Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Yana
“Don’t push your luck.”
He says it without raising his voice.
He is leaning against the edge of the desk with his back to the light. His shirt is still open at the throat. The collar is pulled crooked. The cuff is dark with the blood from his hand. The cut has stopped bleeding, but he has not bandaged it.
I let my eyes move over him.
I do not mean to, but I look over at him anyway, and I get lost in it.
The line of his shoulder. The tendon at the side of his neck.
The snake at his collarbone, the head of it visible now that the shirt has shifted, the body disappearing down into the fabric I have not yet seen.
My chest is warm, my pulse is in the side of my throat, I am still standing where I have stood for the last ten minutes, and I have not been able to make myself leave.
I look away, and I force myself to think about Lucia. She has been on my mind since our last encounter, and my gut hasn’t rested.
She was in bed and could not lift a glass of water without dropping it.
She is the same woman standing up off that bed with a strength her body has no business holding, pushing me behind her, screaming at the door.
I think about her again, three days ago, on her feet, shoving him off balance hard enough that he went down on his hip.
I have seen what dying looks like. Lucia is not far from it on a bad day. And yet on a bad day, she produces a kind of strength that does not match the body she is in.
That is not natural.
Sickness does not work that way. Bodies do not work that way.
A woman who cannot reach for a glass should not be able to manhandle a Don to the floor.
Something is wrong with her, yes. But underneath the wrong, there is something else wrong.
Something on top of the illness. It’s something unnatural. I have no proof, just my gut.
He is watching me, and I look back at him.
He walks past me to the door. He closes it. He turns the key.
I hear it click.
“What are you doing?”
He does not answer me. He walks back to me, and as he walks, he unbuttons one button at the top of his shirt that was already open, and then the next, and then the one below it. His fingers are unhurried. By the time he reaches me, his shirt is open down to the middle of his chest.
The snake.
It comes down out of the collar of his shirt and curves across the muscle of his pectoral and disappears under the fabric on the other side. Its detail is fine. Its body has scales drawn in. The eye, just below his collarbone, is open and watching.
But beneath it are scars, dried-up old scars. I stare at it.
“What are you doing?”
His hand finds my wrist, and he pulls. I do not let myself be pulled, but he is stronger than he is fair, and he closes the half pace between us anyway, and I am suddenly very close to him.
I can feel his breath on my face.
I can feel my heart against my own ribs.
I am reminded again of what his fingers did inside me.
I think of his mouth on my skin. I think of the gag of my own underwear pressed between my teeth and the helpless sound that came out of me anyway.
I think of the smell of him because the smell of him is in the air right now, and my body is not asking my brain for permission to recognize it.
He bends and brings his mouth to my ear.
“You have been tempting me a lot lately.”
His teeth find my earlobe. A small bite. It hurts enough to send a tremor through me that I cannot hide.
“Is this how you negotiate?” he murmurs. “Hmm? You have decided to seduce me into giving you what you want. Is that the strategy? Get me to want you badly enough that I open the door for you. You are softer than you look, Lupa.”
I swallow. My throat is doing something it should not be doing.
I have to keep my voice steady. “Your sister,” I say. “If you tell me how she got sick. The original injury. If you tell me what you know, I can help.”
His hand on my wrist tightens.
I feel the change in his body and then in his face. He does not pull back. He stays where he is, his mouth at my ear, his other hand at the side of my throat, but everything in him has gone hard underneath the closeness. His smile is still in place when I tilt my head to look at him.
The eyes are not smiling.
“I see your game.”
“It’s not a game.”
“You think you can pull on my sister to get the upper hand. To learn the thing nobody is supposed to learn about me. To carry it home in your pocket. So that Kirill knows. So that the next time we sit across a table, you have something to put on it.”
“Giovanni —”
“That’s not very smart, lupa. Truly. I expected better from you.”
He pulls back enough to look at me.
There is a small smile playing under his mouth, the worst version of his smile, the one in his face and not in his eyes, the one I have learned to recognize as the moment before he does something.
“I would not want,” he says softly, “to have to use Christov.”
I go very still.
For a half second, my mouth is dry.
I let myself feel half a second. I let it pass. Then I bring my eyes up, I meet his, and I let the corner of my mouth lift in a small smile of my own.
“Use him,” I say.
His face does not change.
“Use him. Go ahead. I dare you.” I keep the small smile in place.
I let the smile widen by a fraction. He looks at me. His eyes have gone darker. The small smile is gone.
I shove him in the chest. I step back into the space I have made.
“I am not playing games with you,” I say. “Leave my brother out of your mouth.”
He laughs. “Sore spot?” he asks.
“Yes, it is.”
I am not pretending otherwise. We both know what is in each other’s chests.
I take a breath.
“Your sister,” I say. “Listen to me. Just listen. I do not know what she has. I am not a doctor. But I will tell you what I do know. Her illness and her physical weakness do not look natural to me. A woman who cannot lift a glass of water does not have the strength to shove a grown man across a study floor. Today and yesterday, she —”
His face has changed. I pause.
He is not smiling anymore.
“And the room,” I say. “You said you have specialists. But the woman I have seen in that room is not getting better. She is getting worse. Faster, I would bet, than she was getting worse a year ago. There is something —”
His hand is at my throat.
It is so fast that I did not see him cross the distance. One moment, my back is straight, and my breath is in my chest, and the next his palm is around the side of my neck, and his fingers and thumb are pressing on either side of my windpipe, and my air is going.
He does not squeeze hard enough to crush.
He squeezes hard enough to make me feel it.
I feel the restriction and feel my own pulse against his fingers. I feel the room tilt one degree and right itself. I do not reach for his wrist. I stand where I am, and I look at him.
“You don’t listen,” he says quietly. “Do you?”
I breathe what air I can.
“Will killing me,” I rasp, “make her better?”
His fingers stay on my throat.
For a long second, he does not move, and I think he might.
Then his grip loosens, and the blood comes back into my head. My throat opens, and I pull in a breath that is not as steady as I would like. He looks at me for what feels like a long time but is probably ten seconds.
Then he steps back. He drops his hand from my throat. Then he steps back in and lifts me.
I am off the floor.
His hands are on my ribs, and he has lifted me cleanly. I should be fighting. I do start to fight. My knee comes up. He turns me and presses me back down, so my feet meet the floor again, but his hands stay where they are, and his body is against mine, and there is no daylight between us.
“What is wrong with you?!”
His hand closes around my jaw, and he tilts my face up, and he kisses me.
It is not soft.
His mouth is hot, his teeth find my lower lip immediately, and he bites. I cry into his mouth. The bite from the car opens again. I taste my own blood.
He pulls back, and his thumb is at my chin. His eyes are on mine. The small smile is back.
“Sorry,” he says. “I am thinking of creative ways to shut you up.”
“Giovanni —”
He kisses me again, and he bites again, harder. I cry into his mouth, and he swallows the sound and presses closer, and his hand at my jaw tightens, and there is nowhere for me to go.
My body is responding.
I hate that I notice it. I hate that I notice it the same way I noticed it last night and yesterday in the study and in the cold yard with a gun running down my ribs.
I hate that my hand has crept to the front of his shirt and is gripping the fabric instead of pushing him away.
I hate that my knees have stopped trying to drive themselves between his legs.
I hate that the snake is against my palm now, that I can feel the warmth of the skin underneath the ink, and that I am thinking about putting my mouth on the eye of it.
I hate the warmth moving down through my body for the second day in a row, and the way it is winning.
He pulls back enough to look at me.
His mouth is wet. So is mine. I can taste blood. I can taste him.
He smiles.
That dangerous, half-lidded smile that makes my stomach tighten even as my mind screams at me to move. Before I can, he reaches back with one hand and pulls his shirt the rest of the way off. The fabric slides off his shoulders and drops to the floor.
God.
His body is carved from muscle under olive skin with broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist; traces of scars cover him everywhere.
The snake tattoo coils across the scarred chest, the head resting just below his collarbone, its unblinking eye staring straight at me.
More ink decorates his ribs and disappears beneath his black pants, intricate lines that shift with every breath.
I swallow hard.
He steps in again, crowding me against the desk, and grabs my face with one large hand, fingers digging into my jaw. His eyes lock onto mine, black and burning.
“One day, I’m going to fuck you so hard, Lupa,” he says, voice low and rough, “that you forget how to scheme for Kirill. The only name in that pretty head will be mine. Giovanni, over and over until you can’t think of anything else.”
I shove at his chest, palms flat against warm skin and hard muscle, but he doesn’t budge.
He catches my wrists, pins them behind my back with one hand, and kisses me again.
His mouth is ruthless. His tongue forces its way past my lips, stroking deep, tasting me like he already owns me.
I feel hostage to it, to the solid wall of his body pressing me down.
My will to fight drains away just like last night, replaced by treacherous heat flooding my veins.
My mouth softens under his, and my lips part wider. I hate how easily he does this to me.
He pulls away and looks down at me with a grin. “Kirill doesn’t shut you up like this, does he?” he murmurs, smug even while wrecked.
I try to push him off and sit up, but he catches me easily and pulls me back down against him, tucking my head under his chin.
“Be a good girl,” he says.
I should shove him away. I should hate the way he’s holding me. But more than I want to push him off… I like him being there. The solid heat of his body, the steady thump of his heart against my cheek.
What is wrong with me?