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Just like last time my world fell apart.
Rayne is looking up at me, waiting for me to say something. To make my apologies and go. But there’s only one person I need to apologize to.
I turn on my heel and run up the stairs.
15
RAYNE
Humiliation clings to me like a stench. I swear everyone can smell it. It’s the only explanation I have for why everyone has kept their distance all day, even Natalia.
I doubt Kirill or his friend would have told anyone what happened in the kitchen. But maybe there are cameras. Maybe someone else saw us before German did. Why else would everyone tuck tail and run at the sight of me?
Probably because you’re oozing sexual frustration and are moments away from a breakdown, the more rational part of my brain says.
I let my forehead fall against the glass I’m supposed to be cleaning. I’ve been in the medium gym—as opposed to the big gym and the small gym—for an hour now, but I should have been done twenty minutes ago. I’m not even sure it’s been used since the last time it was cleaned, so it ought to have been a quick job. But I’ve been distracted.
Plus, being in here is better than doing what I really want to do: sprinting up to the third floor to figure out what the hell Kirill is hiding up there.
“Maybe it is a den of debauchery,” I say with a bitter sort of half-sarcasm, half-depression to my reflection. “Maybe I wasn’t debauch enough for him.”
That can’t be true, though. He was about to finger bang me in the middle of his kitchen. I told him about my shower session the night before! If that isn’t debauch, then I don’t want to know where I rank on his sliding scale.
No, it’s something else.
There’s a problem on the third floor.Why couldn’t German have been more forthcoming with information? A problem with what?
I could feel Kirill’s erection against my thigh. I know he was into what we were doing. There’s no way he would have let himself be drawn away for some kind of silly mechanical issue. No water leaks or busted furnaces.
More possibilities swirl in my mind, if for no other reason than to explain why he was able to walk out of that kitchen yesterday like it was nothing. Especially when I would have done anything to stay there and finish what we started.
I haven’t seen Natalia all day, but I hear her voice in my head.Let’s sleuth it out.
“I can’t,” I whisper. Talking to myself is a new low in a lifetime full of them, but someone has to be the voice of reason, and I’m the only one here. “I’ll get fired.”
It’s not as if you can show your face in front of Kirill again anyway.
Mental Me makes a compelling point. I barely convinced myself to show up today. His hand was inside of my pants, for Christ’s sake. I bared a teeny sliver of my soul to him last night and there is no taking that back. Maybe getting fired would be a blessing.
Especially if it’s paired with finally figuring out what Kirill is hiding. Because little by little, it’s driving me insane.
I wage this internal debate with myself for the next half hour. When I finish cleaning the gym and head upstairs to put away my cleaning supplies, I take the stairs up to the first floor, and then the second.
And then I just… keep going.
“This is stupid,” I mutter under my breath. “Reckless. The worst decision ever.”
But I can’t stop my feet from climbing.
The light isn’t on in the third floor stairwell. A visual clue to the staff thatThou shall not pass, apparently. But I pass anyway.
I head straight up to the third floor and encounter a truncated hallway. At the top of every other floor’s stairwell is a long hallway with rooms positioned on either side. But the third floor has a closet to the right, an elevator to the left, and then a set of double doors no more than ten feet ahead. That’s it.
“Probably locked,” I say. So I turn the handle to confirm, already sure that this impromptu and ill-advised little adventure is about to end.
Except… it opens.
I freeze in place. I’m teetering between the right and wrong decision. It’s a watershed moment. But for the life of me, I don’t know which is which.
