Chapter 3
The arrival was a performance.
The press was a wall of cameras and flashes. The red carpet was a strip of blood-red velvet laid over the concrete.
Dominic’s arm was around her waist like iron, and she held herself the way he’d taught her — chin up, shoulders back, the ring catching the light as she touched his sleeve.
They moved through the crowd like a single creature.
City councilmen shook her hand and told her she was lovely. Real estate developers kissed her cheek and asked how she and Dominic had met.
Cold-eyed men in expensive suits watched her from the edges, and she smiled at them, and she recited the cover story until it was smooth as a prayer.
“We met through a charity fundraiser,” she said, for the seventh time. “Dom was on the board. I was volunteering after a shift. He spilled coffee on my scrubs and apologized for three weeks.”
Lies. I’m good at this, she thought. I’m a nurse. I’m used to lying gently to people who are dying.
Then Anton Tarasov walked toward them, and the crowd parted like water.
He was big in a way that had nothing to do with height.
Blonde hair cropped short, a scar cutting through his left eyebrow like a knife slash, and he moved like a brawler — shoulders forward, hands loose at his sides, a man who had never once worried about what his body might hit.
“Dominic.” His accent was thick, his smile thinner than paper. “You’ve made a decision that’s surprised a great many people.”
“Anton.” Dominic’s voice was flat. “You’re a long way from Brighton Beach.”
Anton’s eyes slid to Norah. He looked at her the way a man looks at a car he’s thinking of buying. “A nurse,” he said. “A clever trick. I was almost impressed.”
He leaned in, close enough that she could smell tobacco and wintergreen. “But here’s the thing I keep turning over, little nurse.
When the feds look away — and they always look away — your husband will have no further use for you. And you’ll quietly disappear.”
She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. She had seen men like this in the ER — the ones who talked about hurting people the way other men talked about the weather.
And then Dominic moved.
It was fast. One moment he was beside her, and the next he had Anton by the throat and slammed him into the marble pillar hard enough that the crystal on a nearby table jumped.
Dominic’s forearm pressed the scarred man against the column, and he leaned in and said something in a voice so low that Norah heard only the shape of it.
Something about eyes. Something about tongue. Something about wiping his family off the face of the map like chalk off a board.
Anton’s face went red. Then white. Then Dominic released him, straightened his own lapels with two precise fingers, and smiled at the guests who had frozen mid-conversation.
“Anton and I were just discussing real estate,” he said. “He’s thinking of retiring.”
Anton said nothing. He straightened his collar with shaking hands and walked away, and the crowd closed behind him like water over a stone.
Dominic turned to Norah. For the first time since she’d met him, his voice was different. Softer. Real.
“Are you all right?”
She was. She wasn’t. She didn’t know. “I’m fine.”
“Good.” He looked at her for another second, and something in his face shifted. “They’re watching us. They need to see.”
And he kissed her.
It wasn’t a performance. It was hard, and desperate, and consuming — his hand at the back of her head, his mouth on hers, scotch and adrenaline and something ferocious.
She gripped his lapels because otherwise she would have fallen.
The lie vanished for one terrifying second, and there was nothing left but the two of them, and the cameras, and the crush of the crowd that wanted to watch a man who loved his wife.
He broke it. “Perfect,” he whispered, his forehead against hers.
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe.
The ride home was silent. She kept her face turned to the window, watching the city slide past in smears of light. Her lips burned.
She didn’t touch them. She didn’t dare.
May you like
When they reached the estate, he opened her door and didn’t take her arm.
He just walked beside her into the huge, dark house, and neither of them said a word, and the silence between them was the loudest thing either of them had ever heard.
