Chapter Twenty-four
Inna Grace
“Let’s go home,” I told Anton as I slid into the car. He pulled the car out of DK Holdings while I leaned back against the seat, processing the full result of my brilliant investigative mission.
Dmitri hasn’t been coming to work for three days.
That was it. After the receptionist informed me that the boss had been absent, I performed a convincing act of a woman who already knew this and needed to retrieve something from his office. I went to Dmitri’s office, sat in his chair, and stayed there for about five minutes before leaving.
Akim was nowhere either, though that proved little. The man moved at Dmitri’s hip with the fidelity of a well-dressed shadow. Wherever Dmitri was, Akim was probably standing behind him, looking like a decorative danger.
I shifted in the seat and watched the city through the window as the evening deepened around it. What would I do with the answer, exactly? Find out where Dmitri spent his nights, and then what? March in? I was better off at the mansion with Cole and Grandma, playing the role of a fake wife.
Speaking of Grandma, I promised her to be home before dinner.
I made the promise with every intention of keeping it because her good opinion was one of the few things I wanted to maintain.
Instead, I spent the afternoon chasing a man who wasn’t where I expected to find him. And now I would arrive late.
The car slowed to a stop, making me lean forward to see what made us stop. A river of red brake lights stretched down the road ahead, vehicles packed tight and moving nowhere.
I dropped back against the seat and pressed my forehead to the window. I would need a story for Grandma, something better than traffic. I reached into my bag for my phone to call her. It was better to inform her I would be late than to keep her waiting.
My fingers moved through my bag, pushing past the things in it. There was nothing. I checked the usual pocket, turned the bag over on the seat beside me, and stared at its contents spread across the leather. No phone.
I checked the seat and the floor, then turned back to the bag in case it had reappeared.
A memory of me seated in Dmitri’s office, with the phone face-up on his desk, arrived. I remembered turning the chair in slow circles and enjoying the skyline view for a self-indulgent minute before standing up and walking out. I left the phone on his office table.
“Oh, no.”
If Dmitri went to his office and found my phone on his desk, my harmless curiosity would look deliberate. It was, but that was private information, and private information was only useful when it stayed private.
“I think I left my phone,” I said to Anton, leaning forward.
His eyes found mine in the rearview mirror. “Where did you leave it?”
“Dmitri’s office.” I pressed my fingers to my forehead. “Can we go back?”
He studied the unmoving procession of vehicles ahead before agreeing. “Yes, but we need the next roundabout first.”
“How long?”
“In less than an hour, if the traffic improves?”
Less than an hour? Wonderful. I dropped back into the seat and closed my eyes. The universe was not content to let me decide without immediate consequences.
Less than an hour sounded better when Anton said it than it felt living through it. The traffic thinned by degrees, and by the time he pulled the car outside the building, the city had gone quiet around it. Most of the lights inside were off.
“I’ll be back,” I told Anton and stepped out.
The guard near the entrance straightened as I approached. Recognition moved across his face, and he stepped aside. I moved through the lobby and into the private elevator.
Dmitri’s office was exactly as I left it. My phone sat on the desk where I had abandoned it. I grabbed it and turned back toward the door.
The elevator panel showed it was sitting at the penthouse floor when I pressed the button. It only meant someone had used it after me. After a few seconds, the numbers descended, and the elevator stopped where I was. I stepped in, still processing that someone was in the penthouse.
I turned it over, telling myself it was none of my concern, that I needed to go home because Grandma was waiting. My hand moved to the panel to press the lobby button, but I paused when I noticed a red smear on the metal.
I leaned closer. The elevator was clean when I rode it up. I pressed the tip of my finger to it, and the chills moved through me when I noticed it was blood. Fresh blood.
Panic settled over me, and I straightened, letting possibilities arrange themselves, each one worse than the last. I could not walk away without knowing. My finger pressed the penthouse button before I finished deciding what to do.
I stood watching the numbers and told myself this was probably nothing. If it were Dmitri, I would come with a reasonable explanation for why I was here, but I had to know if he was hurt.
The doors opened onto a hallway that stretched ahead. I walked to the door and stopped, noticing blood across the brass as well.
I pressed the bell and stepped back. The seconds stretched longer, and I grew impatient and rang the bell again. I tapped my foot against the floor. Someone was inside and was choosing not to answer.
Lifting my hand to ring a third time, I heard the lock beep and the door click open.
Dmitri filled the doorway, one hand braced against the frame and the other holding a bottle of alcohol loosely at his side.
Blood striped his knuckles and ran across the back of his hand.
His shirt hung open at the shoulder, the fabric soaked through and clinging to a wound beneath, making my stomach drop.
A gasp left my lips, and I stepped back. “Wh…what happened?”
He looked at me with exhausted eyes. “So the smell of perfume in the elevator was truly yours,” he said casually.
I opened my mouth and closed it again. He was bleeding through his shirt, and his opening line was about my perfume?
“You’re bleeding,” I pointed out.
A faint smirk moved across his mouth. “I am aware.” His eyes narrowed. “What I’m not aware of is what my wife is doing here at this hour.”
I stepped past him without answering. The first aid kit was upstairs. I remembered that much from the night he used it on me. I moved toward the stairs with a purpose. He could ask his questions when he wasn’t bleeding through his clothes.
I pushed open the bathroom door and froze. The sink was a mess, blood streaked the porcelain, and a bloody, soaked towel lay on it. My hand rose to my mouth, the panic turning to fear. On the edge of the sink, I caught a bullet covered in blood as well.
My knees softened beneath me. I reached for the doorframe and held it.
“I—oh God,” I whispered, the words barely finding their way out.
Ambulance. I needed to call an ambulance or the police. My fingers hovered over the phone screen, trembling. One of those was the correct solution.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Dmitri said, and I turned to him. He stood behind me, watching me with a mild expression as if he found my distress interesting.
“I should call an ambulance,” I breathed. “Or the police. I should…” My voice fractured somewhere in the middle, and I looked at the phone again, fingers brushing the screen. “This is bad.”
He took the phone from my hand and threw it across the room. It clattered on the floor, and before I could understand what was happening here, Dmitri’s hand closed around my waist. He pulled me toward him with an energy that had no business existing in a man currently losing blood.
“Dmitri, you were shot, you are…” I looked at his shoulder and looked away again, hissing. “God, are you okay?”
“No.”
“Then I should call an ambulance.” I gestured at the phone on the floor and at the sink. “What do I do? Tell me what to do, or I will lose my mind.”
His mouth curved. “I owe you a kiss.”
I stared at him. “What?”
He pulled me in, and his lips met mine with a force that emptied my lungs.
I tried to step back on instinct, but his grip on my waist held the argument closed.
He tasted like whiskey and cigarettes. I couldn’t kiss back, couldn’t organize my mouth into anything intentional, not with the wound at his shoulder and the bullet on the sink still sitting at the edge of my vision.
He pulled back a fraction. “Kiss me,” he said lowly, a command wearing the clothes of a request. “Kiss me before I pass out.”
He found my mouth again, and this time the kiss moved slowly with a patience that made no sense, and it undid me completely.
His lips drew the breath from mine in measured increments, testing the edges of my resistance.
When I finally stopped fighting it and moved my lips against his, the dynamic shifted without warning.
He took the opening entirely, his tongue sliding inside my mouth and meeting mine.
The kind of kiss that dismantles a person from the inside out.
A sound left me.
My knees softened, and he held me tighter, which was the only reason I was still standing.
The fear had gone nowhere; it ran underneath everything.
But the kiss ran over it, through it, and somewhere in the middle of that, I lost the thread of where one ended, and the other began.
He kissed me with complete and total certainty, as though my mouth was somewhere he always intended to arrive.
When he finally pulled back, the air between us was charged.
He exhaled, holding me in place. “We’re doing that again.” He declared and proved it in the same motion.
His lips returned to mine, and he began walking me backward with a momentum that suggested the injury was either forgotten or irrelevant.
I kissed him back, my hands moving up his stomach, feeling the muscle tighten beneath my palms. My butt met the edge of the counter, and I gasped into his mouth, but he didn’t stop kissing me.
We kissed as if he had decided nothing else existed, thorough and consuming, working through me from the inside out until my hands moved purely on instinct.
I tried to hold on to him because the floor had stopped feeling reliable.
My fingers curled on his chest and found warmth, then wetness, and the texture registered half a second before my brain did.
Blood. I broke the kiss immediately.
My hands hung between us, slick with his blood, and the room rushed back in around me. I was leaning against the sink that had a towel with his blood.
I looked up at him, and he was looking at my mouth.
“Your wound,” I said, the words coming out shaky. I swallowed. “Dmitri.”
“Wife,” he answered, shifting his gaze to mine, and the look in his eyes stopped me. He looked as if he were balanced on a very thin line between consciousness and unconsciousness. Though with how he kissed me, I couldn’t be wrong if I said it was desire in his eyes.