CHAPTER 5 #2
Because I've been watching his hands the whole time — strategist's habit borrowed from cloth, you learn where the tension lives by where it shows — and his hands are too still.
A man who's just conceded a fight he wanted to win lets something go in his hands.
Mateo's haven't moved. They're holding onto the edge of the desk like it might be the only thing in the room he's allowed to grip.
And I am cruel enough, or honest enough, or simply tired enough of being the only one in this house with her wants showing, to put my finger on the seam and pull.
"You wanted to say no to all of it," I say, soft now, stepping closer, close enough that the cedar and vodka of him is a temperature on my skin.
"And you conceded the second I gave you a version where I'm never out of your reach.
Call it strategy if you like, Pakhan, but underneath it you simply needed to know where I am.
" I tilt my head. "There's a word for a man who needs to know where a woman is at all hours. Several. None of them are security."
I watch it land. I watch the deep water turn over.
"Careful," he says. Very quiet. The watch ticks.
"I'm a couturier," I say. "Careful is the whole job.
Pins between the lips, blade near the silk, one wrong cut and the whole thing's ruined.
I know exactly how careful I'm being. " I'm close enough now that I can see the burn scar where his shirtsleeve's pushed back, the pale smooth length of it along the inside of his right forearm, the one thing on him that isn't armor, and I have the insane impulse to touch it, to ask the cloth of it what fire made that grain. "The question is whether you do."
He moves.
There's no run-up to it, no escalation I can chart, which is its own answer — a deliberate man losing the thread of his deliberation.
One second I'm reading him and the next his hand is at the front of my throat, warm and broad and gentle as a held breath, the heel of it light against the hollow where my pulse has started slamming, and he's walking me backward in slow unhurried steps until my shoulder blades meet the oxblood leather of the study door and the cold brass of the handle bites the back of my hip.
His thumb rests under my jaw. He leaves my windpipe its whole easy width — I can breathe, I can speak, I could tell him to stop and the word would come out clean — and somehow that's what makes it unbearable, that it's all hold and no harm, a hand at my throat that says here you are, I have you, I am choosing not to, and my whole traitor body lights up like a window at dusk.
"You came down here," he says, low, his mouth close enough that I feel the shape of the words on my own lips, "in your stockings.
Without your shoes. To stand in my study and read me to my face like a length of cloth and dare me to be more careful than I am.
" The thumb under my jaw shifts a fraction, tilts my chin up.
"I am the most careful man you will ever meet, Amara. Do not mistake that for safe."
And he kisses me.
The kiss arrives certain — harder than soft and worse than cruel for how sure it is — a kiss that lands like a verdict already written and signed, his mouth taking mine the way a man closes an argument he's tired of having, slow and complete and absolutely sure.
I taste the clean burn of vodka he never drank.
His hand stays at my throat, light, a collar made of warmth, and his other hand finds the inward turn of my waist and follows it down to the flare of my hip and holds there, palm spread, fingers spanning the give of me like he's measuring something he means to come back for, and through all of it the old brace stays down in me, the old waiting for the wince stays quiet, the old ear listening for for a woman like you hears nothing at all.
There's only his hand on my hip treating my softness as the whole point of him being here, only his mouth telling mine in no words at all that he has thought about this, that the granite Pakhan has stood in this exact room and thought about exactly this, and the knowing of it pours down my spine like warm wax.
I should push him off. I have a free hand. I have a voice.
I grab his shirt instead.
I get a fistful of fine charcoal cotton over his sternum and I haul him closer, the wrong direction entirely, and I hear the small wrecked sound he makes against my mouth, low in his chest, the sound of a wall discovering it has a crack in it, and God help me I want to widen the crack with my thumbnail. My back arches off the door.
My breasts press against the hard plane of him and his hand tightens on my hip, and for one long swung-open moment we are not a Sokolov and a Costa, not a contract and a clause, not the man whose family ruined mine and the woman who came down to win an argument — we are just two people who have been starving in the same house and decided, briefly, terribly, to eat.
And then he stops.
He stops the way he ends everything, all at once and complete, the motion finishing clean instead of trailing off.
His mouth lifts from mine. His hand comes away from my throat, slow, deliberate, and I feel the absence of its warmth like a draft.
He doesn't step back. He stays close, his forehead nearly to mine, both of us breathing like we've climbed something, and when he speaks his voice has gone rough at the edges in a way I've not heard from him, a stone with the polish worn off.
"No," he says.
For a second I think he means no, this isn't happening, and the humiliation rises up my neck hot and fast — but his hand is still on my hip, his thumb dragging once, slow, over the full swell of me, and a man holds on like that only when the no he just said was aimed at himself.
"Not until you ask," he says.
I go still against the door.
"You'll tell yourself I took it. " His gray eyes hold mine, and there's something in them I wasn't braced for, something that's been carrying the empire so long its hand has shaped to the weight.
"Tomorrow, or next week, when you remember whose name is on the gate and whose ruin paid for the roof.
You'll tell yourself the Sokolov pressed you to the door and took it, and you'll be able to hate me clean. " A muscle works in his jaw.
"I won't give you that. Whatever this is between us, you will not get to rename it conquest later to make it bearable. If you want me, Amara, you will ask. With your own mouth. And then it's yours, and there's no one to blame for it but the two of us. Only then, and not a moment sooner."
He steps back.
The cold rushes into the space where his body was.
My back is still flat to the oxblood leather, my fist still half-curled where his shirt was, the brass handle still cold against my hip, and I am shaking — actually shaking, a fine tremor I can't will out of my hands — with a fury and a want so braided together I couldn't find the seam between them with my shears and my whole life's training.
Because he's done the unforgivable thing. He's put the power in my hands.