Chapter 14
SELENE
Iwake up to the sound of him on the phone.
Not in bed beside me. He's in my living room, voice low and clipped, issuing instructions calmly like a man who runs the world before breakfast.
The words filter through the bedroom door in fragments: "Her things. All of it. The car, too. I want it done by noon."
I lie still for a moment, cataloging the damage.
The bite on my shoulder throbs with every heartbeat.
My inner thighs ache in a way that's half bruise and half something I refuse to name.
The sheets smell like blood and sex and sandalwood, and my body is sore in places that make last night impossible to file away as a mistake, a lapse, a thing that happened in the dark that can be denied in daylight.
The knife is gone.
I can see the empty space under the dresser where it spun last night, and its absence feels like a verdict.
I sit up.
My T-shirt is twisted around my torso and my shorts are on the floor by the door where he tossed them, and I reach for them with hands that are steadier than they should be.
There's dried blood under my fingernails. His.
The thin line I opened on his throat before everything collapsed into teeth and skin and a hunger that didn't know the difference between hurting and wanting.
He appears in the doorway before I've finished dressing.
He leans against the frame, arms crossed, wearing yesterday's shirt with the collar dark and stiff where his blood dried.
The cut on his throat is a thin scab, precise as a signature.
I did that.
I held a blade to this man's neck and drew blood, and then I let him fuck me in the mess I made of him.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Moving you."
"Excuse me?"
"You're not safe here. Zhukov's people are watching this building.
They left a message at one of my warehouses three days ago that referenced you specifically.
" He says it the way he says everything—like the decision has already been made and he's simply informing me of the outcome.
"Peter and Lionel are on their way. They'll pack your things. "
"No."
"This isn't a negotiation, Selene."
"Everything between us is a negotiation now." I stiffen my spine. The ache between my legs sharpens, and I refuse to let it show on my face. "You don't get to show up in the middle of the night, break into my apartment, and then rearrange my life because it's convenient for your security protocol."
"I didn't break in. I have a key."
"Which I didn't give you."
"You've known about it for months and never asked me to return it."
The accuracy of that lands like a slap.
He's right.
I've known about the key since my bout of pneumonia a while ago.
I filed it away as one more piece of the architecture he built around me and chose not to dismantle.
"The Russians know where you live," he says.
His voice drops, not softer but denser. Weighted.
"They know your routines, your contacts, your connection to me.
Three days ago they killed one of my men and left a message that translates roughly to 'your wolf lost her teeth.
' That's not a threat. That's a promise, and you're alone in an apartment with a deadbolt that Lionel could kick through without breaking stride. "
"So, I'll get a better lock then."
"You'll get a better location." He pushes off the doorframe and crosses the room, and even after everything, even with the dried blood on his collar and the scratch marks I left on his forearms, he moves with that unhurried certainty that makes the air feel thinner.
He stops a foot away, close enough to touch me, but he doesn't. "My penthouse has reinforced doors, armed security on every floor, and a surveillance system that costs more than this building. You'll have your own room. Your own space. I won't touch you unless you ask."
"Like last night? When I asked you to come here at God knows what hour and hold a knife to—"
"Last night was a mistake."
"Which part?"
His jaw tightens.
The scab on his throat shifts with the movement, and I watch it the way I'd watch a crack spread through glass.
Slowly. Waiting for the break.
"The part where I didn't come sooner," he says.
I hate him.
I hate him with a thoroughness that should leave no room for anything else, and yet the words land somewhere behind my ribs and stay there, warm and heavy, like a stone I swallowed that won't pass.
Peter and Lionel arrive twenty minutes later.
They're efficient and respectful and they don't look at the bloodstained sheets or the evidence wall or the gun on the nightstand that I grab before anyone else can touch it.
I watch them box up my clothes, my books, my mother's jewelry case that I kept in the top of the closet.
They dismantle the evidence wall last.
Peter photographs each document before placing it in a folder, and I let him because the alternative is putting a bullet in someone and I don't trust my aim when my hands are shaking this badly.
I ride to the penthouse in the back of an SUV with Lionel driving and my father's .38 in my lap, the collar pressing against my throat with every swallow.
The key Cassius slid under my door a couple of nights ago is in my pocket.
I could have taken the collar off.
I could have left it on the bathroom counter, a rejection he'd understand without words.
I didn't.
I don't know what that means yet, and the not-knowing is worse than any answer could be.
The penthouse is exactly as I remember it.
Floor-to-ceiling windows that make the city look like something you could own. Italian marble.
The kind of furniture that costs more than most people's annual salary and is designed to look like it doesn't.
His scent is in every room, embedded in the fabric of the place, and breathing here feels like breathing him.
He shows me to a guest room on the opposite end of the hall from the master.
King bed, en suite bathroom, walk-in closet already stocked with clothes in my size.
Not my clothes from the apartment. New ones. Tags still on. He's been planning this.
Maybe not consciously, maybe not with a date in mind, but somewhere in the architecture of his control, there was always a room for me with clothes on the hangers and towels in the bathroom and a door I could close.
"This is yours," he says from the doorway. "The lock works from the inside. Only you have the key."
"How generous. A cage with a lock I control."
"A room, Selene. In a building where no one can get to you."
"Except you."
"Except me." He doesn't flinch from that truth.
Doesn't dress it up or soften the edges.
"Lionel is outside the front door. Peter and Paul rotate twelve-hour shifts.
You have access to everything in this apartment, including the office, the kitchen, and the elevator.
The only thing I'm asking is that you don't leave without security. "
"Asking. Not telling?"
The pause before he answers is a fraction too long. "Asking."
I step into the room and close the door in his face.
Then I stand with my back against it and listen to him breathe on the other side for ten seconds before his footsteps retreat down the hall.
The room is beautiful. The bed is soft. The view is stunning.
Yet, I have never felt more trapped in my life.
It’s been five days in the penthouse, and the tension is a living thing.
We orbit each other like objects caught in a field neither of us controls.
He leaves for work before I wake and returns after dark, and the evidence of his day is in the lines around his eyes and the way he pours his whiskey—two fingers when things are normal, three when they're not.
It's been three fingers every night.
I hear him pacing in the middle of the night.
The rhythm of his footsteps is something I know the way I know my own heartbeat, and lying in the dark, listening to him walk the length of the hallway, is its own form of torture.
I stand in the dark with my hand flat against the drywall and feel the vibration of his footsteps through the wall and hate myself for leaning into it.
His cologne lingers in every room.
The office, the kitchen, the hallway outside my door. I can't escape it.
I shower and the steam carries it.
I make coffee and the warmth of the mug smells like him.
I sit on the guest bed in the dark and the pillows smell like the laundry detergent he uses, and even that, even something that mundane and domestic, makes my chest tight.
I call Emilia on the sixth day, sit cross-legged on the guest bed with the door locked and my voice pitched to casual. "Hey, Em. Just checking in."
"Sel! Where have you been? I texted you like four times."
"Sorry. I've been staying with a friend for a few days. Got some weird messages, figured I'd lay low somewhere with better security." The lie comes out smooth. Practiced. I stare at the ceiling and deliver it like lines in a play I've rehearsed too many times.
"Weird messages? Like threatening messages? Selene, what the hell—"
"It's nothing. Probably spam. I'm just being cautious."
"Do you want me to talk to Dad? He can make some calls, get someone to look into it—"
"No." Too fast. I hear the sharpness in my own voice and soften it. "No, it's fine. Really. I just wanted to hear your voice."
Silence.
The kind that means Emilia is thinking, turning something over, deciding whether to push or trust.
"You'd tell me if something was really wrong," she says. Not a question. A plea dressed up as a statement.
"Of course I would."
Another lie. They're getting easier. It should scare me more than it does.
After I hang up, I sit with the phone in my lap and stare at the wall that separates my room from his office and think about how many layers of deception a person can maintain before the weight of them collapses the thing they're trying to protect.
Vincent comes later that evening.
I'm in the kitchen making a salad I won't finish when the elevator opens and he walks in with a leather briefcase and the expression of a man carrying bad news.