Page 163 of Boardroom Ties
I put both hands on his face. His skin is so pale that you’d almost expect it to be cold, but in truth, it’s so warm under my palms. He’s the hottest part of the fire. Always has been, always will be.
“I love you,” I tell him. “I’m sorry it took me until now to say it without abutafterward.”
He closes his eyes. A second tear escapes and runs along the bridge of his nose. “I love you, too, Cassandra Madden.”
In the hallway, somewhere, I can hear Afon clear his throat meaningfully. Time to go.
Mat kisses my forehead, then the corner of my eye, then the place on my jaw where Raymond used to grab me. Like he’s erasing the past. Then he stands and pulls me up with him, and starts walking us out of the room.
We step over the unconscious DeMaris on the way, his blood-red tie hanging limply from around his throat.
Mat doesn’t look down.
Neither do I.
We don’t need to worry about him anymore.
EPILOGUE: CASS
2 WEEKS LATER
The sheets are wrong.
I mean that in the best possible way. Gone are the eight-hundred-thread-count, ice-cold, custom-monogrammedRWSsheets that I’ve spent the last four years entombing myself in, night after night. What I wake up in now is better in every way.
Theysmellright, for starters. Cedar and rain at night, a faint hint of cigarette smoke, and that tantalizing fire-incarnate that I’ve never been able to properly name.
Another thing that’s different: the ceiling. In Raymond’s apartment, the ceiling was tray-ceilinged with elaborate, hand-carved crown molding, lit by a chandelier I had to dust with a special microfiber wand.
The ceiling in Matvei’s apartment, by contrast, is flat, white, and smooth, broken up only by a single recessed light and the iron beam that runs the width of the loft like a dark spine.
This has become my happy place. No more late nights staring up and wondering where it all went south. It’s cozy and comforting. It’shome.
The only thing I dislike when I wake up today is that I’m alone in bed. I have a vague, blurry memory of Mat kissing me on the forehead before he slipped out of the penthouse. Since everything that happened with DeMaris at the detention center, he’s been spending every day from dawn until dusk cooped up in a conference room at Lazarev Global with Lukas, Kir, and a phalanx of LG’s finest lawyers. They’re waging war on many fronts: legal, PR, and of course, eradicating the Vainakh Syndicate’s footprint from all of the Lazarev Bratva’s territories.
I pout out my lip. I want to be there with them, but Matvei expressly warned me that, if I tried to follow him in, he’d tie me to the bed.
You’re growing a human,he’d chided.That’s all the work you need to be doing right now.
So here I am, alone. Untied as of now, but you never know when I might get a defiant itch and go pound on the door of that conference room until the men let me in.
Sighing, I roll over onto my side and reach out to touch the lingering warmth and indent where Matvei slept. I drag his pillow over my face like I’m smothering myself and take a deep, greedy inhale.
Ahhh.I don’t think that will ever get old.
I could stay here for a while, but I’ve started doing a yoga routine first thing in the morning, which my blossoming little blueberry—who has actually graduated to strawberry status by now; yay for summer fruits and on-target fetal development—seems toappreciate. So I roll out of bed, brush my teeth, and make myself half-decent by pulling on one of Mat’s t-shirts.
Out in the living room, I turn on the TV. Mat disapproves, but he can’t keep mecompletelyhidden from the world. I like to know things, too. The news fires up with pretty much exactly what I expected it to say:
SENATOR DEMARIS RESIGNS AMID WIDENING FEDERAL PROBE
Below that, in smaller text:Senator Cites “Health Concerns” — Justice Department Confirms Grand Jury Convened.
It scrolls past, replaced by a B-roll of the Senator’s last press conference, in which the makeup couldn’t quite cover the bruise on his cheekbone where Afon had slapped him into the next millennium.
He’d stood at a podium in hisI Respect The Laws and Institutions of This Country Very Muchoutfit, which consists of the same bland blue suit and red tie that every politician since John Adams has worn when they want to court the centrist vote. He made some grand, vague overtures about “strain on his family” and “the privacy of his daughters,” the “necessity of letting the investigative process play out without political distraction.”
Unsurprisingly, he was way too much of a coward to take any questions from the press. That’s a pity—Jillian was in the front row and ready to tear his freaking head off.
