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If only to show them how wrong they are.
Besides, if I know it’s doomed from the start, I can’t get hurt. Right?
Right. That’s gotta be right.
Kirill moves closer. I have to crane my neck to look in his eyes. My lips part on a sigh I can’t bite back, and he smiles. He opens his mouth to respond, but then his breath hitches and he goes deathly still.
I’m suddenly terrified, stuck in limbo, inhale caught in my chest. This is a dangerous ride we’re on, and Kirill is the one at the wheel. If I so much as twitch wrong, I’m convinced it will go off the tracks.
Then Kirill sighs and looks over my head. “What is it?”
I spin around and see the man from last night—German, his name was—standing in the doorway. He’s wearing the same shit-eating grin he wore at the gala.
“Am I interrupting?” he asks.
Instantly, I feel dirty. The pleasant tingling in my limbs downshifts into an unbearable itchiness. And the pounding in my chest isn’t exciting anymore; it’s anxiety-inducing.
What in the hell was I thinking?
I jump away from Kirill and busy myself fluffing a pillow on the couch next to us. It looks worse now than it did before, but that’s only because my hands are shaking like leaves in a hurricane.
“What do you need?” Kirill growls. He sounds annoyed, but German doesn’t seem to mind.
“I need you, big fella,” German says. “But I don’t appear to be the only one.”
I grit my teeth. I’ve let my mouth run enough in the last twenty-four hours. Plus, I get the feeling German would enjoy a tongue lashing too much. So I stay quiet.
Kirill doesn’t look over at me, but I feel his attention like a physical touch nonetheless. Then he moves quickly across the room. “Not here.”
I watch him leave. German lingers in the doorway a moment longer, wagging his brows at me. Then Kirill grabs him by the shoulder and yanks him away.
The moment they’re gone, I flop down on the couch. I hear my sister’s voice in my head.
“‘You’re better than this, Rayne,’” I mutter, giving voice to the thoughts. “‘So much better than this.’”
8
RAYNE
Kirill doesn’t make an appearance for the rest of the day, which is fine with me.
Really, it is. I’m glad I didn’t see him. I’m glad that every time I looked over my shoulder at the slightest noise that he wasn’t there. I’m glad that when I walked down the hallways with fresh linens for the beds and new flowers for the vases, he wasn’t in any of the rooms I peeked into as I passed.
His scent was. His stuff was. His presence was.
But him? Nowhere to be seen.
“This place is massive,” Natalia remarks as we’re grabbing our belongings out of the mud room at the back of the house. “I barely saw anyone else all day.”
“No kidding. It took me thirty minutes to find you this morning to figure out what I was supposed to be doing.”
After Kirill left with German, I wandered around for so long that I started to worry that everyone else had been dismissed and I was locked in some luxurious dungeon. Kirill was going to hunt me for sport through the gilded hallways.
Natalia hangs her stiff cotton blouse in her locker and shrugs on the black t-shirt she showed up in. Then she leans in, voice low. “Sonya was everywhere, though. She has some kind of signal that alerts her when I’m about to take a break, I swear. I sat down on a stool for one minute after mopping the downstairs kitchen and she showed up.‘This is not your sanctioned break. On your feet.’That woman should be running a prison camp.”
I laugh. “Sonya never bothered me. She showed up a few times, but she didn’t say anything. She’s creepier than she is mean, thus far.”
Once I turned around and she was staring at me from a doorway like a ghost. I shrieked and then laughed, trying to explain myself. But before I could, she left without a word.
