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My last shred of pride puts up a short, useless fight, and then it folds completely, and I turn to face her. “I’m sorry, Miss Lebedeva.”

She waves a graceful little hand through the air. “Oh, don’t worry yourself about it. I know you didn’t truly mean it.” But her mouth curls up at one corner, and there’s nothing kind anywhere in it. She’s won, and she wants me to watch her win.

I lower myself down to the floor with a cloth and begin wiping up the water she spilled all over herself.

Above me, she sniffles into his shoulder. He murmurs something low to calm her, the same tone he once used on me in the dark.

My knees hit the hard tile. I wipe her water off his floor in slow circles, and he doesn’t look down at me even once.

14

LEV

I watch Delaney kneel on the tile and mop up the water that soaked Yelena’s dress. A strand of hair slips over her shoulder, and she tucks it back without thinking, without once looking up at me.

She’s burying something under all that stubbornness. I can see the hurt she won’t let onto her face, the way her jaw sets a fraction too hard, the way she keeps her breathing slow and even because a shaking breath would give her away. She scrubs the floor like it insulted her. It’s the opposite of Yelena, whose every fragile edge makes a man want to step in front of her and take the blow himself.

One woman asks to be protected without ever saying a word. The other would sooner bleed out quietly than let me see the wound. I’ve spent my whole life around people who perform their pain for me, and I don’t know what to do with a woman who hides hers.

I refuse to believe Yelena lied to me. The Yelena I grew up with could not lie. She was the angel of every gathering, the one who slipped out of rooms thick with liquor and shouting to find me alone in the garden.

I was fifteen the year they locked me in the basement for losing a fight I’d been ordered to win. Everyone agreed I had earned it, my father loudest of all. I sat in the dark on cold concrete and told myself I didn’t care, the way I told myself everything back then. She came down the stairs anyway with a candle and a strip of clean cloth, and she knelt in the dirt of that basement in her good dress and blew softly on the split skin of my knuckles.

No one had ever touched me like that before her. No one has since, except a soft-mouthed woman who kissed the scar on my hand a few weeks ago and asked if it still hurt.

The harder my father’s demands grew, the better I learned to hide what hurt. By twenty I could take a beating and walk out of the room with my face smooth, and everyone learned to fear the man who felt nothing. Yelena kept showing up every single time I bled, and she never flinched, never once looked at me the way the rest of them did, as though I were something built to frighten people.

To her, I was never the heir, never the coming Pakhan, never the animal the family was breeding. I was only the boy in the garden with the split knuckles. A debt like that doesn’t expire. I owe her the benefit of every doubt I have, and I intend to pay it.

A girl like that doesn’t lie about a stranger she barely met. It’s simply not in her.

And yet Delaney is not the sort to throw water at a guest on purpose. She’s sharp and quick to feel things, but she would not aim that at a woman she doesn’t even know.

The two judgments crash together and set my temple throbbing. I can’t make them fit inside the same room. Yelena doesn’t lie. Delaney doesn’t attack strangers. Both of those things have always been true, and today one of them has to give, and I find I would rather break my own head against the wall than choose which.

So, I decide it was an accident. A misunderstanding that ran away from both of them at once. Delaney’s short fuse met Yelena’s raw nerves, and it spiraled into a soaked dress and a scene neither of them planned. Yelena didn’t lie to me. She only misread a woman who meant no real harm. It’s a coward’s answer and I know it even as I reach for it, because it costs me nothing and asks nothing of me, and it lets me keep believing two things that cannot both be true. Both women stay intact that way, and today I need them both to stay intact more than I need to be honest with myself.

Yelena has never been strong. Even as a child, a short run across a lawn drained the color from her face. Her heart was always weak. Whatever else is true today, calming her comes first.

“I’m finished.” Delaney’s voice comes out flat and scraped clean of everything. She gets to her feet. “Will there be anything else, Mr. Volkov, before I take these to be filed?”

The cold title lands wrong in my ears. Days ago, she gasped my name into the dark with her legs wrapped around me, and now she armors herself behind two formal words.

I can’t bring myself to answer her.

“I will take these down,” she concedes, and gathers the stack off the desk. She turns to go.

She brushes past me, close enough that lemon and warm skin fill the space between us, and her scent pulls every muscle in my body tight. My fingers twitch toward her before I catch them and force them still at my side. She walks straight out without a single backward glance, without giving me the one thing I want, which is her eyes on me for even a second longer.

The door clicks shut. I take a step to follow her before I even know I have decided to. My whole body has already turned toward the sound of her leaving. There is a sentence sitting in my chest, though I could not tell you what it is, some explanation or apology I have no right to offer and no habit of giving to anyone.

Yelena’s voice stops me where I stand. “Lev, I’m so cold.”

She’s shaking hard, her face gone paler still, her lips drained of all their color. I cross to her and lift her off the chair, and she weighs almost nothing, her arms winding around my neck. I lay the back of my hand against her forehead. No fever, but her skin is ice.

“Yuri,” I say into my phone. “Bring women’s clothing up. Anything at all will fit her.”

I drape my jacket over her shoulders. “You have to get out of the wet dress. Your temperature is dropping too fast.”