Page 56 of The Bargain

“I wish you’d drop dead,” he snaps, but there’s definitely a bit of redness in his cheeks now.

“Only so you could make out with my corpse, probably.”

“Let’s get out of here,” a voice murmurs warmly against my cheek.

Elias’s fingers press into my waist, and he turns me around by pushing his thighs into my body, with effortless control.

“This how you rich people do foreplay?” he says in my ear, and I can hear the amusement in his voice.

“That wasn’t foreplay,” I try to explain as he guides me away from Emerald and Benjamin and the crowd that’s slowly formed around them like an audience around a boxing ring. “They hate each other.”

“Oh, they definitely hate each other,” Elias says. “But that was still foreplay.”

“Emerald would rather die than let Benjamin lay a finger on her.”

“So? That’s part of the fun, isn’t it?”

Elias slowly backs me into a corner—an actual corner, because now there’s a wall pressed to my back, and Elias’s arms caging me in, and the dim red lights make him look like a nightmarish vision as he gazes down at me.

“Don’t you think it would feel good, love? To be touched by someone you hate?”

My breath is trapped in my chest, and I wish I hadn’t drunk so much, and I try to remember a time when I didn’t want Elias’s touch—when it wasn’t even a shadow of a thought on the horizon of my mind.

“I don’t hate you,” I whisper up at him.

“No?” he whispers back. “You’re developing a fondness for a worthless scumbag like me?”

“You’re not worthless.”

He lets out a mocking laugh, a low, rasping sound that scrapes over my skin, sending a curl of heat deep into my belly.

“Noxie!”

An obnoxious whoop shatters the tension between us like a fist punching through ice. Dimitri’s burly arm appears as if from nowhere to loop around Elias’s neck, dragging him away from me. Dimitri looks drunk and wild-eyed; the girl in the red catsuit is nowhere to be seen. Just like Dimitri’s fiancée.

I glare at him.

“Why don’t you go find Natalya?”

At the sound of her name, the muscles in his jaw tighten, visible all the way into his cheeks, which are sharp and curved just like his father’s. I’ve never found Uncle Iakov scary—but Dimitri is like the dark shadow of his father.

“She’s not here,” Dimitri says, lying to my face. “Need to borrow Noxie.”

I step up to him, anger kindling in my chest. “He’s here with me.”

Elias, to my surprise, lifts his mask for a fraction of a moment, flashing me a disarming grin: amused, cocky, delighted. Then the plastic mask snaps back into place, and the moment is gone.

“I’ll only borrow him for one second,” Dimitri tells me, slightly cowed by the anger in my tone. “Everyone’s excited to meet the guy who got Desdemona to dress like that.”

I glare at him, but he’s already turning away. Elias, grabbing my hand, presses his thumb into my knuckles, yanks me closer and whispers in my ear, “Won’t be long, love.”

Then he tilts his head, and he adds, “Guess the plan’s working, huh?”

A knot forms in my throat.

“Guess so.”

With Elias carried away into the poolroom to amuse Dimitri’s stupid hangers-on and Emerald disappeared somewhere—probably in the garden to bury Benjamin’s dignity with a shovel—I wander the party looking for Mira, the only person who can be trusted to behave.