"Do you know where you are?"
I look at the window and I ask, "Where am I?"
"One of my properties," he says. "In New York."
I find the second shoe under the chair, I pick it up and I hold both shoes in one hand and I look at him and I say,
"Thank you. I need to go now."
"You can't go yet."
"Why not?"
"Because you were drugged." He says it and something changes in his face. "You were drugged, Nathalie. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what they were planning to do to you?"
I look at him. His jaw is set and his eyes are very green.
"What do you care?" I ask in answer.
He breathes in. "Stay here," he says. "I'll take care of you."
I feel something crack open in my chest that I promptly push back down and seal over.
"No thank you. I would rather not get drugged again."
"I would never do that."
The laugh that comes out of me is not a happy one. "You won't?" I say. "That's interesting. Because I remember fucking you and begging you to keep me, then waking up in a hospital bed with my father glaring at me."
I feel the tears coming but I refuse them. "We made love all night, Luca. I begged you to keep me. I told you I wanted to stay and you looked me in the eye and you put something in my drink and you threw me away like I meant absolutely nothing to you."
"Nathalie, listen to me?—"
"No." I wipe my face with the back of my hand and I will not cry in front of him.
"Thank you for last night. I'll compensate you for any trouble. I have to go now."
I walk to the door.
"Back to the den of wolves?"
I stop.
He is behind me, I can hear it, and I don't turn around but I stop walking.
"Your fiancé and your cousin planned this together," he says. "They put enough of that drug in your wine to knock out someone twice your size. If I hadn't happened to be in that building tonight you would have woken up in a situation you couldn't have recovered from easily." He pauses. "Do you understand that?"
I turn around.
"So what?" I say. "It's my business. It's my life."
"You're handling it badly."
"That has nothing to do with you. It's my fiancé and my life and none of it has anything to do with you!"
He drags his tattooed hand over his face in the way he does when he is containing something.
"Do you love him?" he asks. His voice is very quiet and very direct.
