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But none of that matters. If I were entirely on my own, if I didn’t have any responsibilities to anyone else, it might. I could tell him no, that I don’t want to sell drugs for him anymore, that I don’t want to work for him at all. I could go around to the other side of his desk, sit in his lap, and kiss him until he forgets everything except his name and mine.
I bite my lip, trying to control the way my breathing quickens at the thought. “If I said I wanted to stop—” I look at him, trying to gauge his reaction as I speak. “And I had an—arrangement—with someone else, would things be different between us?”
I can tell from the sudden, dark flash in his eyes and the way his jaw tightens that I don’t need to explain further what I mean. Lorenzo shakes his head, sharply.
“I don’t share what’s mine, Miss Ilenya,” he says, his voice dropping an octave and sending a shiver over my skin that settles directly between my legs.
“Then let me be yours.” It comes out before I can stop it, the words hanging in the air between us. “Lorenzo?—”
Slowly, he stands up. His expression has darkened further, the first real emotion I’ve seen on his face since I arrived. He circles slowly around the desk to where I’m sitting, and his approach makes my heart beat so hard that it hurts.
He reaches for me, and I feel as if I can’t breathe. His hand closes around my wrist, tugging me up from the chair, and I know I see lust in his eyes. I know he’s imagining putting me on my knees again, setting me on his desk, repeating everything we did in the studio, and more.
When his hand touches my chin, his fingers resting beneath it as he makes sure I’m looking up at him, my knees feel weak. Every inch of my skin is begging for his touch, and I know he can see it.
I start to reach for him, to press my hand against the front of his trousers so I can feel how hard he is, but he grabs my wrist again with his other hand. When he speaks, his voice is low and quiet—nearly a growl.
“No, Mila. The answer is no. And if you ask again, all of our business together will end.”
On the surface, it’s a rejection. But I can hear what else it is, in the dark depths of his voice, because the steps of this dance are ones we’ve already done together.
His control is on the knife’s edge. He’s threatening to drop me altogether if I ask again, not because he doesn’t want me, but because he wants me too much.
Because he’s afraid if I ask again, he won’t be able to say no.
I want to push him so badly that it hurts. I want to ask again, anyway, to look up into those tormented green eyes and dare him not to fuck me right here, in his office, the way I know he’s imagined while he wraps his hand around his own hot and straining flesh.
But if I call his bluff and fail, everything will be so much worse.
So instead, I swallow hard and nod, slowly.
“I understand,” I whisper, trying to hide the soft cracking in my voice. Trying to hide how much I want him.
From the look on his face, I think he knows anyway.
He holds my gaze for a long moment, still touching my chin, until my knees feel like they might buckle underneath me and leave only those two fingers to keep me upright. And then his expression shutters, the desire wiped away and locked behind some invisible door that only he holds the key to, and his hand drops from my face.
Lorenzo walks behind the desk, taking something out of his desk. The bag of pills, I see, as he straightens and holds them out.
“Call me when they’re sold,” he says simply. “We’ll speak then.”
Curt and brief. Just business. I try to keep my own face carefully blank when I take the bag out of his hand, tucking it in my purse. I feel a weight settle on my shoulders, as if having them taken away had given me a momentary burst of freedom.
But, of course, money is the only thing that will give me any real freedom at all.
“If you see Officer Adams again, call me as well,” Lorenzo adds. I still hear the unspoken sentence after—not for anything else. I should contact him for emergencies only, and when the pills are sold.
We aren’t friends, and we aren’t lovers. I need to remember that.
He settles back behind his desk, looking at me as if waiting to see if there’s anything else, and I don’t know what to say. Not a single thing that comes into my mind seems right, or as if it will do anything other than make all of this worse.
So, instead, I just turn and walk away.
—
“Why was Lorenzo Campano here to see you?”
Rachelle’s hissing, curious question is the last thing I want to hear when I get to the studio an hour later. I let out a breath as I look down at my pointe shoes, my fingers feeling thick and clumsy with the ribbons, reminding myself that I knew the question was coming. There was no way that she wasn’t going to ask. After he stood there in the doorway watching me, half the troupe probably has questions.
