23. Lorik
LORIK
Idon’t sleep, so I get to watch the sun come up the length of my wife.
She’s sprawled across me in the wreck of the penthouse bed, one leg thrown over mine, her dark hair fanned across my chest, drooling faintly on my sternum, and I lie perfectly still beneath the weight of her so I don’t lose a second of it.
There are men who would tell you the most powerful thing in this city is a senator, or a court, or the gun I keep within reach even now.
They’re wrong. The most powerful thing in this city is the slow rise and fall of this woman’s breathing against my ribs, and the fact that she fell asleep on me on purpose, and that last night she put a woman on the floor for daring to touch what’s hers.
Hers. I turn the word over in the dark like a stone I want to keep.
I have stopped pretending. Somewhere between a needle in a bathroom and this exact sunrise, the lie I told myself, that this was revenge, that she was a means I count in leverage, burned all the way down to ash.
I love her.
I love her the way the drowning love air, total and undignified and without a single condition, and it is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to me, and I would not trade it to be safe again for anything in the world.
I could watch her every second of every day for the rest of my life and never once grow tired of it.
She stirs against me, makes the small grumbling sound she makes surfacing out of sleep.
Her eyes open, and the first thing she does, before the armor, before the smart mouth, is smile at me.
Sleepy. Unguarded. Mine. It only lasts a second.
Then she remembers who she’s supposed to be, and the wariness slides back down, and I love that too, the war in her, the way she fights what we both already know.
“You let them watch me,” she says.
There it is.
“In the elevator.” She props herself on my chest, studying me, her chin on her stacked hands.
“Strangers. You let the doors open and you let them see me on my knees and you didn’t care even a little.
” Her eyes narrow. “Most men would’ve lost their minds.
Possessive as you are, I figured you’d kill anyone who looked. But you just—let them look.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, because I can’t be near her and not touch her, that ship sailed a long time ago.
“Because you’ve got it backwards,” I tell her, “the way most people do. Listen to me, because I’m only going to explain my whole soul to you once, and then we never have to do it again.”
I tip her chin up so she’s looking at me.
“I don’t care if the world sees my wife half-dressed.
I don’t care if they see you naked. I don’t care if they watch me take you apart on a table in the middle of that club with the lights all the way up.
Your body is a masterpiece, Brooklyn. It would be a crime against the species to keep it in a box.
Maybe that makes me wrong. I could watch you every second of every day and never tire of it, and I want the whole rotten world to see exactly what it doesn’t get to have.
” My thumb strokes her jaw. “So let them look. You, my smart-mouthed wife who thinks she can take on men three times her size, the most beautiful, vicious thing I have ever put my mouth on, are mine. Only mine. Looking is free.”
Her breath has gone shallow. “And touching?”
“That’s the other half.” The warmth drops out of my voice, and I let her see what lives underneath it, because she should know exactly what she married.
“What’s mine gets respected. In our home.
Here. At whatever garbage party we’re forced to attend.
Anywhere on this earth. Someone disrespects you with their words—” I think of the stripper, of isn’t it past your bedtime.
“They lose the ability to speak. Someone disrespects you with their eyes, looks at you like a thing instead of a person, I will blind them. Permanently.”
She doesn’t flinch. My girl never flinches. She just arches one brow, that infuriating, gorgeous defiance, and says, “And let me guess. Someone touches you, you’ll cut off their hand?”
“No.” I hold her eyes. “Someone touches my wife, they’re dead. There’s no hand. There’s no warning. There’s a body, and a hole in the ground, and me coming home to you with their blood still on my cuffs. That’s not a threat, doll. It’s just a fact. You should know who you share a bed with.”
For a long moment she just looks at me, and I brace for the fight, the you’re insane, the recoil—
Instead she leans forward and kisses me, slow and deep and certain, and when she pulls back her eyes are doing something complicated and warm that I want to live inside of.
“Okay,” she says simply.
Okay. Like I’ve just told her it might rain. Like a girl raised by killers hearing a man promise to kill for her and deciding it’s the most romantic thing she’s ever heard. God, I love her.
I almost say it. The words are right there behind my teeth, have been for days. I love you, and the second confession underneath the first, the bigger one, the one with a mask and a rooftop and nearly two years of text messages attached to it.
She’s warm and open in my arms and she just said okay to me promising to murder for her, and there will never be a cleaner moment than this to hand her the whole truth and pray she doesn’t run.
I don’t. Because if I tell her now, if she learns the man who took her at the end of a needle is the same man she handed her whole innocent heart in the dark, she won’t hear a husband saying I love you.
She’ll hear a hunter who sprang his trap and called it a marriage. She has to fall for Lorik first. Not her stalker. Me. I am a patient man about exactly one thing on this earth, and she is it. So I swallow the truth again, and I hold her, and I hate myself a familiar, almost comfortable amount.
It’s Cas who ruins it.
The knock is two short raps. Our signal, the one that means now, the one that means business has arrived and won’t wait for me to be finished being a man instead of a krye.
I ease Brooklyn off my chest, press a kiss to her hair, and pull on slacks, and meet him in the penthouse foyer with the door half-closed behind me.
He’s holding a box.
It’s beautiful. Matte black, ribboned in deep blue, the kind of packaging that costs more than the gift inside is worth, except the gift inside is worth a great deal, because when Cas lifts the lid there’s a necklace coiled on black silk, sapphires and diamonds, easily seven figures, the kind of thing you put on a woman to mark her.
“Courier dropped it at the front desk an hour ago,” Cas says, his voice carefully flat. “For Mrs. Kovaci. Not for you. For her.” He hands me the card.
The handwriting is elegant, old-money, unhurried.
To match your eyes when you finally look at me the way you look at him. Everything has a price, my dear. Even a Kovaci. — V.
The room goes very quiet and very red.
Vance didn’t send this to me. He sent it to her.
He reached past me, past my men, past my walls, into the one building in this city I thought was sealed, and he put a gift in my wife’s name, addressed to the woman, not the wife, courting what’s mine in my own house, telling me with a necklace and four lines of fountain pen that he is patient and he is thorough and he always, always closes.
And there is a worse splinter under all of it. My hotel is sealed. My front desk is my men. A courier does not get a box onto that desk in my wife’s name without someone inside waving it through, the same way three armed men got past my walls and into my foyer.
Two breaches in a month, in two houses I built to be unbreachable.
Someone is opening my doors from the inside.
I don’t have the time to find out who. I make the time anyway, because a man with a traitor in his walls and a senator courting his wife does not get to choose which fire to fight first. He fights all of them at once, or he loses her.
And he’s right that I gave him the opening.
I see that now, with a clarity that tastes like acid.
I put her in that green dress at his gala.
I paraded her through a room of the worst men alive and let them ache.
I made her a centerpiece and hung her where the connoisseur could see, and a man whose only remaining appetite is the acquiring looked at the one thing I love and decided he wants it more than he’s ever wanted anything.
My obsession built the trap. My need to show her off loaded the gun and handed it to him.
“Burn it,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“And then find me everything. His houses. His holdings. The places he keeps the girls he buys, and the ledger he keeps them on, and the night this quarter he means to use the new one. Because there’s always a new one, Cas, and this time we’re not just pulling her out.
This time we follow the thread all the way back to the man holding it, and we end him. ”
Cas closes the box. He’s known me long enough that he knows exactly what I’m not saying, which is that this stopped being the job the second Vance wrote my dear.
“It’ll mean exposing the operation,” he says quietly. “Move on a sitting senator over a woman, and we risk everything you’ve spent three years protecting. Everyone you’ve saved.”
“I know.”
“You’d burn the whole thing down for her.”
I think of a smile in a club, of Yours, of the slow weight of her breathing against my ribs.
“In a heartbeat,” I tell him. “Without one second of regret. Double the detail on the penthouse and the estate. She doesn’t go anywhere I’m not standing.
And Cas—” He pauses at the door. “If Roland Vance gets within arm’s reach of my wife before I’m ready, you don’t wait for my order.
You put him down where he stands and you let me deal with the aftermath. ”
Cas nods, once, and he’s gone.
I stand in the penthouse foyer with a city laid out gold and rotten beneath me and a soon-to-be dead man’s necklace cooling in a box, and through the half-open door I can hear my wife humming to herself, off-key, alive, mine, and I make Roland Vance a promise he’ll never hear, in the quiet voice I save for the things I mean most.
Let him look. Let the whole world look until their eyes bleed.
But he reached for her. And the moment he closes his hand on a single thread of what’s mine, I am going to take him apart so slowly and so completely that they’ll need dental records and a strong stomach, and I will bury Senator Roland Vance in so many pieces that not even God will be able to put him back together to ask what he did to deserve it.