The sound swallows the room. Dante screams and crumples, grabbing his leg, blood jetting between his fingers. Mikhail steps over him the way you step over a puddle. Walks to me. Crouches.
His eyes are flat, winter gray. Blizzard gray.
“I gave you ten thousand dollars,” he says in a voice that is soft steel. “And a way out. What part ofstay out of my worldconfused you?”
I stare at him. The pakhan who shut down my auction. Here. In Roxbury. Saving me again.
“I don’t need saving,” I say. The words are slurred. My head is ringing. My cheek aches.
He extends his hand. I take it. His grip is warm, rough, and unyielding. He pulls me to my feet, and my legs betray me. I buckle. He catches me, one arm around my waist, and I hate how small I feel. How fragile. Howsafe.
“Search the place,” he says to his men. It sounds like rocks grinding together. “Find her money, then throw out the rats.”
In the SUV, I shake. Not from fear. Fear can wait. It’s adrenaline, pure and vicious, coursing through me like bad dope. My teeth chatter. My fingers twitch. I press my palms between my knees and will myself still.
Mikhail sits across from me in the back of a black Escalade. The leather here doesn’t crack or rustle. It has a fresh, clean, slightly lemony smell, as if it’s recently been cleaned and detailed. The partition is up. We’re alone, if alone means separated from Dmitri and the driver by tinted glass.
A muscle jumps along his sharp jawline as he stares me down, his lips pressed into a bloodless line. Anger flows in hot and cold waves. Not because he saved me. He’s angry because I almost got myself killed.
“Do you have a death wish?” he asks.
I look at him. Perfect suit. A watch that only movie stars can afford. Skin that has never known a Boston winter without heat. “Easy for you to say.” The words crack like a whip. “You’ve never been hungry. Not really. Not the kind of hungry where your stomach eats itself, and you drool over a stranger’s fast-food bag in the trash. You’ve never been homeless. Never had to choose between a roof and a meal and still failed at both. Never had to walk into a room and sell the only thing you own free and clear because it’s that or fade into nothing.”
My chest heaves. Tears burn my eyes, but I don't release them.These men will not break me.Tears are for girls who have someone to wipe them away.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” I finish. My voice is raw meat. “To have nothing. Tobenothing.”
Silence.
Mikhail stares at me. Glacier eyes. But a fault line shifts underneath. A crack so deep I feel the cold wind blowing through it.
I see it. I don’t understand it. Is he going to hit me? Or throw me out of the moving car. Instead, he turns his head. Looks out the window at Boston sliding by—the Common, the harbor lights coming on as the city prepares for sleep.
“Dmitri,” he says to the driver after pressing a button. His voice is lower. Rougher. “The penthouse.”
“What?” I sit up straight. “No. I don’t want—”
“You had your chance to do this your way.” He doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to. Its finality stops my protest. “Now we do it mine.”
“How did you know where I was?” The question tears out of me. “Were you following me?”
He says nothing. Just holds my gaze until I look away.
I protest. I threaten to jump out. I call him every name my foster mothers taught me, and a few I invented. He ignores me. The Escalade glides through the Financial District, past the harbor, up to a glass tower that touches the clouds. Doormen in uniforms that rival Buckingham Palace welcome us. A private elevator. Steel and marble and quiet so deep it’s deathly.
The penthouse.
I’ve never been this high up. My ears pop as we rise. My heart pounds a warning against my ribs. I’m dirty. Bloody. Wearing clothes from a thrift store’s sales rack. I don’t belong here. I’m a mud smudge on a white canvas. The doors open. Floor-to-ceiling windows. The city spread out like a quilt made of diamonds and darkness. Boston. My city, but not my city. From up here, I can’tsee the shelters. Can’t smell the dirt and grime. Can’t hear the gunshots in Roxbury.
It’s beautiful.
It’s terrifying.
A woman with salt-and-pepper hair steps forward. She presses a warm cloth into my hands, cleans the blood from my face, and disappears before I can thank her. Or tell her to fuck off. I’m too stunned to decide which.
The bedroom they give me is huge, almost as large as he is. The bathroom is marble with rainfall showerheads and towels plush enough to drown in.
I scrub Dante’s touch off my skin until I’m almost raw. Then I put on the robe folded on the chair. Silk. Charcoal gray. Too expensive.
