Then I kick off my heels and walk barefoot across the cold marble of the foyer. I go to the gas fireplace and turn the dial, and a ring of flame whooshes to life behind the glass. I drop down onto the rug in front of it in my midnight-blue dress and let the heat work on my goosebumps.
I’m still sitting there, nearly an hour later, when I hear the soft click of the front door opening.
I’m not surprised. Not really. It’s not that I knew he was coming. It’s that, somewhere under the panic, I hadhoped, and the hoping had calcified into certainty by the time he turned the knob.
OfcourseMatvei would come.
Footsteps in the foyer. Then he appears in the archway of the living room. Tuxedo. Bowtie undone. Hair a little mussed, but no less beautiful for it.
He stops just inside the room. “How did you get in here?” I ask.
Matvei shrugs. “Does it matter?”
“I guess not, no.” I look back at the fire. “You picked a good night for it, though. He’s not coming home tonight.”
“I know.”
I look up at him and frown. “You know?”
“I followed him out of the ballroom. He left thirty minutes after you did, with a bridesmaid on his arm. I sat in my car across the street and watched them walk into the St. Regis.”
“That would be Brittany,” I say. “Am I a bad feminist if I didn’t warn her away from him?”
Matvei’s face darkens. “You can’t save everyone, Cass. Especially not from themselves.”
That draws a snort from me. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black if I’ve ever heard it. Only one of us assaulted a sitting congressman tonight, and it wasn’t me.”
He broods. Then: “I thought he had you.”
I exhale slowly. “So you’re telling me,” I venture, picking at the hem of my dress, “that the lawyer of the year, the cool-headed assassin, the Blue-Eyed Bastard himself, lost his shit at a black-tie wedding because he was scared for me?”
He nods.
“Huh,” I say.
“Huh?” He lofts a brow.
“I don’t know what to do with that, Matvei. Nobody’s ever lost their shit over me. Not since Giana died.”
He comes toward me, finally, and sinks to a seat on the floor at my side. “Then I’d say it’s overdue.”
I look down at my hands. My ring is catching the firelight in fractured bursts, ugly and bright. I think about how much I have hated this hideous chunk of platinum and ice over the last four years. I’ve wanted, on many occasions, to swallow it, or drop it down the toilet, or take a hammer to it on the kitchen counter, just to relish thecrack.
“So what now?” I ask. “Tell me what we do now.”
Matvei takes his time answering. First, he strips off his bowtie, the black silk hissing through his collar, and lays it across his knee. Then he undoes the top button of his shirt, like he needs a little more room to breathe before he tells me whatever he’s about to tell me.
“Now,” he says, “we don’t panic.”
“Ha. Little late for that.”
“It’s never too late to take a breath together.”
My whole life, I’ve felt like a victim of my own anxiety, my own swirling thoughts. But when Mat looks at me like he’s doing now, it’s as if the volume dial on all that nasty ruminating gets turned down.
Ahhh.I can breathe again.
And yet…