“You say that as if everything is okay.” I sweep an arm around my head to encompass the whole, y’know,everything.“What on earth is okay, Mat?”
He doesn’t seem fazed, though. “What happened tonight was bad. But it wasn’t the worst it could have been.”
My eyes nearly bug out of their sockets. “Matvei. You assaulted asenator.”
“He’ll wake up tomorrow with a headache and a story he’d rather not tell his wife. The Plaza wants this buried more than he does. There won’t be any fallout.”
“What about Raymond?”
“That’s slightly more problematic,” he concedes, jaw working side to side. “Raymond saw something he didn’t see before.”
“Which is what?”
“Me,” Matvei replies. “Looking at you the way I look at you.”
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until little stars appear. Behind them, I see Raymond at the column with his bourbon, the cold shine of him.
What does he know? What will he do with that knowledge?
“How much of a problem is that going to be?” I whisper through the gap between my palms.
Matvei peels my hands away, his fingers gently encircling my wrists, and sets them down in my lap. “None,” he says forcefully.“Because one week from now, Raymond ceases to be a factor in either of our lives. Three times now, he’s gotten away. I swear to you,dikarka:There will not be a fourth.”
“You sound so confident.”
“I am.”
“But how?”
“If he were sure of the things he suspects, then you wouldn’t have ridden home in the back seat of his car—you’d have ridden home in his trunk. And if he’d tried that, then I’d have killed him on the spot, consequences be damned.”
“Even if it meant going to prison for the rest of your life?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
“Don’t be ridic?—”
“I would,” he interrupts, almost angrily, like he thinks I’m doubting him. “Don’t ask me to lie about it or pretend otherwise. I would. It’s a statement of fact, not a line to get in your bed.”
“Well,” I murmur in a shaky voice, halfway betweenscared out of my skinandfemme fatale in a cheesy detective noir movie, “if you wanted into my bed, Mr. Satyrin, there are easier ways than offering to spend the rest of your life behind bars. A drink would’ve worked. A coffee, even. Hell, you could’ve just said ‘please.’”
The corner of his mouth twitches—just barely, just enough to crack the seriousness wide open. “Noted,” he says.
“I mean, it’s aqueen,not a king, so it’s nothing to write home about. And the sheets are some kind of silky satiny thingRaymond picked out, which, it goes without saying,ick. But…” I lift one shoulder. “There’s room.”
“Room for what, specifically?” he teases, stealing my life from the Ice Room.
“I’m just saying, if you’ve come all this way…” I tug at the hem of my dress. “… it seems a waste to make you sleep on the rug.”
He huffs a quiet laugh into the fire-lit dark. “Dikarka,” he says, “are you propositioning me?”
“Maybe. I’ve never done it before. How am I doing?”
“Terrible.”
I swat at his shoulder. “Rude. I’m trying my best here.”
He catches my wrist before it lands, brings it to his mouth, and presses his lips to the soft underside where the veins run blue. “Lucky for you, I don’t need to be talked into anything.” But then the smirk slides off his face. “Listen to me, Cassandra. I’m not inclined to repeat myself, but I still think you’re doubting that I mean what I say. So I’ll say it one more time: I’m not letting you go. There’s no version of this where I leave you behind. Not in the Caymans. Not in this apartment. Not in a hotel bathtub, not in a courtroom, not in a hospital bed. Wherever you go, I go. If your road runs through fire, then I’ll walk it with you, and if it runs through hell, I’ll carry you across it on my back. You and the baby.Bothof you. Until my last breath leaves my body.”