6. Luka #2
“At her desk.”
My pen stops. “Still?”
“Yes.”
“Doing what?”
Meredith hesitates, because she is intelligent enough to know that my question is not professional. “I believe she is updating your social diary.”
I close the file. “Tell her to go home.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“She said you could tell her yourself if you were suddenly concerned about labor law.”
For the first time all afternoon, something close to a smile threatens me.
I suppress it.
“Thank you, Meredith.”
She nods and leaves.
I wait another fifteen minutes, because I’m not a man who runs from his office because a twenty-four-year-old woman has decided to test his patience from behind a desk.
Then I take my coat and leave.
Nina’s desk is empty.
The lamp is still on. Her bag is gone. The diary’s not visible, which means she’s either taken it with her or hidden it because she knows I might look.
Smart girl.
The elevator ride to the garage is silent.
I use the private lift, the one that opens directly into the secured level beneath the building. Concrete. Cameras. Low lights. Armored cars lined in black rows. Two guards near the entrance. Another at the ramp. My driver waits beside the sedan, but I dismiss him with a look.
“I’ll drive.”
He nods and hands me the keys.
I’m halfway to the car when a voice says, “So you are alive.”
I stop.
Nina’s standing beside one of the concrete pillars, coat over her arm, dark hair loose around her shoulders, looking as tired and furious as a woman has any right to look after the day she’s had.
The dress is gone. She’s changed into a softer black one, and I’m annoyed with myself for noticing. Her face is composed, but her eyes are too bright.
She has been waiting. For me.
“What are you still doing here?” I ask. “It’s late.”
Her mouth curves without humor. “That’s what my brother said.”
Everything in me stills.
“Misha called you?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“After you left me in the boardroom.”
I look past her toward the security camera angled over the garage, then back to her. “What did you tell Misha exactly?”
Her eyebrows rise. “So that’s what you’re worried about?”
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” she says. “It’s an observation.”
“Nina.” There’s warning in my voice.
She steps closer anyway. “I told him I was fine,” she says. “I told him you were not making me do funny errands.”
I say nothing.
“Yes,” she adds. “That was the phrase he used.”
A sound almost leaves me. Not a laugh. Something darker. “And did he believe you?”
“Of course not. I lied terribly.”
“That seems unlike you.”
“I had a difficult afternoon.”
I deserve that.
I look at her properly now, because I’ve avoided doing so for hours and because apparently my punishment is that looking at her does not make me want her less.
It makes it worse.
She’s angry. Embarrassed. Still drawn tight with awareness, though she’s trying to hide it under sarcasm. I can see the questions she’s brought down here with her, the ones she’d rather bite through her own tongue than ask first.
Why did you leave? Why did you avoid me? What am I to you now?
I don’t know which answer would hurt her least. So, I choose none of them.
“You should go home,” I say.
Her eyes flash. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“After today?”
“Nina.”
“No.” She steps closer again. “Don’t say my name like that and expect me to vanish.”
The garage is too exposed for this. Too many cameras. I don’t like being in vulnerable places.
I take her arm lightly and guide her toward the side of my car, out of the direct line of sight from the ramp.
She comes with me, but only because she chooses to. I feel the tension in her arm, the heat of her skin through her sleeve.
When we reach the car, she turns on me. “You ignored me all day.”
“I was busy.”
“You sent Pavel for files you always ask me to bring.”
“Pavel was available.”
“I was ten feet away.”
“Exactly.”
That stops her, and her expression changes. For one moment, she looks hurt before she can hide it, and it cuts deeper than I expect.
“Exactly,” she repeats softly.
I loosen my grip on her arm. “Nina—”
“No, I understand.” Her voice goes light in the way people sound when they are anything but. “You got it out of your system.”
My jaw tightens. “Careful.”
“Why?” she asks. “Because you don’t want to hear the truth? Because I’m not a thing you can use and throw away?”
“Stop it,” I say when I want to say, you’re none of those things. I still want you so badly it scares me. “You’re angry and guessing.”
“I’m angry because you left!”
“I left because staying would have been worse.”
“For whom?”
I look at her. She glares back.
The garage seems to narrow around us, concrete and steel and the quiet ticking of the car engine cooling beside us.
“For both of us,” I say.
She laughs once, humorless. “You keep deciding that.”
“Someone has to.”
Her eyes narrow. “Oh, there it is.”
“What?”
“That thing you do. Making control sound like responsibility.”
I move closer before I’ve decided to.
She doesn’t retreat. Her back meets the side of my car, and still she lifts her chin, stubborn and flushed and much too close to me in a silent garage beneath my building.
“You want responsibility?” I ask quietly. “Then understand this. I should not have touched you.”
Her breath catches. “But you did.”
“Yes.”
“And then you walked away.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The word is quiet now. I could give her a dozen answers.
Misha. The company. The Bratva. Her age. My enemies.
The fact that she’s my employee and my best friend’s little sister and the one person in this building whose innocence I once believed I had the decency not to damage.
All true. None complete.
I put one hand on the car beside her head.
She looks at it, then back at me.
“Because,” I say, “if I had stayed, I would’ve taken more than I had any right to take.”
Her lips part. A mistake. My mistake, noticing.
The distance between us is small now. Too small for sanity, too large for what my body wants. Her perfume reaches me, softer than this morning, mixed with the faint trace of office air and something that is simply her.
“Maybe,” she says, voice unsteady but brave, “you should stop deciding what I have the right to give.”
That sentence does something to me.
Something final.
I lower my head slightly. It’s not an invitation to kiss.
But her eyes drop to my mouth anyway.
My hand comes to her waist. She trembles once, almost imperceptibly, and I feel it through my palm. Her breathing turns shallow. Mine does not, because I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to hide signs of weakness.
But she’s learning me too quickly. “You’re shaking,” she whispers.
I’m not. Or perhaps I am.
“Because I’m angry,” I say.
“At me?”
“At myself.”
Her gaze softens for half a second, and that softness is more dangerous than her defiance. “Luka,” she whispers.
The sound of my name on her mouth is enough.
I lean closer.
Her hands rise to my coat, not pushing me away, not pulling me in. Just holding on.
The garage lights hum overhead. Somewhere in the distance, a door opens.
I hear it. Too late.
A sharp crack tears through the air.
Gunfire sounds different in enclosed spaces. Less like the films. More like the world splitting open.
Nina flinches.
I move before I think.
One arm locks around her waist, and I drive us both down behind the armored car as the second shot hits the pillar where her head was a heartbeat ago.
Concrete bursts white.
She gasps.
I cover her body with mine, one hand over the back of her head, forcing her low as another round slams into the side of the car with a heavy metallic thud.
“Stay down,” I snarl.
She’s beneath me, wide-eyed, breath trapped, fingers digging into my coat.
Security shouts echo across the garage.
Another shot. Glass somewhere explodes.
I draw my weapon from inside my coat and turn just enough to put myself between Nina and the line of fire.
Then the lights go out.
The entire garage plunges into darkness.
Nina’s hand tightens around my wrist.
Her fingers dig into my coat, her breath trapped against my chest, while another bullet slams into the car door hard enough to make the metal shudder.
The only thought in my head is cold, immediate, and certain.
We’re under attack.