Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
NELL
Ineeded to run.
Not metaphorically. Not as a lifestyle choice, or a wellness practice, or any of the other things people said about running to make it sound like something a sane person would choose.
I needed to run because my body was currently operating at a frequency that was going to make me do something professionally inadvisable if I didn't put it somewhere, and the options I had eliminated were as follows:
Dance class: no. My body was so sensitized that the idea of a stranger's hand on my waist to correct my position made me want to remove that hand from its owner.
This had nothing to do with Magnus telling me not to let anyone touch me and everything to do with the fact that my nerve endings were currently tuned to a specific frequency and anything that wasn't that frequency was going to feel like interference.
Also, I would scream at the instructor. I knew myself.
The moment someone told me which beat to shake it to, I was going to say something that got me banned from the studio.
Weights: no sir. Too much time stationary. Too much time thinking.
Running: okay, fine. Running was stupid, and I hated it. But it was the only thing that was going to work right now.
I changed in the residence, told the wolf detail I was going to the park, and did not wait for their formation to assemble before I started moving.
Central Park in the early evening was full of after-work runners, dog walkers, and tourists who had miscalculated how long it would take to get from the Met to the south exit.
I put my earbuds in and found a playlist that matched the energy of a woman working off a denied orgasm — Beyonce's Partition, Megan Thee Stallion's Savage, Lizzo's Juice — and started running.
I hated running.
I hated the impact of it. The monotony of it.
The way it required me to simply keep going with no choreography and no skill and no variation except faster or slower.
Dance gave me something to do with my body besides move it forward.
Running gave me nothing except forward and the relentless arrival of the next moment.
Right now, that was exactly what I needed.
I did the loop once. My detail settled into their positions; two ahead, two behind, the invisible perimeter I had stopped noticing days ago.
The park was quiet for a weeknight. A few other runners.
A man with a stroller. A woman doing something with a yoga mat that looked more like a hostage negotiation than a practice.
I did the loop again.
My body was angry. That was the most accurate description of its current state.
Magnus had spent ten minutes this afternoon conducting a masterclass in the torture of being brought to the edge of something and denied it, repeatedly.
He'd made a point with his hands because he was not going to make it with his mouth.
Though his tongue had done a pretty good job.
And the point was — what? Cause I had another man in my office? Territorial bastard. I was going to have a lot more men in my office. In my bed, too. Just as soon as I kicked him out of it.
The problem — the maddening, keep-me-up-at-three-in-the-morning problem — was that his ploy had worked.
Not the possessive declaration at the door.
The thing that had worked was the ten minutes before that.
The complete, undivided attention of a man who was not thinking about anything else except how to get me off, how to keep me on edge, how to make me want more.
I had been the only thing in the room for Magnus Blackwood for ten minutes, and my body had not forgotten it and was not going to forget it and was currently making its feelings about the interruption extremely clear on mile two of a park loop.
I did the loop a third time.
By the third loop, the detail had relaxed. They were still there. They were just less there.
The park was emptying. The after-work rush thinned to the dedicated runners and the people walking dogs who needed more than a lobby turnaround. No one was paying attention to me. No tall Kenyan to deploy as a Magnus-summoning device. No threats. No drama.
Just me and my angry body and a playlist that was not helping. Janelle Monáe sang Make Me Feel in my ears. I veered off the path.
Not far — just off the main loop, into the section of park that had trees dense enough to interrupt sight lines.
I wasn't running from the detail. I wasn't running toward anything.
I just needed thirty seconds of not being visible to anyone, not being tracked, not being a perimeter point on someone's GPS.
I needed to be a person in a park who had made a terrible decision about a wolf in a suit and was working through the consequences alone. Unfortunately, I was not paying attention to the ground. The root caught my left foot mid-stride.
It was the thick-knuckled kind that had been lifting the path for probably forty years.
It sprang up and played footsie with me.
The world tilted with a sudden, total wrongness.
My body had committed to a step that wasn't going to land correctly.
I pitched forward, the momentum of a woman who had been running angrily carrying me further than a simple stumble would have. And then the ground dropped.
My body met the sharp slope of a drainage embankment, the kind of infrastructure the park hid under its manicured surface. It was steep enough and sudden enough that I had no time to do anything except tuck and go.
Go, I went.
Grass and dirt and the sky cycled past out of order.
Something caught my hip. My elbow hit a rock.
I stopped at the bottom of the slope against the concrete lip of a drainage channel, with my face in the dirt and my playlist still going in one earbud because the other had come out somewhere on the way down.
I lay there. The music continued, inappropriately upbeat. Ironically, Cardi B was singing Up.
My phone had not made the trip in my pocket. I could hear it — or rather, I heard the sound of the screen cracking and the device settling somewhere above and to the left.
I rolled onto my back and looked up at the slope.
It was not a large slope. It was maybe fifteen feet of steep embankment.
In the context of the things that had tried to kill or inconvenience me in the last month — wolves, corporate warfare, an elevator, Magnus Blackwood's tongue — it was genuinely not impressive.
It had, however, been enough.
I sat up. My elbow was bleeding, a shallow scrape that stung with the injustice of minor injuries.
My hip would bruise. My left ankle, when I assessed it, did not feel like itself.
Not broken, but twisted. Enough that when I put weight on it experimentally, standing up from the drainage channel with one hand against the concrete for balance, the ankle communicated its displeasure in clear and unambiguous terms.
I sat back down.
Above me, the park continued its evening.
The top of the embankment was out of sight of the main path.
I had gone further than I realized when I veered off.
Or the slope had carried me further than I thought.
Either way, I could not see the detail. The detail could not see me. My phone was somewhere above me.
I could shout. The detail would hear me. They would come. I sat with that option for a moment.
I had been rescued once in my adult life, and it was by a wolf who had carried me out of a park in his arms, put me in a cabin, blackmailed me into corporate espionage, and was now sexually tormenting me.
I was also not seriously hurt. I was a grown woman with a twisted ankle and a cracked phone. This was not a crisis. This was an inconvenience.
I was not a damsel. I had never been a damsel. Damsels waited in towers for someone to notice the light in the window. I had been screwing in my own lights and climbing my own walls since before I was old enough to vote.
I did not need a man to carry me out of the park. And I absolutely, categorically, did not need Magnus Blackwood in charge of my orgasms.
I was going to get up. I was going to climb that embankment on my own.
I was going to walk back to my residence, draw a bath, and take care of the situation myself.
Then I was going to make a cup of tea, open my laptop, and finish the Omondi proposal, because Darius Omondi had treated me like a professional and his tea operation deserved a proposal that reflected that.
I was going to do these things. In that order. Without assistance.
I planted my good foot, put my hand against the concrete lip, and stood up. Then I put weight on my left foot.
The ankle had not changed its opinion. A loud, non-negotiable opinion that communicated itself directly from my foot to my brain in a single white-hot transmission. My leg buckled. I went back down to the ground with considerably less dignity than I had risen from it.