Chapter 2 #2
Just like that. A man with a gun who was considering killing me three minutes ago, and now he's walking fast toward the back of the building, not running but close to it, because whatever the other man said was more compelling than his own judgment.
He doesn't look back at me. He doesn't look back at all.
That tells me everything about which of them is actually in charge here. Before Victor moves, he says something else — quieter, not meant for Pavel, maybe not even meant for me. Just two words that I don’t catch cleanly enough to translate.
“Chёrt voz’mi.”
Then his hand closes around my wrist, and I'm on my feet before my brain has decided to stand up.
"Let go of me," I object.
"This way,” he orders, already moving, pulling me with him through the main floor toward a door I have never used. His grip isn't rough, but it isn't negotiable either, the grip of someone who is not entertaining alternatives.
"I said let go." I try to pull my arm back. His grip doesn't change. "I can walk on my own."
"You can walk on your own in the direction I choose," he barks. "You're mine to deal with now, so do as I say."
"I am not yours—"
"Tonight you are." He pushes through the door without breaking stride. "You can argue with me later."
The rooms beyond the door are ones I've never seen.
Narrow service corridors, plain and functional, the working interior of a building that presents a much more expensive face to the world.
He moves through them with the total confidence of someone who knows every turn before he reaches it, no hesitation, no checking, like the layout of this place has been in his memory long enough to become instinct.
"Where are you taking me?" I ask because the silence is worse than talking to him.
"Out."
"Out where specifically?"
"Away from the police, which should be sufficient motivation for you to stop asking questions and keep moving."
I do keep moving. I also keep asking questions, because something about this man makes me want to push back, even when pushing back is demonstrably not in my best interest, which is a new and entirely unwelcome quality to discover about myself at three in the morning.
"How do you know this building so well? I've worked here for four months and I didn't know half of these corridors existed," I demand.
He glances back at me once, just briefly. A tick moves at the edge of his mouth. "Because I built it," he says. "It's my club."
I process this while he takes us through a turn into a corridor so narrow we're nearly shoulder to shoulder, and I become acutely, unhelpfully aware of how much space he takes up, and how little of it that leaves for me.
His club. That means the man dragging me along with him is Victor Rozovsky, owner of the Onyx.
The private corridors, the passages that don't appear on any floor plan — all of it is his.
Which means the body on the floor is his problem, and Pavel is his problem.
And I am, for reasons I have not yet been able to fully construct, a problem he has decided to handle personally.
Instead of letting Pavel handle me the way he had wanted to.
I should be grateful for that, and I am, I genuinely am, but I am also furious at him in a way I cannot entirely account for.
He stops at a door I would not have identified as a door — it's flush with the wall, no visible handle, no frame gap, just a seam so fine it disappears in the dim light.
He does something with his hand that I can't track, and it opens, and beyond it is a small room — metal shelving, locked cases along one wall, a single overhead bulb, the particular cold of a space that never quite warms up.
He pulls it shut behind us. In the smaller space, he is more — more everything, more there, filling the room in a way that I am not going to think about too closely because thinking about it too closely leads somewhere I am not going.
I step back, attempting to put any increment of distance between us.
Until my back hits the shelving and I’m forced to look up at him.
"Your clothes," he says.
I stare at him. Not understanding.
"Take them off," he says.
For one full second, I just stare at him.
“Excuse me?”
“Did I stutter?” He says, irritation seeping into his voice over the accent. “Take your clothes off.”
I feel the heat climb my cheeks so fast it's almost impressive, a full, furious blush that I am completely powerless to stop and deeply resentful of, as I object.
"Absolutely not. I am not going to sleep with you. What in the world is wrong with you? There’s a dead man out there, and the police will be here any minute! "
He looks at me for a moment — really looks, past the blood on my clothes at the woman beneath – and mutters something under his breath in Russian once more. Too quiet and too fast for me to catch.
“Ty menya pogubish.”
Something happens to his expression, almost an edge of humor crossing it. Not quite a smile, just a very slight shift at the corners of his mouth, the wrinkles beside his eyes, that manages to communicate amusement without committing to it. He nods downward, at my clothes.
I look down.
Blood. On my jacket, my shirt, my pants — the knees from where I was cleaning, the cuffs, a smear across the front I didn't notice in the dark of the main floor.
Considerably more than I would have guessed, considerably more than a convenient explanation will cover.
I look back up at him, suddenly so furious I could scream, which would be inadvisable for approximately eleven reasons, so instead I stand there being furious in frustrating silence.
I should be scared of him. I know I should be scared of him.
Every instinct I have spent years developing is pointing at this man, and saying dangerous in terms that couldn't be clearer.
But my body has apparently decided that the correct response to all of that is to be angry at him, which is a spectacular failure of self-preservation.
"Turn around," I demand.
"No."
"Turn. Around."
"I don't turn my back on people I don't know, and frankly don’t trust," he says, simply, without apology, like it's a principle he arrived at through experience and has never found reason to revisit.
His eyes stay on my face. "Take your jacket off first. Then the pants. Maybe we can salvage your shirt."
I hold his gaze for three full seconds. He holds mine back with no visible effort whatsoever, the effortless stillness of a man who has won more staring contests than he's lost and knows it. I look away first, which I am adding to the growing list of things I will be scolding myself for later.
With a relenting sigh, I shrug off my jacket and shove it at him.
He takes it with one hand, unbothered. Then takes off his own jacket — dark grey, clearly expensive, clearly built for a man with considerably broader shoulders than I have — and he holds it open between us, a curtain of fabric blocking his sightline to my lower half, without comment, which is somehow more irritating than if he'd made a production of it.
Because it requires him to step closer.
Very close. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him and smell his cologne.
A musky, intoxicating smell that I shouldn’t even be noticing, given my current circumstances.
I am shrugging my pants off and pulling on the pair of coverall pants he hands me, which I have no idea where he pulled from, and frankly don’t care, in the fastest thirty seconds of my life.
"You're blushing," he comments.
"I am not."
"You're extremely red for someone who isn’t going to sleep with me."
"Stop talking." I hop slightly as I get my second leg in and pull the waistband up. "Just stop talking."
He lowers the jacket. Steps back. His expression settled back into its previous unreachable shield, but the very edges of it are slightly softer now.
He holds the grey jacket out, offering it to me.
I take it because I have no better option, when I shrug it on, it falls to my mid-thigh.
Still warm from being on his shoulders only moments ago, and it smells like that intoxicating musky smell that I’m already associating as uniquely him.
He turns to the back wall of the room and does the same thing he did with the door before — a precise, practiced movement — and a panel opens outward to a passage so narrow it makes the service corridors look generous. Cold air breathes out of it, damp and close.
"Walk," he says, nodding to indicate I step out before him.
I walk without further comment.
The passage runs along what must be the outer edge of the building, and it goes on long enough that I stop counting steps and start cataloging every turn, trying to build a map I can use later if I need to.
When it finally ends, we are outside, on the south side of the building, a completely different street from the one the club's entrance faces, the sound of police sirens carrying clearly from the other side of the block.
I breathe in the cold air and feel, briefly, like I might actually survive this evening. A car is parked at the curb. Black, clean, expensive. He moves toward it, the lights blipping to life with the press of his hand against the door handle as he opens the passenger door.
"Get in," he says. "I'll take you home."
"You don't know where I live."
He looks at me, a look that is all command, and no retreat.
"I'm not getting in your car," I argue.
"It's the quickest—"
"I appreciate what you did in there." I mean it, and I need him to know I mean it before I say the next part. "Genuinely. But I am not getting in your car and I am not telling you where I live and I am not—"
I pause dramatically, looking over his shoulder, at something invisible, watching his attention shift, very abruptly, his head turning on a swivel, eyes moving to a point above and behind his left shoulder.
It is the oldest misdirection in existence, I know it, but I’m relieved when he falls for it nonetheless.
By the time he’s turned back, I've already taken three steps sideways. I turn those three steps into a dead run.
Six blocks. I know this route, I've taken this bus a hundred times, I know every turn between this street and my building, and I run all of them without stopping, without looking back to see if he's following.
He's not following. Something in me already knows he's not following, and that is almost worse than if he were, because a man who doesn't chase you when you run is a man who already knows he doesn't have to.
I hit my building door with enough force to bounce off it slightly, even as it opens.
Skipping the elevator and taking the stairs at a steady pace.
My keys are in my hand, and I'm in the door with every lock secure behind me, leaning against the door in the dark before I finally collapse to catch my breath.
The building is asleep. Down the hall, Evie is in her room behind her locked door, safe, exactly where I left her. And I’m home, wearing a stranger's jacket, with blood staining my shirt, and my hands shaking uncontrollably.
I push off the door, heading to the bathroom, running the water cold, and holding my hands under it until they stop shaking. I stare at my face in the mirror, and I look like someone who has had a hell of a night, which is accurate.
Staring at my reflection, thinking about everything I just witnessed, and Evie asleep in the next room, and everything I have built since we came here, about the promise I made her, and everything that I am not going to lose.
Not to Pavel, and whatever threat might have come next.
And not, I tell myself firmly, to a Victor Rozovsky with his blue eyes and intoxicating scent.
I take the jacket off, but I don't throw it away; instead, I stuff it in the back of the towel cabinet. I tell myself I’ll deal with it later.