Page 27 of Ruthless Bond

They’re not what they seem. Not human. God help me, I’ve been working for monsters.

The words sit on my legal pad in my own handwriting, translated from my father’s cipher, and I read them three times. Four. Five. Each time they mean the same thing and each time the meaning gets heavier.

Not human.

I set the legal pad down. I pick it up again. I read the words one more time and then I close my eyes and let everything I’ve been holding at arm’s length for weeks come flooding in.

The body temperatures. The reflexes. The eyes that change color. The speed. The strength. The heat that radiates from Dominic’s skin like a furnace. The way they communicate without words, turning toward each other in groups with the synchronization of something linked on a level deeper than language.

The pull. The overwhelming, irrational, biological pull that drags me toward Dominic Voronov with a force I can’t override. That makes my body ache when he’s not near me and burn when he is, that fills my dreams with his hands and his mouth and his heat and won’t let me sleep.

Not human.

My father was right. Whatever the Voronovs are, they aren’t human. And the pull I feel toward Dominic is connected to whatever they are. It’s not attraction. Or it’s not only attraction. It’s something else, something that operates on the same frequency as the gold in their eyes and the heat in their blood.

I’m shaking. Not from fear, though fear is part of it. From the size of what I’m holding. The weight of a truth that changes everything, that redraws the map of reality, that takes every assumption I’ve made about the world and the man I’m falling for and sets them on fire.

I think about my father writing these words. Sitting in his apartment, probably at this same hour, decoding his own observations and arriving at the same conclusion. Not human. And then, three weeks later, he was dead.

The entry is dated three weeks before his death. Twenty-one days between writing “God help me, I’ve been working for monsters” and dying of a heart attack that I no longer believe was a heart attack.

My father discovered what they are. And then my father died.

I’m sitting on the bed with my dead father’s notebook pressed against my sternum when the buzzer sounds.

The intercom panel by the door shows a camera feed of the building’s front entrance. I can see who’s standing there before I press the button.

Dominic.

He’s alone. No associates, no security, no entourage. Just a man in a dark coat standing in the lobby of my building at nine o’clock on a Monday night, looking up at the camera with gray eyes that find the lens as though he can see right through me.

My heart is hammering. The notebook is in my hands. The words “not human” are still wet on my legal pad, sitting on the bed behind me in plain view.

I shove the legal pad under the mattress. I slide the notebook into the nightstand drawer. I look at myself in the hallway mirror and see a woman with wild eyes and flushed cheeks and a pulse visible in her throat.

I press the intercom button.

“It’s late,” I say.

“I know.” His voice through the speaker is compressed, stripped of the low resonance that makes it vibrate in my chest when he speaks in person. Even so, even through a cheap intercom, it reaches into me. “I need to discuss your father’s accounts. Can I come up?”

No. The answer should be no. I just connected three weeks of impossible observations to a conclusion that rewrites everything I thought I knew about the world. I should tell him it can wait until morning. I should lock the door and get in bed and process what I’ve learned and decide what to do about it in the daylight.

I buzz him in.

I hear the elevator. I hear his footsteps in the hallway, measured and deliberate. He knocks. Two precise raps, the same cadence as the men who brought me to his office the first time. History repeating.

I open the door.

He fills the doorway. Not just physically, though he does that too, his frame occupying the space with the easy authority of a man who has never walked into a room he didn’t own. He fills it with presence, with heat, with the clean scent that hits me like a wave and makes my knees want to buckle. The dark, animal warmth that I’ve stopped trying to name because naming it would require admitting it’s not cologne.

“Come in,” I say, and step back to let him through.

He walks into my apartment and it shrinks around him. The living room that felt adequate an hour ago suddenly looks like a dollhouse, the furniture too small, the ceilings too low, everything scaled for a human life that he doesn’t quite fit inside. He shrugs off his coat and drapes it over the back of my couch and I watch his shoulders move under his shirt and I think: not human. Those shoulders. That body. The heat I can feel from four feet away. Not human.

“Can I get you something?” I ask. My voice is steady. I’m proud of that. “Coffee?”

“No.” He’s looking at me. Not at the apartment, not at the furniture, not at the nightstand drawer where his family’s secrets are hidden under a hotel Bible. At me. Those gray eyes are heavy with something I can’t read, something that wasn’t there this morning, or was there but is closer to the surface now. “I wanted to check on you.”