Page 17 of Ruthless Bond

I think about Dominic when I wake up. I think about him in the shower, his hands replacing mine against my skin, and I have to brace myself against the tile and breathe through it. I think about him at my desk when I hear the elevator open on the floor above me, the faint mechanical sound of the doors parting, and my whole body tightens because he might be about to walk downstairs. I think about him on my evening runs, pounding the sidewalk along the river in the October cold, and the physical exertion doesn’t quiet it. It sits in my chest like a second heartbeat, steady and insistent, and it gets louder every day.

The dreams are the worst part. They used to be vague. Heat and pressure and the sense of a body against mine, faceless, formless. Now they’re specific. His hands on my hips, pulling me against him. His mouth on my throat, open and hot. The sound of his voice saying my name in a register I’ve never heard him use in real life but that I recognize instinctively, the way you recognize a melody you’ve never been taught. I wake up from these dreams gasping, slick between my legs, my hand already moving before I’m fully conscious, and when I come it’s his name I’m biting back and the release doesn’t satisfy the need. It barely touches it.

I told myself the first week that it was situational. Stress. The intensity of being thrust into a new environment with a powerful man who controls my immediate future. A therapist would probably call it a trauma response, some warped attempt to turn fear into desire.

But I’m not afraid of Dominic. That’s the thing I keep circling back to. I should be afraid. He holds my debt. He controls where I live and where I work and how much of my life belongs to me. He’s connected to my father’s death in ways I haven’t untangled yet. By every rational measure, fear would be the appropriate response.

What I feel instead is a gravitational pull so strong that resisting it has become the organizing principle of my days. I get up and resist. I go to work and resist. I sit at my desk and I feel him in the building above me like a sun I’m orbiting, and I resist the urge to stand up and walk to the elevator and press the button for thirty-nine and find him and stop pretending that I don’t know what happens next.

Three weeks. This is what three weeks have done to me.

I go for a run to clear my head. It’s after seven, the sky already dark, the air biting cold with the promise of a hard winter coming. I run north along the river, past the restaurant patios that are closing for the season, past the dog walkers and the last of the commuters heading home. My breath plumes white in front of me. My sneakers hit the pavement in a rhythm that usually empties my mind.

Tonight it doesn’t empty. Tonight my mind is full of infrared readings and gold eyes.

I push harder. Faster. My lungs ache against the cold air and my calves burn on the uphill stretch near the Merchandise Mart, and for a few minutes the physical effort drowns out everything else. Just my body, the pavement, the river running dark beside me. I used to run like this in grad school during finals week, burning off the anxiety of exams and case studies, and the clarity it brought me was almost chemical. A reset. A purge.

It doesn’t work tonight. The more I push, the more aware I become of my own body, and the more aware I am of my body, the more I feel the absence of his. It’s absurd. I’m running alone along a river in October and I’m mourning the proximity of a man I spent eight hours in the same building with today. A man I’ve spoken to maybe a dozen times total. A man whose hand has touched mine for a cumulative total of perhaps ten seconds across three weeks, and those seconds are the part my body refuses to forget.

Something is wrong with me.

I’m crossing under the bridge at Kinzie when I feel it.

A sensation, primitive and certain, that someone is watching me. The kind of awareness that lives in the animal part of the brain, the part that predates language and logic, the part that knows when you’re being tracked.

I slow to a jog. Then a walk. I look behind me and see nothing but the empty path and the river and the lights of the buildings reflecting on the water. I look up at the bridge and see only concrete and shadow.

But the feeling doesn’t leave. It sits on the back of my neck like a hand, warm and heavy, and when a gust of wind moves through the underpass I catch a scent that makes my stomach drop. Clean. Expensive. And underneath, something warm and dark and animal.

I know that scent. I dream about that scent.

I stand on the path in the cold with my heart hammering and my breath clouding the air and I wait. For what, I don’t know. For him to show himself. For the feeling to pass. For my body to stop responding to the presence of a man I can’t see with a readiness that borders on desperation.

My skin is prickling. Wherever he is, I know it’s him as surely as I know my own name. His attention rests on my body like sunlight through glass. Warm. Focused.

I should be afraid. A woman alone on a dark running path, being watched by someone she can’t see. That’s the opening scene of every true crime podcast I’ve ever listened to. But fear isn’t what’s rising in my chest. It’s anticipation. My body is readying itself for contact, softening, opening, every nerve ending oriented toward the source of that scent, and the wanting is so acute that I have to close my eyes against it.

After a long minute, the feeling fades. Gradually, like a hand lifting from skin. I’m alone on the path. The wind carries nothing but river water and exhaust.

I run home faster than I came. In my apartment I lock the door and stand with my back against it and press my hand against my chest where the second heartbeat lives.

It’s still beating. Steady. Patient. Waiting for something I won’t let myself name.

I shower. I make tea I don’t drink. I sit on the bed with wet hair and the notebook on the pillow beside me and I stare at the wall and think about the two investigations I’m running in parallel. The financial architecture of a laundering operation. The impossible biology of a family that isn’t what it seems. Both investigations point in the same direction. Both lead to Dominic Voronov. And both are tangled up now with a third thing, a thing I can’t map or measure or file in a spreadsheet, a thing that lives in my blood and my skin and the ache between my legs when I think about him for too long.

I’m losing objectivity. A good analyst knows when her data is compromised, and my data is compromised. Every observation I make about Dominic passes through a filter of desire so thick that I can’t trust my own conclusions anymore. Am I noticing that he runs hot because I’m building an evidence-based case about his physiology, or because I want to press my face against his chest and feel that heat against my skin?

Both. The answer is both. And that’s the problem.

I turn off the light and lie in the dark and try to sleep. The second heartbeat keeps its own time, steady and patient, indifferent to my resistance.

I dream about the bridge. About a man standing in shadow, watching me with eyes that glow gold in the dark. In the dream I don’t run home. In the dream I walk toward the shadow, and when I reach it, his hands are already open, waiting for me.

Chapter Nine

Dominic

I’ve spent three weeks feeding the bond. Deliberately. Small touches that look incidental and aren’t. Proximity that seems like coincidence and isn’t. I’m training her body to respond to mine the way you train a vine to grow along a trellis, gently, persistently, knowing the outcome is inevitable.