The Ice Room, as it turns out, is more of a utility closet with more of the pheasant wallpaper. It’s a tiny green-tiled cube with a hulking ice machine humming against the far wall and a vending machine next to it stocked with five-dollar Pringles and twelve-dollar Kit Kats. Everything is washed in bright white light from the bare bulb cam lighting overhead.
And by everything, I meanMatvei.
My eyes start at the floor and travel up slowly like I’m being charged by the inch. His feet are bare on the green tile. The sight of skin there is shockingly intimate to me in a way I can’t quite explain. It’s almost naughty, in a strange way.
Up higher, black pajama bottoms hang low on his narrow hips. A black ribbed tank top—awifebeater, Raymond calls them, always with a self-aware chuckle, though it’s a word that has never sat well in my mouth and sits even worse now—clings to him like it was poured on, the cotton thin enough that I can see the dark shadow of his sternum through it.
But it’s the arms that do me in. God help me, it’s the arms. Long and lean and corded, the kind of forearms a girl could pen a sonnet about, every tendon visible from wrist to elbow as heholds his own ice bucket in one hand. His shoulders are broader than the suit jackets ever let on, sloping into a neck I’ve kissed and a clavicle I haven’t. They show more of his tattoos than I’ve ever seen before. Black ink crawling from somewhere under the tank, twining up over his left shoulder and down his bicep.
A rose. A dagger. Unreadable Cyrillic script along the inside of his forearm.
He looks up. Unlike me, he doesn’t seem surprised that we’ve met here. I’m not even sure he’s capable of being surprised, this man, who I’m starting to think occupies all rooms simultaneously like a particularly handsome quantum particle.
“Good evening, Cass.”
The ice machine drops a fresh load of cubes into its hopper with a well-tuned sense of comedic timing.
I hold up the silver bucket like a hostage. “Just here for ice,” I say, though he didn’t ask.
His mouth twitches, then stills. “I believe you.”
“Do you, though?”
“I do. Unless you have ulterior motives I should know about?” His eyes twinkle with the hidden not-quite-a-joke. “Do you, Cass? Are you plotting something nefarious? A murder, perhaps?”
“That’s not funny,” I hiss.
“Agree to disagree.” He reaches out and gently but firmly takes the bucket from my hand. Our fingers brush. Without ever looking away from me, he shovels ice into the bucket. He moves slowly, as if we’ve got all the time in the world. Maybe we do.Here at this midnight hour, time is only a concept. It might as well not exist.
“You’re up late,” he remarks as he tops off the bucket and passes it back to me.
“If I am, then you are, too.”
He grins halfway. “The nighttime is my time.”
I roll my eyes. “You know, it’s not actually arequirementfor you to be cryptic and mysterious all the time.”
“No, of course not,” he says. “Things are simply more fun that way.”
His grin spreads a notch wider, and the sight of those lips—more specifically, the memory of those lips devouring me while my fingers scrabbled for purchase on the cold walls of Greyshot Arch—makes me burn up on the inside. Thank goodness we’re in The Ice Room, or else the whole hotel might be in danger of being reduced to ash.
Then that grin stills. He extends a hand in my direction. I instantly close the gaping lapels of my bathrobe, blushing hot red and cursing my past self for not even bothering to wipe spilled sauce off my chest. But it’s not my chest it’s going for; the mustard and ketchup stains are safe where they are.
It’s the dried tear on my cheek.
“You’ve been crying,” he observes as he brushes it away.
“Says who?”
He merely looks at me and waits for a better answer.
“It was a dignified cry,” I insist. “Well-deserved.”
“Having second thoughts?” he asks.
“Fuckno,” I declare. “Not even a little bit. Not even first thoughts.”
He nods, pleased. “Nothing sexier than a determined woman.”
