22. Brooklyn
brOOKLYN
He brought me into the city after his mother came. I felt the change in him, the way he keeps me closer now, like proximity is a weapon he can hold against whatever’s coming.
The penthouse sits at the top of his hotel, all black glass and cold quiet. And three floors down, behind an unmarked door and a man who knows my face, is the thing my husband owns and hates in equal measure.
It’s a beautiful kind of rot.
Low red light, leather and smoke, a stage no one’s watching because the real performance is happening at the tables, in the booths, in the open.
Men I’d recognize from the front pages with their hands on women they bought by the hour, eating food off their skin, fucking in shadowed alcoves like the dark makes it private.
This is where the people who run the country come to be the thing they really are. And Lorik owns it.
Lorik smiles at these men and takes their secrets and, I’m starting to understand, does something with them in the dark that he won’t tell me, that gets men killed in our foyer.
I find him in a back alcove with a laptop and a glass of water and an expression like he’d rather be anywhere on earth.
And I find her draped half across his table.
She’s gorgeous, of course she is, all legs and lashes and professional confidence. She’s just reached over and closed his laptop with one red-nailed finger to make him look at her, and she’s leaning in, and I stop walking.
Something happens in my chest. It’s fast and hot and total and I don’t have a name for it yet.
I just know my whole body has gone still and electric, the way it does a half-second before a fight, except there’s no fight here, there’s just a beautiful woman touching my husband and a sound starts up low in my own ears like a kettle coming to a boil.
Then I see what he does, and the kettle screams.
He recoils.
Lorik Kovaci, who holds a room without moving, who has never once in my presence flinched from anything.
He leans back hard into the leather, away from her, his whole body angling for distance like her touch is a live wire.
He doesn’t let people touch him unless he has to.
I learned that weeks ago, watched him reroute me away from a hundred hands.
Only his wife. And some possessive, animalistic part of me that I did not know lived in my body sees him pull away from her and thinks, with savage satisfaction, that’s right.
And then thinks: mine.
I cross the rest of the floor on legs that feel like someone else’s.
“Take your hands off my husband.”
I say it calmly. I’m proud of the calm. The woman straightens, looks me up and down, the short pink dress Lorik laid out for me, the one that ends at the absolute edge of decency, and laughs, low and amused, like I’m adorable.
“Aw.” She doesn’t move her hand. If anything she settles deeper onto his table.
“Go back up to your cage, sweetheart. This is where the grown-ups come to play.” She trails one finger down the length of his black tie, slow, watching me the whole time, and tips her head.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed? It’s a school night.
Run along before Daddy has to explain the age of consent to his lawyer. ”
I hit her so hard I feel it in my shoulder.
It’s a clean shot, the one my father drilled into me ten thousand times, hip and pivot and follow-through, and her eyes roll white before she’s even all the way off his table. She goes down in a heap of long legs and a spilled drink and does not get up.
The whole alcove goes silent.
I’m standing over her with my knuckles singing and my chest heaving, and I turn to look at my husband, and what I find on his face stops my heart.
He is not angry. He is not anything I have a word for.
He’s staring at me like I’m the first sunrise after a year of night, his pupils blown, swallowing the brown, his jaw slack, his eyes dragging down the length of me in that dress and snagging like they’ve forgotten how to move.
There is a flush riding high on his cheekbones and a tension cording every line of his body and I watch the most controlled man alive short-circuit, right there, over me, over the sight of me dropping a woman for putting her hands where they don’t belong.
“Brooklyn,” he says, and my name comes out wrecked.
I don’t get to answer, because that’s when the bouncer reaches us.
I didn’t see the manager wave him over. I just register a wall of a man closing on me fast, a hand coming up to grab my arm, and for one half a second my stomach drops, because I’ve just decked an employee in my husband’s club and there’s a chance, a real chance, that the man I’m still learning is about to let me find out exactly what he does to people who cause problems—
Lorik moves.
I have never seen anything that fast. One instant he’s seated and undone; the next he’s on his feet with a pistol up and level, and the sound of it is enormous in the small space.
The bouncer’s hand never lands, because the bouncer is on the floor with a hole between his eyes and a surprised expression he’ll wear into the ground.
The club erupts. Screaming, scrambling, the rich and the bought stampeding for the exits, and through all of it Lorik doesn’t even look at the body.
He reaches out and pulls me into him, hauls me against his chest, one arm a band of iron across my back, and turns to face his manager, who has gone the kind of gray of old meat.
“Fire her.” Lorik nods at the woman crumpled at our feet, his voice perfectly, terrifyingly level over the chaos.
“Tonight. And if you ever again send a man to put his hands on my wife—” He doesn’t raise the gun, doesn’t need to.
“You’ll leave this room the same way he did. For thinking about it. Are we clear?”
The manager nods so hard I’m afraid his neck will give.
And then Lorik is moving, walking me backward and out, his body curled around mine like a shield.
The second the unmarked door swings shut behind us, the noise cuts off and the air in the corridor changes.
It goes thick and charged. He stabs the elevator call button and I can feel him shaking.
Not with rage, I realize, looking up at him.
With want. The whole long line of him is vibrating with it, his hand fisted in the pink material at the back of my dress, his breath ragged, his eyes when they drop to mine pure black fire.
The doors open. He hauls me inside and they close on us and the box starts to climb, and he’s already reaching for his jacket, shrugging out of it, his voice gone to gravel.
“Floor. Now. I need my mouth on you, I can’t make it to the top, I can’t—”
But I’m already on my knees.
I don’t decide to do it. It’s the same primal thing that named him mine across that floor, the thing that put a woman on the ground for touching what’s mine, and now it has me kneeling on the elevator floor in my obscene little dress with my husband’s belt in my hands, and the look on his face when he understands what I’m doing.
Shocked, coming apart, grateful—and it is the single most powerful thing I have ever felt.
I have him free before he can get a word out.
I know him now, the weight of him, the warm steel of the barbells up his length, and I take him into my mouth.
The sound he makes is not a sound a controlled man makes.
His head goes back against the mirrored wall.
His hand finds my hair, careful even now, not pushing, just holding, his hips trembling with the effort of staying still for me.
The elevator stops on a floor.
The doors open.
There’s a couple waiting. I feel Lorik’s whole body lock, expecting me to flinch, to pull off, to be mortified. Instead I take him deeper, all the way, my eyes flicking up to his while the strangers gasp and recoil and the doors mercifully slide shut, and I watch the last of his control die.
“Fuck,” he breathes, broken, his head rolling on the mirror, his hand spasming in my hair. “Look at you. Doing this where anyone could—God, you don’t care, you actually don’t care who sees you take me, do you, you perfect, vicious—”
The words dissolve. He stops trying. He just gives himself to me, finally, fully, the way I’ve watched him refuse to give himself to anyone, his hips losing their discipline, his breath sawing out of him in my name.
The doors open and close on two more floors and I never stop, and he never tells me to, and somewhere over the city in a glass box I take the most dangerous man in Washington completely apart with my mouth and feel like a goddess doing it.
He comes down my throat with a sound like something tearing loose, both hands cradling my head, my name a curse and a prayer all at once, and then the doors slide open on the top floor and he’s hauling me up off my knees before I’ve finished, dragging me up his body and crushing his mouth to mine, tasting himself on my tongue and groaning into it, walking me backward into the dark penthouse with his hands everywhere at once.
“Mine,” he says against my lips, fierce, wrecked, his forehead dropping to mine.
It isn’t a question. It’s a demand and a confession and the truest thing either of us has said since the altar.
“Say it, Brooklyn. You hit a woman for touching me. You took me apart in front of strangers. You don’t get to pretend anymore. Say it.”
And I’m so far gone, so electrified, so completely undone by the discovery that I am as possessive of this monster as he is of me, that I don’t even think about the locked rooms in my head or the boxes I keep or the man I’m supposed to be saving myself from.
“Yours,” I tell him.
And I mean it.