Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
He came here tonight to prove I was lying.
He touched me to prove I was lying.
He brought me to the most vulnerable moment of my life and the whole time, the whole time, he was gathering data.
I sit up. His hand reaches for me and I move away from it and the movement isn’t fast. Isn’t dramatic. It’s the movement of a woman who has understood something she cannot un-understand and whose body is responding before her mind has finished processing.
I gather myself. Not with anger. Not with tears. With something I don’t have a name for, something that lives below both of those, in the place where the very young keep the things they were not supposed to learn yet. I gather myself like broken glass: carefully, because every piece is sharp.
“Please let me go.”
His hand is still reaching. His face is still that shattered window. His eyes are wet and I have never seen Anton Almazov’s eyes wet and I can’t afford to care because if I care I will stay and if I stay he will hold me and if he holds me I will forgive him and I am not ready to forgive a man who used my body as a closing argument.
“Daisy—”
“Please.”
He lets go. His hand falls to the sheet. The sheet is still warm from both of us and I swing my legs over the side of the bed and I find my t-shirt on the floor and I pull it over my head and I stand and my legs hold, which surprises me, and I walk to the bedroom door and I don’t look back.
I walk through my apartment. Past the kitchen counter with the single coffee cup. Past the bookshelf with the cracked spines. Past the cardigan on the chair. I reach the front door and I open it and I step through it and I close it behind me.
I don’t slam it.
I close it with a click.
The click is the last sound between us.
ANTON
The door clicks shut.
I am sitting on her bed. The sheets smell like her shampoo and my cologne and the particular chemistry of two bodies that have just learned each other, and she is gone.
My hands are shaking.
I hold them up in front of me. I turn them over. I grip my own wrists and try to make them stop and they don’t stop. They haven’t done this since my father’s grave, standing there with with Andrei’s hand crushing mine, swearing I would never let anyone close enough to make me tremble.
I let her close enough.
And I destroyed her.
The shaking doesn’t stop. I sit on the bed of the woman I love, because I love her, I know that now, I have known it since the yellow tab and the coffee I brought myself and the file room where her hand was on my chest and her heart was faster than mine, and I sit and my hands shake and the door is closed and the click echoes in the apartment like a verdict, and for the first time in years, I can’t make them stop.
Chapter 9
ANTON
I drive to Keyes before dawn.
The streets of Monaco are empty at this hour. The harbour is grey. The yachts sit in their slips like sleeping animals and the city hasn’t woken and I haven’t slept and my hands have stopped shaking but only because I’ve been gripping the steering wheel the whole drive and the pressure has forced them still.
The firm’s lobby is dark. The glass doors are locked. I press the intercom and the night security guard, a man I’ve never spoken to and who’s never seen the version of me that is standing on this pavement, buzzes me in without a question because my name opens doors in this city and tonight I hate that it does.
Kaye’s office is on the second floor. I take the stairs. The corridor is unlit except for the emergency strips along the baseboards, green and clinical, and my shoes are loud on the marble and I don’t care who hears.
Her door is closed. I open it.
She’s there. At her desk. I don’t know why she’s here at six in the morning and I don’t care. She is sitting behind her laptop with a coffee cup and her reading glasses and her hair pulled back. Daisy’s aunt., the woman who braided her hair at Thanksgiving, the woman who sent her a first-day card, the woman who put her niece in front of me like a wrapped gift and told me the girl was willing.
She sees me. Her face changes.
Not fear. Not yet. Recognition. The recognition of a woman who has spent years working with men from my world and who can tell, by the set of my shoulders and the absence of my smile and the particular quality of silence I carry into her office, that the man standing in her doorway isn’t the charming twin. The charming twin is gone. What’s left is the other thing. The thing my brothers and I became in the years after our father was murdered. The thing that builds empires and dismantles people and doesn’t blink.