Chapter 2
CHLOE
The ceiling above me was not mine.
I knew it before I opened my eyes. The plaster sat too high.
The air had a weight I did not own, something warm and dry, faintly cedar, with the cleanness of a sheet someone else had folded with care.
My pillow smelled like a soap I had never bought.
The blanket pressing down on my legs was twice the weight of my own.
I kept my eyes closed for one more breath. I counted in Korean under my breath. Hana, dul, set. My hand found the hem of the dress I had put on the night before, still on me, the strap a little crooked at the shoulder. My shoes were off. I was not sore in any place a body should not be sore.
The night came back in pieces.
The club. Bo on the curb with both hands on my elbows asking three times if I would be fine, and me promising her I was. The bar. A song with too much bass for the room. A man in a navy jacket with a smile that did not move correctly.
The second glass.
My pulse climbed the inside of my throat and pulled cold up after it. I had been polite about the glass. I had been polite about the hand at the small of my back. I had been polite right up to the point where the floor began to soften under my heels and the bartender stopped meeting my eyes.
Where am I?
I made myself open my eyes the rest of the way.
The room was warm wood and pale linen. A lamp on a low chest. A curtain pulled almost shut, a band of late morning slipping in at the edge, falling in a soft yellow stripe across the rug.
Water on the table beside me, a glass with a saucer set on top to keep the dust off.
A small plate with a folded napkin. My bag was on the dresser, zipped, set straight, as if someone had carried it for me without looking inside.
And on the long couch under the window, a man was asleep.
My breath caught at the back of my throat and stayed there.
He was too tall for the couch. His shoes were off, lined up under the frame, toes pointed toward the door.
One arm hooked behind his head, the other lay open across his stomach, fingers half curled the way a hand lies when it has finally stopped holding anything.
His jacket was folded as a pillow, lining out, the kind of fold a person makes when he is not staying.
I should have been more afraid.
I waited for the cold thing in my chest to climb higher. It did not. It set its weight down between my ribs and stayed where it was, not gone, but not what it had been a minute before.
I looked at his face because I could not stop looking.
Dark hair, longer in front, fallen back from his brow.
Sharp cheekbones, the kind that put a shadow under themselves in any light.
A mouth that, even asleep, looked like it was holding the back end of a joke.
Stubble at his jaw, a small white scar at the temple, lashes too long for a man who knew the kind of work those knuckles knew.
His face in sleep was kind.
That was the word that arrived before I could chase it off. Not safe. Not soft. Kind. The bone of him was hard, but the rest had set its guard down somewhere in the night and forgotten to pick it back up.
His hand lay open on his stomach. Not in a fist. Open.
A man who fell asleep with his hand open is not a man who came here to hurt me.
I did not know if that was true. I only knew that my body, which had spent the last hour reading the room without asking my permission, had decided to believe it.
A knock came so quietly the door opened on the same breath.
A woman slipped in with a small tray balanced on one palm.
Tea, water, a plate of cut fruit with the pith trimmed away.
She was brunette, slight, the kind of slight that came from years of holding a body at an exact angle on purpose.
She moved on the balls of her bare feet.
Her eyes touched the couch first, then the bed, then me, in that order, and her smile arrived just before her voice did, soft, careful of the air around the sleeping man.
"You're awake," she said, low. "I'm Lily."
I tried to make a sentence. The first one died at the gate. I shaped another in my mouth and lost it on the way out.
"Where..."
"You're safe here," she said. "I mean it."
She set the tray on the small chest at the foot of the bed and turned the saucer of the water glass over so I could reach it. Her hands knew their job. Whoever Lily was, she had done this before, for someone, somewhere.
"You were drugged last night," she said.
The cold thing in my chest stood up halfway and sat back down. I had known. My mouth had known before my mind had. But hearing it out loud, said by a woman in a robe at the foot of my bed, turned it from a thing in my head into a thing in a room.
Her glance went to the couch.
"I don't know the whole story," she said, quieter still. "I know he watched you breathe through every hour of it."
My eyes went to him before I could stop them.
The smile happened on my mouth before I gave it permission. Only at the corners. Small enough that no one should have seen it.
Lily saw it.
"Careful," she said, and the corner of her own mouth lifted. "Looking at him too long will fill your stomach better than the eggs downstairs."
Heat went up my throat in a clean line and broke across my cheeks. I pressed the back of my hand to the side of my face the way my aunt used to press the side of a kettle to test it. It did not help. I dropped the hand and looked at the blanket.
"Come eat," Lily said, gentler. "You'll think better with food in you."
She held out one small steady hand, palm up.
I took it.
She gave me a robe from the foot of the bed, soft gray, too long in the sleeves.
She tied the belt for me when my fingers fumbled the knot, and she did not make a thing of it.
She slid an arm under my elbow and took some of my weight as I stood, and my legs answered the way legs answer when the floor is farther away than it should be.
"Easy," she said. "The drug's mostly out. The mostly is the part that lies."
I looked at the couch as we passed it.
His lashes did not move. His mouth did not change. His hand did not close. I could not tell if he was awake or asleep, and I decided in that pause that I was not going to ask Lily which.
The hallway smelled like butter and coffee and something baked with a little salt in the crust. Dark wood underfoot, warmed by a runner the color of olive leaves.
A tall window at the head of the stairs threw a square of late light onto the landing.
Somewhere below, a plate touched a counter, soft, then again.
Lily steered me down by the rail.
The dining room sat off a wide arch at the bottom of the stairs.
A long table, set at one end only, three places.
A woman in the middle chair, hands wrapped around a mug, shoulders set the particular way shoulders set when a woman has been arguing with her husband in her head for an hour and has not finished.
Small, dark, a braid pulled forward over one shoulder, a face that looked like it had a Mexican abuela in it and a frown that had nothing to do with us.
Lily slid me into the chair beside her with the same hand she had used on the stairs.
"Jade," she said, mild. "What's that face for?"
"Ivan being Ivan," Jade said, without lifting her eyes from the coffee. "He forgot his grumpy pills again."
Lily laughed, quick and bright, the kind of laugh that does not warn you it's on its way.
Jade looked up at the sound and her eyes caught on me, and the frown fell off her face by half. The other half stayed because it was not for me.
"You're up," she said, warmer. "Color's coming back. That's something."
She pushed a small plate at me with two fingers.
"You're lucky the good Sorokin's the one who found you."
The name landed slow. It sat on the surface of the table for a second before it sank.
Sorokin.
Metal in my mouth again, the thin taste of fear that came back any time the floor under me moved.
I had heard the name. Not in my own life.
In the way you hear a name in a hallway at work, in a corner of a coffee shop, in a low sentence between two men at a register who go quiet when they notice you can hear.
"Sorokin," I said, slow, the word fitting itself to my mouth one syllable at a time. "You mean the bratva?"
"Exactly," Lily said, plain. No softening. No lift at the end. As if I had asked her whether the bread on the board was sourdough.
It stood all the way up.
My hand on the table forgot what it was for. My chair was a chair, and then my chair was a thing I needed to be on the other side of. I pushed back and made my legs do their job. They did half of it. The room tilted at the edges.
Jade's hand caught mine across the corner of the table, light, not a grip. Just a hand. Steady.
"Sit," she said. "Those legs aren't carrying you out of here yet."
I sat. The room steadied.
"They're not going to hurt you," Jade said. "Daniil least of all."
Daniil.
The name went into a slot in my chest I had not known was empty. I did not have a face yet to set to it that did not include the wing of a couch and a hand open on a stomach, but the slot took it anyway.
"Look at us," Lily said, easy, and she lifted her own mug as if to count herself. "Still breathing."
She set the mug down.
"Their family has a name people whisper. I won't pretend they don't," she said. "But the day a Sorokin decides he's keeping you safe is the day you stop being afraid of anything else."
I sat for the length of one breath with my hand under Jade's.
Then I pulled it back. Slowly. So neither of them would mistake it for a flinch.
I picked up the fork. I put a small piece of melon on it. The fruit was cold and clean and tasted like a thing a person grows on purpose. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I only knew I was going to do it with food in me.
A footstep arrived in the hall.