Chapter 9 - Iosif #2
“I didn’t think about that,” she says.
I nod. “I know. I’m just saying… there’s what you can see, and what you don’t, what you can lose sight of. There’s good with the bad. You have to find it.”
Janella’s expression shifts. I’m almost certain she’s going to shut down again. But she doesn’t. She exhales, and all the tension leaves her body at once. “I miss my mom,” she breathes. Her breath fogs in wisps of smoke. “My mom was good.”
“So, tell me about her.”
Astonishing me, she hooks her arm through mine, going back to licking her cone, pulling me into step with her.
“She had a café. The Great Escape. It wasn’t anything grand. Just a small and cozy space. There were only ten tables, I think. But my mom was magical. She could take the shittiest place and make it enchanting.”
“Did you work on it?”
Her laugh is light. Sweet. “I was too young. But I’d sit at the counter after school, doing homework. She’d make me hot cocoa and lemon sugar cookies. We’d dance to her beat-up record player while cleaning. She had a wish tree people could hang their dreams on.”
“She sounds great.”
“She was.” She finishes her cone with a crunch and licks her fingers clean. “I think, when she—when she left me, I lost my faith in good. I think it may have died with her.”
I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I plant one at the small of her back. She leans into the contact. I guide us around the corner.
Janella lets the silence blanket her. I don’t know what she’s thinking. I don’t know what I am, either.
“I don’t think you’re weak,” I say finally. “I just don’t understand why you’ve never run. You’re beautiful and smart. Your mother’s been gone for a long time. You work at that fucking club. But you have no money of your own.”
I don’t understand you. And maybe that’s what’s eating at me.
I’m good at reading people. It’s probably what keeps me alive, despite my taste for chaos. I can spot a liar at fifty paces, predict violence before it explodes, see through masks people love to perform with. But Janella, a walking contradiction, perplexes me.
One moment, she’s meek and red-cheeked. The next, she’s flinging a dagger at a man’s dick. I try to remember she’s fucking fragile? She walks through the place where she was last broken like she owns it. I pat myself on the back for having saved her, and she shows me she can save herself.
I don’t know what the fuck to do with her—except to know her.
I don’t understand her, but it’s fucking killing me not to.
We’re almost to the apartment building now. It feels too soon.
“I tried to leave once,” Janella confesses just in time. I’m not sure I didn’t mishear her. My stomach drops like a boulder. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she says, as if thrown by that. “Yes. I was eighteen. I’d been saving what I could. Hiding money like a squirrel does nuts, you know? Whatever I could get away with. I honestly thought I could—”
She swallows thickly. Her voice has become hushed, hurting.
“I was going to start over somewhere new. I was going to open my own café. He sold my mom’s after she died. We were in a lot of debt. I was going to make my own happy place and make as many happy memories as I could. I was going to drown out all the bad. Until life happened.”
I don’t want to know. I do. I don’t.
“What happened?” my mouth asks.
“He found me three days in at a motel in Providence,” Janella answers, numb and matter-of-fact. “I don’t know how. But it didn’t go well.”
I don’t have to ask how it went. I know.
The doorman bows his head and holds open the door for us. I rein in my rage and ask her, “How bad?”
Janella presses the elevator button. Her hands aren’t shaking tonight.
“Enough that I never tried again.” The elevator arrives. But she doesn’t step through the door. She looks up at me, the look on her face hardened. “I learned my place.”
The implications of her words wreak havoc inside me. Fuck logic and rationale—I want to walk right back out into the night. I want to find Cillian Driscoll. I want to make him relive every fear, every wound, every tear he’s caused. And then I want to fucking end him.
“He will never touch you again,” I bite out, and it comes out as a promise.
I don’t take it back.
“—I know.”
Janella steps into the elevator, and something in her eyes pulls me in after her. I pull the fob out of my jacket pocket and press the button to the penthouse floor.
“Do you?” I ask her. “Or are you still humoring me?”
There’s that grim, sad smile on her lips again. “Does it matter, Iosif?”
“Yes,” I hiss, staring at her.
Her passivity is intolerable to me, for more reasons than I can count.
She turns away from me and totters ahead as fast as her heels will allow. My stride keeps up fine. I’m not letting her get away so easily.
I seize her and whip her around by her arm. Déjà-vu washes over me.
It doesn’t feel real that we played this game in this same hallway only hours ago. A lifetime has passed since.
“Stop running away from me every time I see the real you.”
Janella looks up at me, and her eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them.
“Stop catching me.”
I smile down at her, cocking a brow. “Someone has to, doll.”
It comes out sounding like a line. Most times in my life, it would’ve been one. With Janella, I mean it. And I fucking like it, the way that someone is me. I don’t have to think about it to know this.
I think of the men in my family—the way Trifon stares at Yulia like she’s the answer to a question he never thought to ask.
How Val’s entire body orients to wherever Gela is in a room, like a compass finding north.
Only weeks ago, I’d been sure they were idiots entrenched in the honeymoon phase.
Our world is one full of knives; what use is there of reeling someone soft into it?
Now, look at me. Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.
Look at us standing in the same hallway where I crowded her against the wall. Where I told her I could make her beg.
“Iosif,” she whispers to me now.
It sounds like a question.
I’ve never felt guilty for any pleasure I partake in, much to many’s distaste. I am no stranger to desire. It floods me now.
I don’t know who moves first. Maybe it’s fucking gravity. Who fucking cares? I drop the forgotten, mostly full cup of ice cream. My hands are in her hair. Her hands bundle fistfuls of my shirt.
Her breath is sweet.
My head lowers to hers.
“I can’t—” she gasps and stumbles backward.
We’re too close to her door.
She slams it shut before I can move an inch.
I blaze a trail to my bedroom in a stupor. There is fire in my veins, blistering me from the inside out. Consuming me.
I shouldn’t think about her.
I fucking know that.
But I am.
She’s all over me. My head is full of the way her eyes went dark before she ran. Those emotions all over her face weren’t fear. I know what that looks like on her. Her face looked like the heat clawing up my spine now.
Janella wanted me.
And she still ran.
I press my palms against my desk, trying to breathe through the arousal strangling me.
This is nothing new, right? I’ve wanted women before.
I’ve fucking had them, six ways to goddamn Sunday.
I’ve never had to agonize over sex. When I want it, I take it.
I’ve always taken it, any fruit that’s been ripe for the picking.
I can’t do it to her.
Not even with her face and those breathy moans of hers in my head. Her perfume clings to my clothes, and a memory of her breath is on my tongue. I crave more.
All I can do is think about the way she’d taste. About what sounds she makes when she comes. What she would look like in the morning, with my touch branding her all fucking over. That plush mouth of hers swollen from being claimed by mine.
Something deep inside me knows she’d like it.
Wouldn’t she?
Fabric gives way beneath my frenetic touch.
I sigh as my fist wraps around my hard cock. It isn’t one of relief.