Page 162 of Boardroom Ties
“I’mnot going to kill you,” he whispers. “I’m going to let you live just long enough to watch them come for you. Selfishly, I hope they make you wait for it. Imagine, as you deal with all the court drama and the congressional investigations, that you’llalsohave to check over your shoulder every time you walk down the hall. You’ll cry every time you have to turn the key in your car’signition. Hungry? Good luck eating a meal without wondering if it’s poisoned. Every shadow becomes your worst nightmare. Hell, at that rate, the fear might kill you before they do.”
DeMaris has started crying. I notice it only when one of his fat, pathetic tears rolls into the seam of Matvei’s thumb against his throat.
“Look at me,” Matvei croons. “Lookat me. Are you listening?”
DeMaris nods as much as he can with a hand on his neck.
“You came here to hurt my family,” Mat says. “You will not get to do that twice.”
He holds DeMaris there for one more beat. Then he steps back and lets go.
The senator crumples to his knees, gagging, both hands at his throat, drool roping out of his mouth and onto his red tie. He retches once, dry. The half-Windsor is ruined. Even from across the room, I can smell the sour panic coming off him.
Afon ambles over, and then, almost nonchalantly, slaps DeMaris across the face so hard that he’s out cold before he even hits the ground.
“I get sick of the crying, you see,” he explains to me. He smiles. Then he turns his attention to Matvei. “Now, nephew, I’d say it’s time to go. I’ll wait in the hall.”
Then he steps out, pulling the broken door shut behind him as much as the busted frame will allow.
Which leaves Matvei.
And me.
Matvei is still at first. He stands there, breathing through his nose, looking at me like he is afraid that, if he moves too fast, I will dissolve. His hair has fallen over at the front and is hanging over one eye. I can’t tell if I’m imagining things or if his hand really is shaking.
Then he goes down on his knees in front of me.
Not the way he did in Greyshot Arch, with my coat over his head and the dog walkers passing six feet away. And not the way he did on my living room rug, undressing me an inch at a time.
He kneels like he would in a church pew.
He puts his hands on his thighs, palms up. “Dikarka,” he rasps. “I am so sorry. I should never have left you in here. I told myself the cell was the only place he couldn’t reach you, so I left you behind while I went to find a way to get you out. I’d rather you hate me from in here than love me out there, where there was a chance that the world could take you away from me again.”
His face falls to my lap for a moment. Then he pries himself back up and stares hard at me. “I swear to you, on my father’s grave, on my mother’s, on every grave I’ve ever stood over, that I did not abandon you. Not even for a second.”
I’ve prepared so many speeches for this exact moment. I had a Furious speech. I had a Cold speech. I had a Charmingly Sarcastic speech with several really decent zingers in it. I had, for emergencies, a Quietly Devastated speech where I just glared at him until he wept.
Now that the moment is here, every single one of them has gone out of my head.
I reach down and put my hand in his hair. “Get up,” I tell him.
He shakes his head, eyes shut. “Not until you say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you’ll let me try again.”
In a different life—one where I am a better, harder, smarter woman—maybe I’d make him work for it. I’d be cold for a week. Make him grovel. Make himcrawl.
But I am not that woman. And it turns out, in the end, that I don’t actually have it in me to make Matvei Satyrin pay for the crime of trying to save me the only way he knew how.
“Get up here,” I say, “and look at me.”
He raises his head. He does it slowly, like he’s still not entirely sure he has permission. When his eyes find mine, they are red around the rims, and there is a single tear track down one cheekbone.
He’s still beautiful. It’s almost offensive.
“I forgive you,” I say. “You beautiful, blue-eyed bastard. I forgive you.”
