21. Peyton
PEYTON
Yes. Say yes. Why couldn’t I convince my mouth to open and unleash the word stuck on loop in my head?
Because I wanted it too much. The answer came with the weight of all my expectations. Breathe. I had to breathe and get through this moment. I could make it work.
“Fine.” I unfolded my arms, tossing my falling hair over my shoulder at the same time, and pressed my palms flat against the table to keep them still. “I’ll need to stop at my place first. Pack some things.”
Relief crashed over Leo’s face, there and gone in an instant. I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been looking. He recovered so fast, I almost second-guessed it. I’d expected satisfaction, not the way his shoulders dropped.
“Of course.” He stood as he said it. “We’ll stop on the way.”
I nodded, picked up my folder, and walked out of the office with my chin up and my heart doing cartwheels.
I kept my pace steady all the way down the hall, because the moment I let my control slip, I’d either laugh or cry. Neither was appropriate for a Tuesday evening in a corporate office.
The truth I hid deep in my chest was hard to keep tucked away. The offer flattered me to my core.
Not just the offer of protection but that they completely offered up their home for me. And the fact that they found me to be someone worth protecting and a risk they were willing to take.
People often assumed I could handle myself. And I could. I loved that independent part of myself, but I couldn’t deny that being protected also felt kind of nice.
I handled my own problems. I made my own decisions. I did not give people the opportunity to disappoint me by needing them.
And now three men who frightened many of the people they worked with agreed that I needed to be kept close.
The flattered feeling lasted until I reached my desk. Then the nerves hit in full force. I sat at my desk and pulled up the document I’d been working on. I stared at it without reading a single word.
I’d never lived with a man. Not a boyfriend or a partner.
Not anyone since the day I moved out of Mom and Dad’s house.
Roommates in college aside, because they’d both been women and as chaotic as me.
They’d been the ones to teach me the skincare routine I swore by.
Oh, God. My skincare routine. That twenty-minute nightly ritual might be a deal breaker if they ever walked in and found me with my light on my face.
My breath stuck in my throat. I grabbed the folder and fanned my face, desperate for some kind of relief.
This wasn’t college. This was three men who’d seen me at my most confident, my most carefully put together.
They saw me in lingerie I’d spent forty-five minutes selecting and outfits I checked from every single angle to make sure they flattered in every possible way. They’d seen the curated version of me.
They had not seen me in the morning.
They hadn’t seen what happened to my hair when I slept on it wrong, which was most nights.
“Stop it.” I patted my cheeks with both hands, dropping the folder in the process. “You’re spiraling. Stop it. Right now.” My eyes smarted from the severity of the pats, and I lifted my shoulders to my ears, then dropped them down again.
A rolling sensation trembled down my spine. I flexed my fingers, then curled them into fists. I repeated the motion, remembering how Misha did that same thing in meetings.
It wasn’t nervousness on his part, but it helped alleviate mine.
What if I wanted a snack in the middle of the night?
Could I bring myself to stand over their kitchen sink with my bowl of cereal?
No. Probably not.
Okay. No midnight cereal. Fine.
It was only for a little while.
This was waking up in the same house and sharing morning breath and tripping over each other in the kitchen. All the unglamorous, unfiltered, unsexy reality of existing in close proximity.
They’d helped my confidence grow in leaps and bounds, but would they still like me when they saw all my quirks and foibles? Like how I preferred to sleep in fuzzy pajamas.
Fuzzy pajamas were non-negotiable.
I’d had the same pair for three years, the ones with little clouds on them that had faded from blue to a kind of gray from washing but still held their shape and warmth.
They had a fundamental purpose to make me feel like a human burrito at the end of a long day.
I could not give those up. I would not. If that was the thing that broke us, then it broke us. I’d mourn it in the very same pajamas.
It wasn’t just the pajamas. I liked to talk to myself while cooking, full conversations, sometimes with sound effects if something went wrong.
I had a system for unloading the dishwasher that did not allow for compromise.
And that didn’t even account for my feelings about which way the toilet paper should face.
What if they didn’t put the toilet seat down?
I could hear myself trying to ask them to do that without bursting into embarrassed flames.
I organized my shoes by color but my books by author and my spices by frequency of use.
And none of this mattered to them. Rationally, I knew that, but reason had very little to do with my current spiral.
I put my face in my hands.
I was catastrophizing over sleepwear.
This was a new low.
I’d walked into this with the understanding that it was physical and uncomplicated.
But then Misha looked at me, his face soft and open, and I’d been a total goner.
I had something to lose that I hadn’t had when I posted on Intivibe. I’d been anonymous and brave in the anonymity.
Back then, the worst thing that could happen was an awkward first message or a conversation that went nowhere.
Back then, I could close the app, eat my cereal, and go to bed.
None of it followed me into the morning.
Now it followed me everywhere.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out without thinking, my stomach flopping at the Intivibe notification. I grinned and opened the message.
I have never wanted to fuck you against that office door more than I did when you said you’d move in with me. I’m rock hard just thinking about it.
The familiar heat rushed into my face. I pressed my lips together and tried to come up with a snarky response.
A gasp sounded behind me.
I wheeled around, my phone clutched to my chest.
Elena stood two feet behind me, her hand over her mouth. “Is that from Leonid Petrov?”
My stomach hit the floor. “How?” I lowered the phone to check my screen. Damn it. He’d signed it Leo, something he and the others started a week ago. I’d forgotten all about that.
“Elena–”
“Because I know what I saw, so don’t even try to tell me I’m wrong.” She set the folders on the edge of my desk. “And the app name… that’s the one you told me about.”
I was on my feet before she finished the sentence. I grabbed her wrist, not hard, but with the intention of holding her long enough to make my case.
My entire life might combust, but I towed her toward the bathroom down the hall. “How did you get up here?”
“Keycard.” She held up her lanyard. “I have a special access card from my boss. He said I needed to bring these up to you tonight so you’d have them in the morning.”
I stopped outside the bathroom door. There was really no need to go inside. I just hoped to get her away from Leo’s office before her rising voice brought him out. “It’s not–”
“Don’t.” She shook her head once, hard. “Do not tell me what it looks like. I read fast and I saw enough.”
I pressed both hands over my face, then dropped them. “You can’t tell anyone. Elena, I’m serious. No one.”
“Peyton.” She said my name with the weight of the world in those two syllables. “Is it him? Is he one of them?”
I was in over my head, but I could not lie to her now. “Yes.”
She made a small, rasping laugh. “Wait. Do not tell me that Viktor and Mikhail are the other two.”
It wasn’t even a question. The heat in my face answered for me, the flush crawling up and over my cheeks.
Elena stared at me. “I’ve heard things.” She took her time speaking, her hands falling to her hips and settling there.
“Rumors. About all three of them. I have heard that they share women, which you have confirmed. It’s some kind of arrangement they have had for years.
I never put much weight behind it because it seemed unbelievable. Men sharing women?”
“It’s true.” I didn’t have to say that. “All of it. And before you say anything, I know how it sounds. I know how it looks. But you need to understand that it has been unbelievable. Everything that I told you is true.”
Elena looked me up and down, reading and assessing me in that way of hers.
There was a reason she worked in finance.
Honestly, she reminded me of Misha and the way he went utterly still sometimes, his eyes and brain so busy, the rest of him had to stop.
There was no recrimination in her gaze, nothing that made me uncomfortable, but instead of acceptance or excitement, she looked slightly terrified.
“What?” I pushed off the wall. “What’s wrong?”
“There are more rumors.” Elena gripped my arms, bringing our faces so close our noses almost touched. “Rumors about who they are. What they’re involved in.”
Her grip tightened, her fingers digging in. “People have gone missing. Not just recently, and I do not mean the people they have fired, though some of them are concerningly silent. Colleagues, business associates, people who were connected with this company in one way or another.”
She shook me. “I did not want to believe it was connected because believing it meant working here was a risk. But the frequency has gone up the last few months. I have been trying very hard not to think about why.”
Footsteps creaked from a distance, and Elena released me.
“They would never hurt me.” I meant every word.
“You do not know that.”
“I do.” Nodding made me feel like a bobblehead doll, but I did it anyway.
A disgruntled grunt parted her lips. “You are not objective about this.”
“No. I’m not.” And I never would be, but that did not change the facts. They would not hurt me.
Elena took a step backward, toward the stairs. “Be careful. That is all I’m asking. Just… be careful.”
We parted ways, Elena using the keycard to open the door to the stairwell and me to my desk. I sat and wiggled my mouse, only to stare at the screen again.
Elena’s concerns rang in my ears. People have been known to disappear.
Getting close to them is dangerous.
I knew that. On some level, somewhere deep below the part of me that replayed Misha’s voice in the dark and laughed too hard at Viktor’s dry delivery, I’d known.
My conversation with Leo rang in next.
You’ve become one of those people. Whether you asked for that or not.
He’d been warning me. They were dangerous, and I was moving in this weekend.
The part of me that should have been frightened by that, the sensible, self-preserving part of me that had kept me safe and unattached and perfectly fine on my own for years, was quiet.
I picked up my phone and read Leo’s message one more time.
Then I responded.
Good thing the door locks from the inside.
I hit send and dropped my phone onto the desk.
Yep. I had it bad. Not only did Elena’s warning not run me off, but it also made me more curious than ever.