“He found the vitamins,” I get out.
“What did he do?”
“He didn’t— Maybe he was going to, but before he did, there was a phone call. He left.”
Mat’s thumbs stroke under my eyes, soft and steady. He’s checking my face for marks. He’s done this before, in the alley behind Khaza, with these same hands. Once he’s satisfied, he tucks me into his coat and folds his arms around me and just holds me.
I shake. I can’t seem to stop.
“I’ve got you,” he says against my temple. “I’m here. I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I breathe. He smells like rain on pine trees. I press my forehead into his sternum and stand there inhaling him in until I am more or less a person again. “I’m sorry to bother you. I just didn’t know where else to go,” I mumble into his coat.
“You did the right thing.”
He walks me deeper into the stone passage. Above us, the old masonry is dark and damp, somewhere a ghost would haunt, and there’s a dead-end alcove just off the main passage where the carriage path bends. Out of the sightline of either entrance.
He puts his back to the stone and pulls me in against him.
“I keep thinking he can smell you on me,” I whisper.
Mat’s hands move into my hair. “You did good. You handled it. You’re here. He doesn’t know anything.”
“Mat…”
“What?”
“Can you make me forget for a minute?”
I don’t even have to explain what I need. He understands me. He always has. His mouth finds mine, slow and warm, and the shaking in my hands starts to ease. He kisses me like Raymond doesn’t exist. Like I was made for Matvei alone and he was made for me, and everything that brought us here was nothing more than prologue to the real story.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “Are you sure?”
“Please.”
He sinks down.
He goes onto one knee, then both, right there on the cold stone with his black coat pooling around him. He looks up at me. I have never seen anything as terrifying or as beautiful as Matvei Satyrin on his knees in a freezing stone passage in Central Park, looking up at me like I am the only thing he’s going to put in his mouth for the rest of his life.
He works open my coat, then peels my tights down my thighs with shaking fingers. His hands are warm against the cold of my skin. He guides the fabric past my knees, then drapes the hem of my coat forward over his head so we are both inside it, my body and his face, in a tent of black wool that smells like him.
He doesn’t tease. Not today. He knows I don’t have it in me. His mouth goes where I need it to and he gets to work, slow, patient, and devastating. One of his arms wraps around the back of my thighs to hold me up against the wall. The other braces my hip. I have one hand fisted in the wool of his collar and the other pressed flat against the cold stone above his head.
I bite the inside of my cheek to stay quiet.
I can hear voices on the path beyond the passage. The mundane traffic of a weekday morning passing six feet away from us. None of them look in. There’s no reason to. We’re just a murky shape in the dark inside an old stone underpass.
Soon, the shaking stops. Something else takes its place. Mat hums against me when he feels me get close. I make a sound that comes from somewhere in the bottom of my lungs, and the wool of his collar muffles it just in time. I shake apart on his mouth in a long, near-silent rush, and he stays where he is until I’m done.
He resurfaces. The coat comes off his head. He rests his cheek against my belly for a long moment, his eyes closed, his arm still around the back of my thighs.
Then he works my tights back up for me and reassembles me. He kisses the place over my belly, just once, soft enough that I feel it in my throat.
“I’m gonna fix this,” he murmurs. “All of it. Do you hear me?
I nod against his chest.
“If he raises a hand to you again before this is done—if he so much as looks at you wrong—you call me. I don’t care what time. I don’t care where I am. I’ll come and find you and I’ll do what must be done.”
