He's gone during the days. Not always, but often. He leaves in the morning in his suit and his quiet, annihilating authority,and the apartment settles around his absence. I have the place to myself. I can go anywhere inside it. The kitchen, the living room, the study I discovered on the second day that's stocked with hundreds of books. The balcony on the south side with the lounge chairs and the small herb garden that needs a little extra care than it’s been receiving of late.
I can go everywhere except out.
The front door. The keypad. The elevator code. The alarmed stairwell. The invisible fence that turns this palace into a cage, so seamlessly integrated that if you didn't know it was there, you'd think you were just living in a very nice apartment with a man who cooks you dinner every night and goes down on you until you forget your own name.
Because that's the other thing. Every night. Without fail.
He comes home. He cooks. He feeds me, not always by hand anymore, sometimes he sets the fork beside the plate and lets me feed myself. We eat. We don't talk much, but the silence isn't hostile. It's thick and heavy and charged, like the air before a storm, and then he'll say "come" or just look at me in a way that makes my stomach quiver and my thighs clench, and I'll follow him down the hallway.
He never asks. He never negotiates. He just drops to his knees in front of me like a man at an altar and buries his face between my legs and doesn't stop until I'm shaking and incoherent. Then he leaves, closing the bedroom door behind him, and I'm alone in the dark with the aftershocks trembling through me and the taste of shame and pleasure so thoroughly mixed in my mouth that I can't tell them apart anymore.
He doesn't touch me otherwise. Doesn't kiss me. Doesn't try to have sex with me. True to his word, with terrifying, methodical patience, he is waiting. Building the foundation. Laying the bricks. Night after night, orgasm after orgasm, he is teaching mybody that he is the source of the only pleasure I will ever have access to, and my body is learning faster than my brain can build defenses against it.
By the fourth day, I stop flinching when he enters a room.
By the sixth, I'm waiting for him at the island when he comes home.
By the eighth, I catch myself reaching for his hand as he leads me down the hallway, and I pull my arm back so fast I nearly hit myself in the face.
He sees it but he doesn't comment. But that night he is slower. He uses his fingers first, then his mouth, and when I come it's so intense that I sob into the pillow and his hand, the one that isn't inside me, comes up and strokes my hair while I shake.
The closet fills up gradually, like a tide coming in. New clothes appear while I'm in the shower. Soft things. Expensive things. Every single item in a muted, neutral tone that coordinates with his wardrobe like he planned it. And his old clothes keep appearing too, mixed in with the new ones. A worn t-shirt that smells like him draped over the back of the reading chair. A hoodie left on the bathroom counter. Everywhere I turn, something that carries his scent, until the entire room smells like him and by extension, so do I.
I'm sitting in the living room on a Thursday afternoon in his cashmere sweater reading a book he left on the end table with a page dog-eared at a passage about a woman who chose to stay in a place she could have left, and I'm wondering if he dog-eared it on purpose or if I'm reading intention into everything he does because it's the only way I can make sense of my own stillness.
He comes home early that day.
I hear the elevator, the keypad, the heavy sound of the front door, and when I look up from the book he's standing in the foyer. Something is wrong.
I know it immediately. Not because of anything obvious. He looks the same. Dark suit, sharp jaw, hands at his sides. But there's a tension in his body that I haven't seen before, a tightness in the way he's holding his shoulders that reads less like control and more like containment. Like something inside him is pressing against the walls and he's using every muscle he has to keep it in.
"Dominik?"
It's the first time I've said his name unprompted. Not in response to a question, not in the dark with his face between my legs, but in the daylight, in the living room, with concern in my voice that I didn't plan to put there.
He looks at me, and for one second the containment slips and I see what's behind it, and it's rage. The deep, tectonic rage of someone who operates at a level of violence I can't fathom, and something has happened today that pushed a button I didn't know he had.
"Come here," he says.
I go to him. I don't think about it. My body just stands up and crosses the room until it stops in front of him, and he looks down at me in his sweater with my bare legs and my hair messy from the couch, and something in his face shifts from rage to something else. Something possessive and desperate and barely leashed.
"I need to make a call," he says. "Stay in the living room. Don't go near the windows."
"Why? What's--"
"Wren." My name in his mouth like a period at the end of a sentence. "Stay away from the windows."
He takes out his phone and walks to his study and closes the door. I hear his voice through it, low and in Russian. I don't understand a word but I understand the tone. That's a man giving orders that involve consequences for failure.
I sit on the couch. I pull my legs up and wrap my arms around my knees and stare at the windows he told me to stay away from. The city looks the same as it always does. Bright and distant and indifferent.
Twenty minutes pass.
He comes out of the office and he's taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves and my eyes widen involuntarily at the gun in his hand.
I've never seen a gun in person before.
That's probably strange, given where I grew up. Given the kinds of people my father owed money to. But the truth is I lived a small, careful life. The type of life spent keeping my head down and my hands busy and my body out of the path of anything that might break it. I've never seen a gun held by someone who clearly knows how to use it, and the casual way he carries it, the way it sits in his hand like an extension of his own bones, does something to my understanding of who this man is that no amount of penthouse luxury or hand-feeding or oral sex could have accomplished.