Chapter 20
TESSA
Bogdan has stolen most of the blanket.
He owns the building, the bed and probably six more blankets somewhere within shouting distance. He's still managed to wrap himself in the piece that belongs over my knees.
I pull it gently. His arm tightens around my waist without his eyes opening.
“Thief,” I whisper.
He lifts the edge and draws me closer, covering both of us. Apparently this is how disputes are settled in the bratva before breakfast.
Pale light comes through the gap in the curtains. My gown lies over one of the chairs, its velvet holding the folds where he placed it. The crown sits beside our masks on the low table. In daylight, its black roses look rather bossy for something I carried around on my head all evening.
I touch the necklace beneath the sheet. The little points of its setting press against my fingertips.
For a moment I can have this without thinking about my phone.
Then I remember the movement sheet and the message beneath it. Luka got hold of our times and made sure we knew it. Klim is checking who received the revision, but nobody had an answer when we went to bed.
I look at the closed suite door. Bogdan's arm stays around me, warm and heavy, and I make myself listen to his breathing instead of imagining somebody on the other side.
He opens his eyes.
“Morning.”
“You hoard bedding.”
His mouth curves. He bends to kiss my forehead, then waits while I turn toward him. The pillow is cool beneath my cheek. I let my hand rest on his shoulder, feeling him wake under it.
This time last Sunday I hadn't taken the test. Now there's a dress of mine hanging beside his shirts at home, and an appointment in both our calendars. I still catch myself wanting to tell him things twice because I'm pleased he's the person who gets to hear them.
“Can we stay here a little longer?” I ask.
He reaches past me and turns the bedside clock away.
“Come here.”
I go willingly, smiling against his mouth when he kisses me.
Under the blanket, his hand slides over my hip and finds me already warm for him.
I part my thighs. He strokes my pussy slowly, then sinks two fingers into me while his thumb circles my clit.
I bury my face in his throat to keep quiet, laughing softly when he pinches my nipple through the sheet and the diamonds catch between us.
“Morning,” he murmurs against my hair.
“Don't stop.”
He doesn't. He rolls me beneath him, careful and unhurried, and pushes his cock into me in one deep slide.
I gasp. He fucks me slow under the stolen blanket, with steady strokes that make me cling to his shoulders and rock up to meet him.
No rush. No audience. Just heat and the soft drag of sheets and the way he watches my face like he has nowhere else to be.
I come quietly around him, thighs shaking, and he follows with a low groan, burying himself deep as he empties into me. Hot. Thick. Completing the morning.
He stays inside me for a few breaths, forehead against mine, then eases out and draws me close again. I tuck myself against him beneath the blanket. His hand settles over mine.
The next time I look toward the curtains, the strip of daylight has widened across the carpet.
I could get used to mornings with no rush to find my shoes.
He brushes my hair away from my face before reaching for the phone on his side of the bed. A brief call orders breakfast. He asks for whatever bread has just come out of the oven, then looks at me while he requests strawberry jam.
“And coffee?” he asks.
“For you. I want juice.”
He adds it and puts the phone down. I trace the fold in the pillowcase beside his shoulder, trying to imagine all the mornings that could follow this one.
There's an extra toothbrush in his bathroom now. My workbag has a place beneath the hall table. I've been treating these things as temporary, in case wanting them too much makes them disappear. Yet when I think about getting dressed, the place I want to go afterward is his house.
Ours, some hopeful part of me suggests.
I let the thought stay while he holds me.
When breakfast arrives, he puts on his trousers and collects the tray at the suite door.
I pull on the guest robe, then sit cross-legged against the pillows while he brings the food to the bed.
The bread tears softly between my fingers.
Butter melts into its warm center, and the jam is sweet enough to make me close my eyes at the first bite.
Bogdan watches me over his coffee.
“Better than last night's pastry?”
“I need more evidence.”
He gives me the other half of his bread.
I eat it with no shame. The coffee smells wonderful from here, even though I don't want a cup. I like having a morning where my stomach lets me enjoy something before it starts making demands.
My phone rings inside the evening bag on the table.
Bogdan puts down his cup and fetches it. Peggy's name lights the screen. He gives me the phone, takes the breakfast tray to the low table and kisses the top of my head before going into the bathroom to shower.
I answer with jam still on my thumb.
“Tell me nobody needs a costume before noon.”
“I'm in bed,” Peggy says. “My own bed. Stop making that face.”
“You can't see my face.”
“I know your face.”
I grin and tuck the blanket over my feet. Water starts running beyond the bathroom door, and I lower my voice anyway.
“How was yesterday?”
“The pictures were beautiful.”
Something in the way she says it makes me stop licking the jam from my thumb. Peggy can tell me she looked incredible in a photograph without sounding as though she's admitting something dangerous.
“And?”
She breathes out close to the phone.
“I think I'm falling for him.”
I straighten against the pillows. Outside our phone call, the room keeps being an ordinary room. The water runs, the bread cools, and my shoes lie where I left them. Inside it, my friend has just said something I've been waiting for her to admit since Friday's showcase.
“Peg.”
“I know. It's ridiculous. I've known him five minutes.”
“Longer than that.”
“He made me stop posing.” She laughs, a little embarrassed. “I kept doing my good side, and he said he wanted the expression I get when I'm about to tell him off. Apparently that's attractive.”
I picture her in the red dress, trying to keep her chin at the angle she likes, then laughing because he won't let her perform the whole time. It fits the photograph he showed us on Friday, that open look she hadn't meant to give the camera.
“Have you got the pictures?” I ask.
“Only saw them on his screen. He let me choose the ones I liked. He'll send them when they're finished.”
Then she goes quiet long enough for me to hear the rustle of her bedding.
“He didn't make me feel stupid for caring how I looked.”
The sentence hurts more than her joke did. Peggy has spent whole evenings being the fun girl while a man beside her checks whether anybody prettier has arrived. I've watched her put on more lipstick and insist she was having a lovely time.
“You deserve that,” I tell her.
“So do you.”
I look toward Bogdan's cup on the table. There's a little jam on the edge of the plate where he gave me the last piece of bread.
“I'm beginning to believe it.”
Peggy laughs softly. She sounds relieved, and I'm glad I've let her say it without turning it into a joke we can both hide behind.
Before we hang up, she says her escort stayed at Afterglint, took her to the ball afterward and brought her home at the end of the evening. The guard is still downstairs. We agree to speak about the week's fittings after lunch. For now, she wants another hour under her blanket.
I tell her she has earned at least two.
When the call ends, I stay against the pillows with the phone in my lap. I want the finished picture of her. I want to frame it somewhere she can see herself looking like that on a morning when a booking goes wrong.
Across the room, my gown has slipped a little over the chair's arm. I leave my phone on the bed and get up to straighten it before the velvet creases. The carpet presses a soft pattern into my bare soles, and the diamonds swing forward when I bend.
Bogdan said he'd see me at home after Friday's showcase, as though the words had been waiting for me to catch up with them. I smooth the skirt and picture our things together again. His coats, my badly folded scarves, a small pair of shoes we haven't bought yet.
I don't reach for my phone to search for those shoes. The thought is enough for now.
When it sounds on the bed, I expect Peggy to have remembered something else she meant to tell me. I go back and pick it up.
There's no name above the new message.
A photograph fills the screen beneath the number. I recognize the crown before I understand what I'm looking at.
Me, beside the staircase last night. My mask is raised, my head turned toward Bogdan. His hand rests at my waist, but the frame cuts through his shoulder and leaves his face outside the picture.
Below it are four words.
He won't keep you.
My foot catches the edge of the robe as I step backward. I sit abruptly on the mattress, gripping the phone so hard that its side button presses into my palm.
The photograph isn't ugly. That's what makes it difficult to put down. I look happy. My mouth is open because I've just said something to him, and I remember believing he was listening to every word.
Somebody has taken that moment and put a sentence beneath it that makes me feel foolish for having it.
I read the message again. The number is unfamiliar, but it's my business number they've used. The same number on our cards, on the booking page, on invoices for costumes I made while I was thinking about paying the rent.
Anybody can reach me through it.
The shower stops. I look at the bathroom door and try to say Bogdan's name. Only a thin sound comes out, so I get up and knock with the hand holding the phone.
He opens it with a towel around his waist. His expression changes before he sees the screen.
“What happened?”
I turn the phone toward him. He reads without taking it out of my hand.
For a moment I want him to tell me it's Lincoln, or Fern, or some bored stranger who hates seeing a woman in an expensive necklace. A small, mean explanation would be easier to carry than the possibilities already waiting in this building.
“Who sent it?” he asks.
“I don't know.”
He puts his hand against my back and brings me to the bed. I sit while he takes his trousers from the chair and dresses, staying close enough that I don't have to raise my voice.
“Call Alison,” he says. “I'll get Klim.”
I make the call before I can waste another minute staring at the photograph.
Alison answers, and I tell her where I am, who is with me and exactly what arrived. Reading the sentence aloud makes my throat close. I get through it anyway.
She asks me to send the image and the message with the number and time. I do it while Bogdan speaks quietly into his own phone beside the window. The original stays on mine.
“I've got it,” Alison says. “Any other messages or calls this morning?”
“Only Peggy. Before this.”
“Stay with Bogdan and the guards while we look at it.”
I switch to speaker when Bogdan returns to the bed. He bends to look at the image again, his arm against my shoulder.
“The case at the bottom,” he says. “That's beside the lighting table.”
There's a black equipment case in the lower corner of the photograph, crossed with a strip of orange tape. Until he points it out, I can barely see past my own face.
“Where was that?” Alison asks.
“Behind the rope by the staircase. The event crew used that space.”
I enlarge the image. The edge of a table appears beyond the case. It hides part of the lowest stair, placing whoever took the picture off to one side of the spot where we stood for the portraits.
For the posed pictures, we'd looked toward the middle of the room. This one catches me between poses, from farther to my left. I don't remember turning toward that camera at all.
“Could guests go behind the rope?” Alison asks.
“They weren't supposed to. Lighting crew, photographers and event staff used it. Klim will check the floor against the image.”
“I'll need the event records and other photographs too. The angle may help. It doesn't give us a person.”
I let the enlarged image shrink again. For a second I'd wanted the black case to become an answer. Now it's an object several people could have stood beside, with a face somewhere above it that I can't see.
Alison says she has the movement-sheet message Klim sent. She'll keep this one with the other material, without assuming the same person sent both. She asks us to preserve the new message and says she'll speak to Klim about the records.
After the call, Bogdan sends him the image and the number too. I watch his thumb move across the screen, grateful that something is happening even while I sit here doing nothing with my hands.
“I was happy,” I say.
He puts his phone down.
“Last night. In that picture.” My voice sounds small, and I hate it. “I wasn't thinking about who was looking at me.”
He sits beside me, close enough for my knee to touch his.
“You were talking to me.”
“I know.”
“I liked having your attention.”
I look at his mouth, then his eyes. He hasn't stopped wanting me because somebody put four words under a photograph. I know that, but my body hasn't caught up. My chest feels too tight for the breath I'm trying to take.
He draws me against him. I put my face in the warm place beside his neck, and his hand moves over my back until I can breathe without fighting for it.
I want this man. I want the mornings and the shirts in the wardrobe and the small shoes I'm not ready to look at yet. The wanting has become so large that a stranger can find a way to frighten me without even threatening to kill me.
“I'm taking you home,” he says against my hair.
I nod and hold on for another moment before reaching for my bag.
The photograph is still open beside me. I look once more at the little piece of equipment case, the table edge and my own unguarded smile.
I remember checking my crown before the portraits.
I can't remember a single face behind the rope.