32. Sloane
SLOANE
For several seconds, I can’t make my body understand that Vadim is actually standing in front of me.
He looks almost exactly the same and completely different at once, which shouldn’t be possible, but nothing about seeing him after all these months feels possible.
His hair is still silver, his shoulders still too broad for the dark coat he’s wearing, his face still severe enough that strangers instinctively give him room, but there’s something harder in him now, something that wasn’t there when I left the estate.
Or maybe it was always there and I simply stopped noticing.
“Hello, Sloane.”
My name in his voice does something terrible to me.
Relief comes first. It’s so immediate and so powerful that I hate myself for it, because for months I’ve been telling myself that if I ever saw him again I would run, scream, call the police, do anything except stand there looking at him like some part of me has finally unclenched.
Then fear catches up.
Then anger.
Then everything else.
I remember the exact moment I saw the light go out from Camille’s eyes. Viktor telling me he would help me get home. Ethan lying in a hospital bed getting weaker by the day.
The baby.
The fact that Vadim is standing close enough that I could reach out and touch him.
My stomach rolls. I turn away so quickly my shoulder hits the wall. “Oh God.”
Vadim moves at once. “Sloane?”
I barely make it to the edge of the alley before I bend over and throw up.
There’s almost nothing in my stomach except tea and the miserable half slice of toast I forced down earlier, but my body doesn’t care.
The nausea tears through me anyway, leaving my throat burning and my eyes watering while I brace one hand against the wall and pray the pavement will open and swallow me before I have to turn around.
Perfect.
Months apart, one dramatic reunion, and I vomit at his feet.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and stay bent forward for another few seconds while the worst of it passes.
Vadim doesn’t say anything.
I straighten slowly and look over my shoulder. He’s watching me, but not with disgust.
Not even close.
Concern has replaced whatever coldness was in his face before, his brows drawn together while his gaze moves over me with the same unnerving attention he used to give every bruise, every headache, every moment I tried to tell him I was fine when I wasn’t.
“Don’t,” I say.
His expression tightens. “Don’t what?”
“Look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re worried.”
“I am worried.”
A laugh escapes me, brittle and exhausted. “That is unbelievably convenient.”
Anton is still a few yards away with one of the men on the ground, but he has turned slightly aside, giving us the illusion of privacy without actually leaving.
I look back at Vadim. “You can’t be here.”
His face becomes unreadable again. “Yet here I stand.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.”
My hands are shaking. I shove them into the pockets of my coat. “You have to let me go.”
For the first time since he appeared, something changes in his expression that I can’t immediately read.
I continue before I lose the nerve. “My brother is getting worse. I spend almost every day at the hospital. I barely sleep, I barely eat, I don’t know what the doctors are going to tell me from one week to the next, and I can’t do this with you on top of everything else.”
He says nothing. That silence encourages me.
“My life is falling apart, Vadim.”
His jaw shifts. “I know.”
“Then leave me alone.” The words hurt more than I expect.
I force myself to keep going. “I don’t have anything left to give you.
I don’t have answers about your sister, I don’t have whatever you think I have about Petrov, and I can’t go back to being locked inside another house while Ethan is dying in a hospital. ”
The last word nearly breaks my voice. I swallow hard.
Vadim looks at me for a long moment.
Then he steps aside. Just like that.
For one blissful second, I think he’s actually going to let me go. Anton doesn’t move to stop me.
I stare at Vadim, waiting for the trick.
There is none that I can see.
So I walk. One step.
Then another.
My heart beats so hard that I feel it in my throat, and some stupid, wounded part of me is already wondering why he’s not stopping me even though that’s exactly what I asked for.
I make it three steps past him.
Then his hand closes around my arm. He turns me before I can react and backs me into the wall.
The breath leaves my lungs. “Vadim.”
He plants one hand beside my head, boxing me in without touching anything else, his body close enough that the heat of him reaches me through both our coats.
“I tried,” he says quietly.
My pulse jumps. “Tried what?”
“To let you walk away,” he says.
I should be scared at what those words means, the depth of his obsession. But instead, every nerve in my body wakes at once. He’s too close.
Months disappear in the space between one breath and the next. His scent. The low rasp of his voice. The way his eyes drop briefly to my mouth before returning to mine.
I remember exactly what his hands feel like on me. Exactly what his mouth does when he stops pretending to be patient. I hate that my body remembers faster than my anger does.
“You’re trying to scare me,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
The honesty sends heat through me.
“You’re doing a terrible job.”
His gaze darkens. “I noticed.”
Neither of us moves.
The street noise seems farther away now. I can hear my own breathing. His hand remains against the wall beside my head, but the other settles slowly at my waist.
He pauses there. Waiting.
He always waits when it matters.
That nearly destroys me.
I should push him away. I should tell him to take his hands off me.
Instead, my fingers curl into the front of his coat.
Vadim looks down at them. Then back at me. “Sloane.”
The warning in my name makes everything worse.
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
The certainty makes anger flash through me. I pull him closer and kiss him. Or maybe he kisses me. I can’t tell who closes the final inch between us because once his mouth is on mine, there is no room for anything except the violent relief of finally touching him again.
He kisses me like he has been holding himself back for months. One hand slides behind my neck, the other tightens at my waist, and I open for him before I can remember why this is a terrible idea.
His tongue moves against mine, and a sound escapes me. He swallows it.
My hands slide from the front of his coat to his shoulders, and the familiar strength beneath my palms makes my chest ache.
He pulls me closer by the waist, careful without seeming to realize he’s being careful, and I feel the restraint in that small adjustment more than I would have felt force.
For all the violence in him, Vadim still knows exactly how to touch me when he’s trying not to hurt me.
I kiss him harder.
He makes a low sound against my mouth and turns his head, deepening the kiss until my thoughts scatter again. His thumb brushes along my jaw, then settles beneath my chin, holding my face where he wants it while his other hand stays firm at my side.
I had forgotten how completely he occupies space. How impossible it is to think when he’s this close. How quickly my anger gets tangled with want until I can no longer separate one from the other.
His mouth moves from mine to the corner of my lips, then along my cheek, and when he kisses the spot below my ear my knees nearly soften beneath me.
Everything that has been wrong inside me for months goes quiet.
His fingers slide into my hair and tighten just enough to tilt my head, and the kiss turns slower without losing any of its intensity, each movement suddenly deliberate enough that I feel every second of it.
I taste coffee, cold air, and something unmistakably him, and the familiarity of it is almost unbearable after months of trying to convince myself I could forget.
I drag my mouth from his only long enough to breathe, but he follows immediately, forehead brushing mine while his thumb traces the edge of my lower lip.
“You still taste the same,” he murmurs.
The words hit somewhere deep.
“So do you.”
His eyes darken, and then he kisses me again.
For a few seconds, I’m not in an alley. Petrov doesn’t exist. Camille is not dead.
There is only Vadim.
His mouth leaves mine and drags along my jaw. I gasp when his teeth graze the place beneath my ear.
“You still do that,” I whisper.
“You still react.”
His hand moves lower. My fingers stroke his nape, and he kisses me again, deeper this time, and the force of it presses me harder against the wall.
Then his hand shifts across my stomach.
Everything stops.
Vadim freezes, his mouth still against mine. For one terrible second, neither of us breathes. His palm remains pressed against the curve beneath my coat. The curve I have spent months hiding. The curve that is impossible to hide from a man whose hand knows my body.
Slowly, he pulls back.
His face changes.
I have seen Vadim furious. I have seen him murderous. I have seen him look at blood as though it meant nothing.
I have never seen him look like this.
His gaze drops to my stomach. Then rises to my face.
“Sloane.”
I can’t speak.
His hand stays where it is, barely touching me now.
His voice is almost unrecognizable when he asks, “You’re pregnant?”