I pulled my hand back like Jason's skin was made of something radioactive.
Too late. The damage was already done in the time it took for his fingers to close around mine, hold on with the sincerity of a man who thought he was rescuing me, and for my brain to scream Nik is thirty feet away in a car with tinted windows and a direct line to your husband.
"Jason." I stepped back, putting air between us. "You need to go."
"I'm trying to help you." His voice cracked on the last word. "Evie, please. You don't have to live like this."
The worst part was that he meant it. Every syllable. Jason Miller, with his clean hoodie and his homework and his belief that the world was a place where good intentions actually worked, was standing on a sidewalk offering to save me from a man whose last name made people cross streets.
I wanted to shake him. I wanted to thank him. I wanted to tell him that the girl he was trying to rescue had stopped existing somewhere between a bathtub full of lavender bubbles and a pair of teeth on her neck.
"I'm not being held hostage," I said. "I know what it looks like. I know how it sounds. But I'm choosing this."
"Choosing him?" Jason's jaw tightened. "A man who texts threats from your phone and shows up at your campus like he owns it."
"Yes."
The word came out quieter than I intended.
Jason searched my face. Whatever he was looking for, he didn't find it.
"If he hurts you," he said.
"He won't."
"If he does…"
"Then that's my problem, Jason. Not yours. It was never yours."
He looked at me one more time. Then he turned and walked away, hands in his pockets, hood up, sneakers scuffing the pavement. He didn't look back.
The SUV's window rolled down two inches.
"Well," Nik said, sunglasses catching the light. "That was uncomfortable."
"Did you already text him?"
"I texted him when the kid reached for your hand." He took a sip of something. Coffee, probably. The man was surgically attached to caffeine. "For the record, I described it as 'a situation' and not 'your wife is holding hands with a college sophomore on a public sidewalk.' You're welcome."
"He's a junior."
"That's not the detail that matters here, Mrs. Volkov."
***
The apartment was quiet when we got back.
Cillian was at the kitchen island, hands flat on the counter, looking at the door when I walked through it. He wasn't even reading or scrolling or pretending to be busy.
He'd changed since this morning. Dark t-shirt, sleeves pushed to his forearms, hair still damp like he'd showered and hadn't bothered finishing the job.
Nik dropped my bag by the entrance and vanished down the hall with the instincts of a man who had survived years of employment by knowing exactly when to leave a room.
I closed the door and leaned my weight against it, letting the wood hold me up.
"He grabbed my hand," I said, because waiting for him to ask felt worse. "I pulled away. It lasted maybe two seconds."
"I know."
"Then why do you look like that?"
His jaw shifted. He pushed off the counter and walked toward me, slow, each step deliberate, until he was close enough that I could smell his soap and feel the heat coming off him. His hand came up and his fingers found the side of my neck, right over the bruise he'd left on the bench. His thumb pressed against it, light enough to be a question, firm enough to remind me it was there.
"Did you consider it?" he asked.
Did I consider it?
Jason had offered me clean documents, a new city, a life without contracts and bruises on my neck and a man who counted my heartbeats like data points. Three months ago, I would have taken that offer before he finished the sentence. I would have been out the door and on a bus and building another version of myself before the sun came up.
Three months ago, I hadn't slept in a bed that smelled like someone else's cologne. I hadn't watched a man sit in a chair all night because he was afraid I'd stop breathing. I hadn't felt teeth on my pulse and liked it.
"No," I said.
His thumb stilled on my neck.
"Not for a second," I added, and hated how true it was.
Something shifted behind his eyes. His hand slid from my neck to the back of my head, fingers curling into my hair, and he pulled me forward until my forehead pressed against his chest. I went, because my body had apparently signed a treaty with his without consulting me. His other arm wrapped around my waist and I stood there in the entrance of his apartment, pressed against him, listening to his heartbeat slow down from whatever speed it had been running.
This was new. This standing-still thing. This letting-him-hold-me thing. My arms were pinned awkwardly between us and I didn't know where to put them so I just left my palms flat against his chest like a person who had never been hugged before, which was not far from the truth when it came to men who smelled this good and had this many felonies.
Then he spoke against my hair.
"The man Jason was sending you to. His name is Sergei Kedrov."
I went still.
"He's a fixer," Cillian continued, his voice dropping. "He handles documents, relocations and works for a man named Viktor Seriova."
The name meant nothing to me. It clearly meant something to him. I could feel the change in his chest, the way his breathing tightened around it.
"Seriova wanted the Rossi contract," he said. "Before I took it. Your father owed debts to both families. Viktor made an offer first."
I pulled back enough to look at his face.
"My father was going to sell me to someone else first?"
"Not sell." His eyes met mine. "Trade. Viktor wanted you as leverage against your father's operations. You would have been a tool, not a wife. Not even on paper."
The distinction sat between us, ugly and heavy.
"And you?" I asked. "What was I to you?"
He looked at me. The green in his eyes was darker in the apartment's low light, closer to the color of something growing in deep water.
"That's a longer conversation."
"I'm not going anywhere. You keep reminding me."
He didn't take the bait.
"Not tonight," he said.
I wanted to push. I wanted to grab his jaw and hold him still and make him tell me why a man who could have had anything had outbid a rival for a girl he'd never met. But I thought about Nik's advice. Give him time.
"Fine," I said. "But you owe me an answer. Add it to my tab."
His mouth curved, just barely. His hand tightened in my hair and he pressed his lips to my forehead, right where the bandage used to be.
Okay. So, we were doing this now. Forehead kisses. In the kitchen. On a Tuesday. After a debrief about rival mafia families. This was apparently my life. My husband was kissing my forehead and my brain was splitting in half between that feels really nice and he literally just told you another crime lord wants to kidnap you, maybe prioritize.
I did not prioritize.
"Jason's contact," I said, my voice steadier than it had any right to be. "Sergei. If he works for Viktor, then Jason wasn't helping me escape. He was delivering me."
"Yes."
"Someone fed Jason that contact," I said slowly. "Someone who knew I was looking for a way out and exactly which boy to funnel the breadcrumbs through."
Cillian's hand stilled on my back.
"Viktor's been circling for weeks," he said. "The texts. The man in the restaurant. And now your friend, pointed at exactly the right fixer at exactly the right time." He pulled back and looked at me, and the softness from thirty seconds ago was gone. In its place was the man who ran an empire. "They weren't trying to scare you, Ava. They were herding you."
And it had almost worked. If Cillian hadn't shown up at that café. If I hadn't grabbed his hand on a stupid sidewalk and called him darling and let him bite my neck on a park bench. If I had still been alone, still running, still telling myself I didn't need anyone, I would have taken Jason's hand today and followed Sergei Kedrov into whatever clean, quiet trap Viktor Seriova had built for me.
"So what now?" I asked.
Cillian's hand came up to my face. He cupped my jaw, tilting my head back until I was looking at him, and his thumb brushed my lower lip once, slow, before settling against my chin. The touch was new. Possessive, yes, but tender in a way that made my ribs ache.
"Now," he said, his voice so low I felt it more than heard it, "you stay close. And I find out how far Viktor's reach goes before I cut it off."
He kissed my forehead again. Then the bridge of my nose. Then the corner of my mouth, so close to my lips that my breath stuttered and my fingers curled in his shirt and I had to physically stop myself from turning into it.
He pulled back. His eyes were dark. Hungry in a way he was keeping on a leash.
"Go to bed, Ava," he said.
"It's nine o'clock."
"Then go to bed early."
"Because you said so?"
"Because if you keep looking at me like that, I'm not going to make it to the phone call I need to make. And that phone call is going to keep you alive."
I let go of his shirt and stepped back. My face was burning and my pulse was doing something medically concerning and the spot on my neck where his thumb had pressed the bruise was throbbing in time with my heartbeat.
I walked to the bedroom. At the door, I stopped.
"Cillian."
He was reaching for his phone, shifting back into the version of himself that made people disappear for a living. He looked up.
"Thank you," I said. "For not killing Jason."
His mouth twitched. "The night is young."
"Goodnight, Cillian."
"Goodnight, wife."
I closed the door and pressed my back against it and stood there in the dark with my hand over the bruise on my neck and the terrifying, undeniable knowledge that the most dangerous man I'd ever met had just kissed the corner of my mouth and I had wanted him to miss.