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ME: Your ego required a significant safety margin.
KANE: But it won’t be delivered until next week. That simply won’t do.
ME: You’ll just have to keep it in your pants until then.
KANE: Fuck that. I have a better idea.
KANE: Come to my place tonight. I’ve got bedroom equipment that could use some testing.
38
DELILAH
Anton won’t look me in the eye when he opens the door.
“Good evening, Ms. Dorsey. Mr. Makov is waiting for you upstairs. Please let me take your coat.”
Even by his standards, he’s being unusually distant. He keeps his gaze fixed down as he takes my purse and coat and disappears around the corner.
Leaving me facing an empty house.
It’s quiet. Too quiet? Eerily quiet?
I don’t know. I guess I’m just used to Kane greeting me with a smile and a kiss, maybe a grab of the ass. Funny how quickly we get used to things we’ve spent our whole lives waiting for.
Tonight, though, it’s just a hallway, a staircase, all of it dark and silent.
I creep up the steps one by one with my heart climbing into my throat. At the top of the stairs awaits a long landing with a thick runner the color of blood going down the length of it.
And at the end of the runner is a set of double doors.
Kane’s bedroom.
I’ve been in there before, but that was on a sunny evening, half-drunk off a bottle of wine we shared over dinner, giggling and giddy. I don’t know why tonight feels different, but it does.
A sliver of light escapes through a thin crack in the doors. When I get close enough, I pull one open and slip through.
All the lamps and overhead lights are off. Candles cover every surface instead: tapers along the mantel, squat glass jars on the nightstands. Their flames duplicate themselves in the dark windows until Kane’s bedroom looks less like a bedroom and more like the inner circle of a very sexually charged version of hell.
And who’s the devil?
Why, Kane Makov, of course.
He’s leaning against a bedpost in black trousers and no shirt. The chain is looped around his tattooed neck and he’s toying with it, his ringed fingers glowing and gleaming in the light.
He doesn’t say anything right away, and I don’t, either, because I’m busy looking at him.
The candles transform him. In daylight, he’s just a very big man in a very good suit. In here, the light comes from below and from the sides, and it snags on every part of him that isn’t flat.
The muscle across his chest.
The ridge of his shoulder.
The hollow under his collarbone where the chain sits.
His skin looks warmer than it does in daylight. Almost gold. Against it, the black of his tattoos is a jarring contrast. It looks wet and fresh in the candlelight, like I could drag my fingertips through the art and they would come away inky.
His hair’s damp. He showered before I got here. It’s pushed back off his forehead, except for that one lock that refuses to cooperate. The one imperfect piece.
