“Hush,” he says again. He puts a finger to my lips, then rearranges me in his embrace until my tear-stained cheek is resting on his shoulder. Stroking my hair, he whispers, “He doesn’t get to touch you. Do you understand me? Not now. Not ever again. I don’t care what you tried to do or what he thinks he has the right to do—that doesn’t fucking matter. I’ll put him in the dirt before he ever touches you again.”
I hiccup, kind of a laugh, kind of a sob. “Normal people don’t say things like that, you know.”
“I think you understand by now that I’m not a normal person,dikarka.”
He keeps stroking my hair. His palm is warm against the back of my skull, his fingers spread wide enough that I can feel each one, and I let myself lean into it.
Just for a second. Just until I remember how to breathe.
“You had him followed, right?” I mumble into his lapel. “Tell me you have someone on him, or a tracker, or— I don’t know, a guy in a van. Because if he’s gone, and we don’t know where he went, or why, then we’re— Mat, we’re so screwed, we’re?—”
“No.”
I lift my head in surprise. “Huh?”
“I didn’t follow him,” he says.
I blink. “You— What?”
“I heard you crying through the wall.” His thumb brushes the hinge of my jaw. “And I made a choice.”
The wind wails louder. Out on the parkway, Raymond is getting farther away by the second, taking whoever was on the other end of that phone with him.
And Matvei is here on the carpet with me instead.
“Mat,” I whisper, “that was the wrong choice.”
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.”
“It was, though. Mat,come on. That was our chance!”
“There will be other chances.” He kisses my forehead. “There will be other windows. There won’t be another you.”
That stuns me speechless.
Pulling back off his chest, I look up at him.
He’s got snowmelt at his hairline and his pupils are blown wide enough to swallow all but the thinnest ring of the blue. There’s a tendon ticking in his jaw that hasn’t stopped since he walked in. He has come down off Murder Mode Matvei by maybe two percent, and the other ninety-eight percent of him is still vibrating with unspent violence.
And yet he still chose me.
I don’t understand.
He chose me over that. How? Why?
So in the end, there’s only one thing you can do with a man like that. You show him what it means, for him to take all that bloodthirsty rage and lock it up so that he can give you something tender instead.
I lean forward and put my mouth on his.
His hands come up to my face, both of them, and I wonder briefly if he’s about to push me back—Not now, Cass; you thought I wantedyou?!—and then he tilts my head a different way and kisses me like he’s trying to keep me from sliding off a cliff.
It’s the first proper kiss he’s given me. Not a forehead. Not a knuckle. Not the brush of his mouth against the corner of mine in The Ice Room. This is a real one, with his tongue against mine and his teeth catching the soft of my lower lip until I’m whining into him.
“Mat,” I manage, when he lets me breathe.
“Yes.”
“I need?—”
