CHAPTER 9
Siena
The first gunshot inside a house sounds nothing like one in a trauma bay. In the bay it is already a story. A body on my table, already history. In the house it was immediate and deafening. It was close. It went through the walls like a hand through paper.
I was in the library, then I was in the hall. I have never once in my life run the right direction. And the man on the floor was why.
Maksim. One of the young I’d met, a door man, barely older than Bea.
He was down at the foot of the stairs. His hands were pressed to his own stomach.
A dark spread gushed out between his fingers.
His eyes found me. The dying always find the one person in the room who isn't afraid. I’d never known whether that was a gift or something broken in me.
"Move your hands," I said, and dropped to my knees.
The house was screaming around me. Men shouted in Russian. A second shot echoed somewhere above, then nothing. I didn’t look up. I had a hole the size of my thumb in a boy and a pulse going thin under my fingers. The world narrowed to that.
I packed the wound with the hem of my own shirt. I found the artery with two fingers. I leaned my weight into it. I kept him from emptying onto the floor of the Bratva king's house. Somewhere in the middle of it, the shouting stopped. That meant it was over. That meant they had killed whoever came.
Ivan reached me first, gray-faced, one arm still stiff from his own knitting flank.
Then men with a stretcher I had taught them to keep ready.
I gave the orders. Pressure here. Lift on three.
Don't you dare tilt him. They obeyed a woman with her hands inside their brother, because I had earned that in a kitchen days ago. Maksim went up the stairs alive.
Then it was quiet. I was kneeling in blood that was not mine. And I finally looked at the threat they had killed.
The attacker lay by the front door. One of Kolya's men had opened his throat. I didn’t care about that. I cared how he had gotten to the foot of my stairs at all.
I stood up on legs that had decided to shake now that the work was done. I walked to the body. I read it.
He had not come over the wall. His boots were clean.
His hands were soft. He had not climbed anything or cut through anything.
He’d walked in. And he had walked straight past the garage, past the guarded room, to the one interior stair.
The one that led to the wing where they kept Dima.
He’d known exactly where to go in a house I had needed three days to learn.
"He had the codes," I said to no one. "The gate, the inner door. Somebody gave him the whole house."
"Siena." Kolya's voice was calm.
I had not heard him come. He was across the hall. There was blood on him. I didn’t think it was his. He looked at me like I was an accident that interrupted his grief.
I should have softened it. A wiser woman would have. I gave it to him straight instead, because I was still shaking and straight was the only thing I had left.
"This is the same hand," I said steadily.
"Your brother, close range, let in close.
Ivan, in the kitchen. Now this one, walked through your front door like he had a key.
Because he did. It's not the Orlovs. It's not anybody outside.
Somebody in this house is opening doors.
He's senior enough to have every code you own. And you know exactly who. And you still aren’t telling me. "
Something in Kolya's face came apart. For six days I had wanted exactly that, the crack in the wall. Now that I had it, I wished it away. It looked too much like grief.
He crossed the hall quickly, never looking away from me. His hands closed over my arms firmly and he walked me backward until my spine hit the wall.
"You ran toward the gun." His voice was low and shaking. I had never once heard him shake. "There were three men with weapons and a boy bleeding out. And you ran into the middle of it in a silk shirt with your bare hands."
"He'd have died."
That was true. It was also not the whole truth, and I knew it.
I’d not run because I was brave. I’d run because the alternative was standing still in a house that was trying to kill everyone in it.
Standing still is the one thing I’ve never survived.
I didn’t tell him that. I did not tell him that his voice, shaking, was doing something to me that six days of his cold control had not.
"You could have died." His forehead dropped to mine. "Do you understand what I am telling you? You could have died. And I would have stood in that hall and watched it, and there is not one thing I own that could have stopped it."
There it was. He wasn’t angry that I had disobeyed. He was terrified that I could be taken. A man like him has no word for terror, so it came out as anger. I understood him better in that one sentence than in six days of reading his face.
"Then stop caging me and start telling me the truth," I said. "Because I'm the only one in this house who saw it walk through the front door."
He kissed me.
It wasn’t a decision. It stopped being one somewhere between his mouth and mine.
The last of his control gave all at once, silently.
His mouth came down hard enough to bruise.
I fisted my hands in his shirt and pulled him into me.
I’d been furious and terrified for days.
This was the first thing that tasted like the truth.
He tasted like blood and cold air. His hand came up into my hair.
It closed, pulled, and tipped my head back.
The small pain of it lit me up from the scalp down.
He put his mouth to the pulse slamming in my throat.
He said something against my skin in Russian, rough, wrecked, a curse and my name tangled together.
I didn’t need the translation. Fury and fear and something with no floor under it.
"Kolya." His name came out of me like a plea. I hated it. I said it again.
He got a thigh between mine and pressed up.
I made a sound into his mouth I’d never made in my life.
His hand left my hair and dragged down. It found my breast, thumb rolling over the peak of it through wet silk until my knees stopped being reliable.
I was pinned between the wall and the hardest, coldest man I had ever met.
Every place he touched went molten. The ruin of that boy's blood was still tacky on both of us and it didn’t stop either of us for one second.
"Say you want it," he said against my jaw, not a command so much as asking permission. "I don't take. You know I don't take. Say it, or I stop."
There was the whole of him. He had a wife he hadn’t touched. He had every right the paper gave him and had used none of them. And now the pakhan of this house stood wrecked against me and asked. I could have wept.
"I want it." The truth fell out of me, bare, furious. "I hate that I want it. I want it anyway."
That was all the yes he needed.
He got my silk shirt open, buttons bouncing somewhere on the floor, and dragged it off my shoulders.
He found the clasp of my bra and it was gone.
Cold hall air hit bare skin. Then he pulled back an inch to look at me.
The way he looked at my breasts undid me worse than his hands had.
Like a starving man who had not known he was starving until the plate was set in front of him.
"Bozhe." The word was low, reverent, and filthy at once.
He cupped me in both hands. His thumbs dragged over my nipples until they drew up tight and aching, and he held my eyes the whole time.
Then he bent his head, took one into his mouth, and sucked.
My knees went. Only the wall and his thigh kept me up.
He worked me with his lips and his teeth.
He found the exact pressure that pulled the loudest sound out of me and gave it back, again and again.
My hands fisted in his hair to hold him there.
My back arched off the wall to push more of me into his mouth.
I was already clawing his shirt up his spine, greedy for skin.
He came up to my ear and talked to me while his hands kept moving.
"I have wanted this since the corridor." His teeth grazed my throat.
"Since you walked out with my brother alive on your hands and looked at me like you were not afraid of me.
" His hand slid down my stomach. The button of my slacks gave under his fingers.
"You are the only thing I have ever wanted that I refused to simply take.
Do you know what that does to a man like me? "
I knew exactly what it did. It was pressed hard against my hip.
"You're not taking it." My voice came out wrecked and I told him what I’d refused to tell myself every time I heard his voice through the walls or saw his hand close around a mug. "I'm giving it to you. I want your hands on me. I've wanted it for days and hated myself for every hour of it."
His hand slid under the waistband and down and found me slick and wanting. He made a broken sound against my neck. I came apart against his fingers. My hips chased his hand. The word fell out of me, the one I never use. “Please. Please.”
"There she is," he breathed. "Again."
I said it again. I said his name. Then I got my hand between us. I dragged his belt open. I closed my fingers around the hot, hard length of him. He shuddered head to toe, the way a bridge shudders in the second before it collapses.
We were one layer and one motion from what we both wanted. His hand worked me. My hand worked him. Both of us shook. Both of us were right at the edge.
Then he went still.
Everything stopped but our breathing. His hand went still against me. His forehead dropped to mine. His dark eyes hardened, then something closed behind them.
"No," he said, to himself more than to me. "Not like this."
I reached for him. He caught my wrist gentlely and held it against his chest.
"Why?" My voice did not sound like mine. "I said it. Out loud. You made me say it and I said it."
"I know." His forehead stayed against mine. "That’s not the problem."
"Then what is?"
He didn’t answer straight away. The house came back around us while he found it. Men on the stairs. A boy's body going up them in somebody else's hands.
"There is a thing I am going to do." His voice came out raw. "It is already in me. I have not done it yet. I know that I will."
"Then don't."
"That is not one of the things I get." He said it without self-pity. He said everything without self-pity. "If I have you tonight, I will do it anyway. And I will have had this first. Then it stops being a thing I chose. It becomes a thing I am."
"You're not making sense."
"Nyet." Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not a smile. "I am telling you the truest thing I have said in twenty years, and it comes out as an excuse. That’s the cost of being me."
I wanted to argue, but he hadn’t given me anything to hold. He’d given me the hint of darkness that already lived in him.
"Whatever it is." My hand was still flat on his chest. His heart pounded hard under it. "Do it. Then come back."
Something I couldn’t name passed over his face. He shut his eyes.
"That," he said, "is exactly what I was afraid you would say."
He stepped back. The want still stood in every line of him, held down by nothing except what he refused to name. He took my face in both hands, gentle now, and pressed his mouth to my forehead. Like a vow or an apology.
"You saw more in ninety seconds than my men saw in a week," he said. "You're right. About all of it. And I am going to tell you the truth, milaya. Soon. When it can't be the thing that gets you killed."
He left me against the wall. I was undone and furious. Wet through with want and another man's blood.