"I look forward to meeting her."
The voice is pleasant. Conversational. The kind of voice that discusses dinner reservations and wine pairings and the weather. The fact that it's discussingme— my face, my body, my location — in that tone is the most terrifying thing I've heard since Declan came home with broken ribs and a warning.
Viktor Reznikov. I've heard the name a hundred times. Now I've heard the voice.
Nico's thumb kills the video. His eyes find mine, searching, assessing, looking for fear. He'll find it. But he'll find somethingelse too: the cold clarity that settles over me when a threat becomes real. The same clarity that made me sit down in Elysium and negotiate my own marriage. The same clarity that walked me down that aisle alone.
"I have to deal with something." His voice is ice. He's already on his feet, already reaching for his phone to call Lex.
"Nico —"
"Go back to bed." Not cruel. Urgent. The man who almost kissed me is gone and the man who kills to protect is here and the switch between them happened so fast I felt the temperature drop.
I sit in the dark kitchen after he's gone. His scotch glass is still on the island, half-full. The water glass I was holding is still cold in my hands. The chair where he sat is still warm.
I press my hand to my chest. My heart is hammering — not from Viktor's message, though that's part of it. From the almost. From the hair tuck and the scar I didn't touch and the inch between his mouth and mine that the phone erased.
I almost kissed him. I wanted to — wanted to so badly my body ached with it, wanted to climb across that island and press my mouth against every scar and learn the taste of scotch on his tongue. I wanted to touch the silver line on his ribs and the bullet wound on his shoulder and the hands that have killed men and made me breakfast and I want ALL of it, the violence and the tenderness, the boss and the man, and that was not the plan.
The plan was separate bedrooms. Strategic distance. A controlled consummation that both of us could walk away from unchanged. That plan is dead. I killed it somewhere between the hair tuck and the scar he got at twenty-two and the way his eyes looked in the dark when I said I wanted him.
This is not the plan.
This is so much worse.
And somewhere in this city, a man with gray eyes and a pleasant voice has a photograph of me in my wedding dress, and he's waiting.
I go back to bed. I don't sleep. And the wanting doesn't stop — it just changes shape, expands to include fear and fury and the specific desperation of a woman who almost had something beautiful and watched a monster take it away before it started.
Chapter 11
Nico
The Space Between
* * *
She turns her back to me and lifts her hair.
"Can you?"
The zipper.That's all it is — a zipper on a dress for a family dinner at Elysium. A simple mechanical action: grip the tab, pull down, done. I've disassembled weapons in the dark. I've sutured wounds with steady hands while men screamed beside me. A zipper should be nothing.
My fingers find the tab. The metal is warm from her skin.
I pull it down. Slow, not because it's stuck but because my hand won't move faster, because the fabric is parting over her shoulder blades and the ridge of her spine is a line I want to trace with my mouth, and the sound the zipper makes is the loudest thing in this silent penthouse.
She's holding her breath. I can tell because her ribs aren't moving. The stillness of her body is absolute, the kind of stillness that costs effort, and I can feel the heat coming off her bare back against my knuckles as they drag down — vertebra by vertebra — through territory I have no right to.
The zipper ends at her lower back. My hand stops. I don't move it. She doesn't step away. For three seconds, we stand like this: my knuckles pressed to the warm skin above her waist, her hair gathered in one hand, the dress open, and my hand at the base of it.
She turns her head. Not all the way — just enough that I can see the line of her jaw, the curve of her neck. My mouth is inches from her shoulder. I could press my lips to the place where her neck meets her collarbone. She's waiting. I can feel her waiting the way you feel a held breath in a quiet room.
I don't.
The effort of not kissing her shoulder costs me something I'll be paying for all night.
"Thank you," she says. Her voice is rough.