Chapter 4
His thumb found the edge of her jaw and settled there, perfectly still.
No man had touched her face like that in twenty-three years of living. In that single moment, she understood what it actually meant to shiver — a word she had only ever encountered in novels.
His mouth moved closer. An inch. Half an inch. She felt his breath graze her upper lip. She could smell him — salt, copper, something warm underneath. The heat radiating off his chest in slow waves.
She closed her eyes. It was the only instinct her body still remembered.
He stopped.
He didn’t pull back. He simply stopped. His hand remained on her face. His breath still hovered over her mouth. But he stayed frozen there, motionless, until she opened her eyes and found the gray of his staring back.
“You don’t understand,” he said. His voice was stripped bare, rougher than usual. “How dangerous it is to be this close to me.”
He withdrew his hand from her face. His thumb grazed her cheek as it left. Barely a touch. That was the part that hurt the most. Not the distance he was putting between them. The tenderness in the way he did it.
He stood from the edge of the tub, took a towel from the rack, pressed it against his side, and turned his back.
“You can go, Alina.”
She stayed on her knees a moment longer, fingers clenched around the rim of the kit until she felt the metal bite into her palms. Then she rose, picked up the kit, and walked out.
The next two days crawled by.
She caught glimpses of Damon three times in the hallway. Always at a distance. Never turning his head in her direction. She watched his office door swing shut whenever she approached with the tray. She watched a different maid carry the coffee pot upstairs in her place.
She had crossed a line. He had stepped back. It was as simple as that.
Then the woman in the red coat arrived.
The sedan rolled to a stop on the gravel a few feet from the portico steps. The rear door swung open, and a woman emerged. Long red coat falling to mid-calf, belted tight at the waist. Black stilettos. Dark hair swept back. Makeup immaculate. Lips painted the exact shade of the coat.
She looked to be in her thirties, with the posture of someone who had never once waited for an invitation.
“Sweetheart,” she said, her accent stretching the vowels just slightly. “Aren’t you going to help me with this bag?”
Zoya Ivanov. Guest of the family.
She climbed the remaining steps without waiting for a response, brushed past Alina, pushed open the mansion’s front door as if the house belonged to her, and deposited her leather bag into Alina’s hands without so much as a glance.
“Let the Pakhan know I’ve arrived.”
She disappeared inside.
The days that followed were a slow exercise in humiliation.
Zoya was everywhere. The breakfast room. The dining room. The garden. Draped over furniture, speaking in Russian, laughing too loud, her eyes always tracking Damon’s movements.
And her eyes tracked Alina, too.
“You have such young hands for so many calluses,” Zoya said one morning at breakfast, loud enough for the entire room to hear. “Hands age before the face when the work is rough. The right kind of woman, naturally. The ones the Vulkoffs take seriously never had to scrub their own plates.”
Alina said nothing. She finished pouring the coffee and stepped back.
But Damon heard. He set down his silverware with a slow, measured precision that made the metal ring against the porcelain like a small bell.
“Zoya. This woman has been in my employ for two years. Not yours. You are a guest in this house as a courtesy, not by right. The next time I hear a remark from you about any member of my staff, you will be taking your breakfasts elsewhere. Am I clear?”
Zoya’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
“I was only — ”
“Am I clear?”
“Crystal.”
He picked up his knife and fork and resumed cutting his meat as though the exchange had never occurred.
Alina’s hand stayed steady on the tray. Her gaze stayed on the floor. But her heart, in a place she hadn’t known existed, was beating slow and whole for the first time in three days.
That night, the engines growled to life in the garage. Two cars, then three. Kirill descended the main staircase at a clipped pace, three men in black falling in behind him. Damon followed, jacket buttoned, collar turned up, eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
She watched from the service wing window. The headlights swept across the gravel and vanished beyond the gate.
“Where are they going?” she asked Sloan.
“Somewhere neither of us wants to know about.”
She tried to sleep. Lights off at eleven. Eyes closed. Body still. But every part of her was listening.
It was close to three in the morning when the cars returned. The tires ground against the gravel differently this time. Heavier. Slower. One door slammed ahead of the rest. Hurried footsteps at the service entrance.
She got out of bed.
Robe over her nightgown. Slippers on. Down the service stairs without flipping a single switch. She cut through the side hallway and reached the main hall just as they came through.
Damon was at the front. He was walking under his own power, but unevenly, listing to one side. His white shirt was stained at the right shoulder. Dark dried blood near the collar. Brighter red lower down where it was still wet.
His eyes were open, but they weren’t in this hallway.
Kirill walked half a step behind, one hand bracing the Pakhan’s elbow. Damon passed within six feet of her. He turned his head. Found her. His gray eyes locked onto hers for a full second — a second in which she saw everything he was holding back, and he saw that she could see it.
May you like
He didn’t stop. He kept walking. Climbed the staircase. Turned into the west wing corridor.
She heard his bedroom door slam shut.
