Page 26 of Ruthless Bond

When she does, I want her to know the full shape of what she’s choosing. Not just the man in the suit. Not just the gray-eyed executive who brushes her fingers and makes her breath catch in a dark office.

All of it. The wolf. The violence. The blood.

I stand in the shower as my bathroom fills with steam and think about her.

Tomorrow. I’ll see her tomorrow. The mask will be back on. The suit will be pressed. My hands will be clean and smooth and give nothing away.

But underneath the mask, the wolf will be watching her through my eyes. And underneath the calm, the memory of tonight will be sitting in my chest like an ember, still warm, still glowing, waiting for the next breath of wind to catch fire.

Chapter Twelve

Sophia

He’s different on Monday.

I notice it the moment he steps off the elevator onto our floor. He’s wearing the same kind of suit he always wears. His hair is the same. His posture is the same. His hands, when he stops at Patricia’s desk to sign something, are clean and unmarked. Nothing is visibly different about Dominic Voronov on this particular Monday morning.

But I feel it.

He moves through the room and the energy he carries with him has a different quality. On a normal day, his presence is controlled, contained, a gravitational force that pulls attention without demanding it. Today the containment is thinner. The control is still there but it’s resting on top of something that wasn’t there last week, something fed and satisfied and quietly dangerous. It reminds me of the big cats I used to watch at Lincoln Park Zoo as a kid, the way a lion looks after it’s eaten. Sated.

He passes my desk. He doesn’t touch me or look at me directly. But his eyes sweep the floor as he walks, and when they pass over me there’s a heat in them that’s new. A possessive focus that makes the pull in my chest tighten so hard I have to grip the edge of my desk.

He’s gone in five seconds. The elevator takes him back up to thirty-nine. I sit at my desk and breathe and try to catalog what I just saw, what I just felt, and I can’t. There’s no data point to record. No temperature reading, no anomalous speed, no golden eyes. Just a man walking through a room with the energy of someone who did something violent recently and is still wearing the satisfaction of it underneath his suit.

I know violence. I grew up adjacent to it. I know the way men carry it after the fact, the looseness in the shoulders, the settled quality in the jaw. The calm that comes from having discharged something that was building pressure. My father’s associates would come into the restaurant sometimes wearing that calm like aftershave, and my father would serve them quietly and keep me in the kitchen until they left.

Dominic Voronov did something this weekend. I don’t know what. I’ll probably never know what. But the man who walked past my desk this morning is wearing the same calm those men used to wear, and the effect it has on my body is so immediate and so wrong that I want to put my head between my hands and scream.

Because I’m not afraid of it. I should be. A rational woman would feel the predatory energy rolling off him and her survival instinct would say run. Mine says lean closer. Mine says breathe him in. Mine says whatever he did this weekend, whatever violence those clean hands committed, I want to be the thing he touches next.

I am in serious trouble.

I bury myself in work for the rest of the day. I don’t go to lunch with Katya. I don’t leave my desk except to use the restroom and refill my coffee. I need the numbers, the spreadsheets, the clean logic of financial analysis, because the rest of my life has become a landscape I don’t recognize. I’m a woman who’s attracted to violence. I’m a woman whose body responds to danger the way other women’s bodies respond to flowers and compliments. I’m a woman who is sitting in the financial heart of a criminal organization, surrounded by people who are somehow different, falling for a man who runs the whole thing. And the most disturbing part isn’t any of that. The most disturbing part is that I don’t want to leave.

Around four, Patricia takes a call and closes her office door. I can’t hear everything, only fragments through the glass.

“...yes, Mr. Kowalski.”

Pause.

“I understand.”

Another pause.

“Mr. Voronov appreciates your continued loyalty.”

She hangs up and goes back to work like nothing happened.

Five minutes later, two vendors who had been holding payments suddenly clear their balances.

At seven, I pack up and go home. Katya walks me to the lobby. She’s quieter than usual today too, and I wonder if she knows what Dominic did this weekend. I wonder if she was part of it.

In my apartment, I change into sweats and make a dinner I barely eat and sit on the bed with the notebook.

I’ve been putting off the last section. The entries get sparser toward the end, the handwriting tighter, as though my father was writing faster or under more pressure. The cipher is the same but the tone has shifted from careful observation to something closer to urgency. He was running out of time and he knew it, though I don’t think he knew how little time he had.

I decode three entries. Dates and times and references to conversations he overheard in the restaurant. Fragments that don’t connect to anything I have context for yet. Then I turn the page and decode the fourth entry and the room goes cold around me.