exactly as embarrassing as I expected to feel about it.
One room that’s a bedroom pretending to be more.
A kitchenette the size of a closet. The good lamp, the bad couch, the wall of secondhand paperbacks I keep instead of furniture.
He fills the doorway, has to duck slightly to come through it, and once he’s inside, the place shrinks around him until there’s no air in it he isn’t standing in.
I round on him. I’ve had enough.
“Okay. No. You don’t get to just decide things.
” My voice climbs and I let it. Three nights of fear has to go somewhere, so it goes here, at the one man dumb enough to follow me indoors.
“You don’t get to kill somebody in front of me, then show up at my job, throw money around, tell the whole room I’m your property, then walk me up to my apartment like this is a date.
What is this? What do you actually want from me? ”
“You know what I want.”
“Say it.”
He looks at me for a long second. Then he tells me, low and even, exactly what he wants, in words filthy enough that the floor tilts under me.
“You can’t say that to me,” I manage.
“You asked.”
“There are words you’re not supposed to use on a first whatever-this-is.”
“Tell me which ones.” He takes a step. “I’ll use them slower.”
“I have a gun-to-my-head situation with you. You’re standing in my apartment talking about my body like it’s already yours.”
“Tell me to leave.” He takes a step toward me. I take one back, my shoulders hitting the door I just came through. “Look me in the face. Tell me you want me to walk out of here, I’ll go. You’ll never see me come up these stairs again.”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out. Because the true thing, the thing I hate with my whole entire body, is that I don’t want him to go.
I’ve spent three days terrified, furious, unable to stop seeing his face.
Now his face is here, six inches from mine, his hand coming up to rest flat on the door beside my head, every nerve I have screaming the wrong word.
“That’s what I thought,” he says.
He kisses me.
It is not gentle, thank God, because gentle would have given me time to think.
This gives me nothing. His mouth comes down on mine, hot and demanding, three nights of held breath breaking at once, his tongue pushing deep as his hand slides off the door into my hair, fisting there, tipping my head back so he can take more.
I make a sound I’d be ashamed of any other day, a low, needy moan that goes straight to my wet pussy. My hands, which I last saw shaking, fist in the front of his shirt and pull. That’s the whole argument lost right there. I’m dragging him in, my body already aching for his cock.
“There she is,” he says against my mouth, like he found something he was looking for.
His mouth tastes like water from somewhere cold. Under my fists the wool of his jacket is soft enough to make me angry. Cedar somewhere. Gun oil. Him.
I get his jacket off his shoulders. I don’t decide to.
My fingers just do it, shoving the expensive fabric down his arms until it drops.
His hands are already at the canvas jacket I stole back off Crystal, peeling it down, his mouth at my jaw now, my throat, teeth grazing the spot under my ear that makes my knees stop participating and my pussy clench.
He’s everywhere at once and it still isn’t enough.
I get my hands under his shirt, feel the heat of him, the hard plane of his stomach, the ridge of a scar I don’t ask about, and lower, the thick, hard outline of his erection straining against his pants.
He hisses something in Russian when my nails drag over his skin.
“Bed,” I tell him, because the door is digging into my spine. I have apparently made some decisions.
He lifts me. Just picks me up like I weigh nothing, my legs going around him out of pure instinct, my wet heat grinding against the hard bulge in his pants.
He carries me the four steps to the bed that takes up half my apartment, and we go down onto it in a tangle, him over me, the good weight of him pressing me into the mattress.
I get his belt open, my fingers brushing the hot length of his cock as I free it.
He gets my shirt off, his big hands cupping my tits, thumbs circling my nipples until they tighten and ache.
His mouth follows his hands down my body, sucking one nipple into his mouth, teeth grazing, and I arch up into it, shameless, gone, some version of me I’ve kept in a drawer for years suddenly loose in the room.
He talks the whole time, low, rough, obscene.
“I’m going to fuck this tight little pussy until you forget your own name.
I’ve been hard for you since I watched you on your knees in the sand, wanted to bend you over right there and bury my cock in you.
” The worst part is that I give it right back.
“Yes, fuck my pussy, I want your cock so bad, please.” Things I didn’t know were in my mouth.
“That mouth,” he says against my throat, dark, delighted. “That mouth is going to get you in trouble.”
“It already did. You’re in my apartment.” He goes still for half a second when I do, then groans like I hurt him in the best way.
“Christ,” he says. “You’re going to be a problem.”
“You’re just figuring that out.”
I’m down to almost nothing under him now, breathless, aching, his hand sliding up my thigh to cup my wet pussy, two fingers teasing my entrance. I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want the next sixty seconds.
Then he stops.
He goes still over me, a different stillness from before, sudden and total. I feel the change in him a beat before I understand it, the heat snapping off him like a thrown switch. He pulls back. He looks down at me, and something shutters behind his eyes, some door slamming I don’t have a key to.
“This is a mistake,” he says.
Then he’s gone. Off me, up, on his feet beside the bed, dragging a hand down his face, turning away, yanking his shirt straight over the body I just had my hands all over. The cold air rushes into all the places he was.
I lie there. Half-dressed. Wrecked. My heart slamming, my skin still lit up, my brain about four seconds behind, scrambling to catch up to the fact that the man who just had me coming apart is walking toward my door like the building is on fire.
The humiliation hits first. The fury comes right behind it, hot enough to dry the wet at the corners of my eyes before it can fall.
I will not cry. I will absolutely not cry in front of this man twice in one week.
I’ve spent years being the girl who keeps it together, the one who doesn’t fall apart, who watches everybody else’s drama from a safe dry distance with a drink in her hand.
Two encounters with this man and I’m a puddle on a mattress with my shirt across the room. I hate him. I hate him more than I’ve hated anyone, which is a problem, because hate and whatever just happened on this bed are running down the exact same wire in me.
“Wow,” I say to his back. My voice comes out steadier than I am. “Okay.”
He doesn’t answer. He’s at the door. His hand closes on the knob.
Then it stops there.
He doesn’t open it. He stands with his back to me, his hand on the knob, his whole big frame gone rigid, his head dropping forward.
I watch his shoulders rise and fall with a breath that looks like it costs him something.
A long second. Another. I don’t say anything.
I don’t breathe. I just watch the back of this man fight a war I can see the shape of but not the inside of, his knuckles white on the cheap brass, the muscles of his back tight under the shirt.
For one whole second I think he’s going to do it. Open the door, take the stairs, leave me here ruined in a tangle of my own sheets.
Then his hand comes off the knob.
Sevastian turns around.