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The moment we’re outside, she yanks her arm away from me, putting space between us. “I’ll pay you back at the garage,” I tell her quietly, in a voice low enough that not even any security system could pick up on it. “So there’s no chance of him seeing.” I pause. “I already called you an Uber there, so we can talk once we—”
She’s already walking away from me, towards the curb, where I can see lights starting to come towards us. She hasn’t spoken a word directly to me since she walked out of the room with Matvei, and it makes me feel restless and irritable, wanting to find out what’s going on. I want her to talk to me, to tell me what’s going on in her head right now, and she clearly has every intention of shutting down.
I can’t make decisions about how to handle the next time if she doesn’t talk to me.
Every muscle in my body is tense as I follow the Uber back to the garage, pulling into a space in front of it and killing the engine as Asha gets out of the car. She still has that blank, shut-off look on her face, and I let out a breath as I walk to meet her, pulling an envelope out of my jacket pocket.
“Here’s the cash for tonight.” I pause as she takes it out of my hand and puts it into her purse, trying not to be distracted by the brush of her fingers against mine. “Asha—are you alright? I know tonight wasn’t something you like to do, but you seem—”
“We don’t need to talk about it.” Her voice is flat, curt. “It’s none of your concern.”
I feel a flash of irrational anger, frustration that she won’t talk to me. “We’re working together, Asha. Itismy concern if you’re not alright. If something happened—” I force what Matvei said as we were leaving out of my head, how pissed off it made me. I need to think about her right now, what she might be feeling—but she’s making it just as difficult. Her lips press together, thinning, and I can tell it’s going to be hard to drag anything out of her at all.
“I did my job. That’s all you need to know. He didn’t say anything useful, so I’ll go back again, but I expect it will be a few sessions before I have enough trust with him to be able to ask much without seeming suspicious.” She raises one eyebrow, her gaze still flat as she looks at me. “Is that enough of a debriefing for you, Mr. O’Sullivan?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Asha!” I glare at her, the use of my last name the last straw that tips me over the edge. “You don’t need to play these games with me. You can justtalkto me. You can tell me what happened—”
“No, I can’t.” She tilts her chin up, letting out a slow breath. “I’m not going to detail what I did with Matvei, both because he stillismy client, and because I don’t personally want to go into it again. When I get something relevant to whatyouwant from me, I’ll share it. Alright? We don’t need to keep talking about this.”
Asha pauses, looking at me as I struggle to get my emotions under control, to think of how to have this conversation rationally. “Thegames, as you put it, are how I keep my life in order,” she says calmly. “And now, I’m going to go home. I’m very tired. Same time, same place next week.”
She turns to go, and I close my eyes briefly, struggling for patience. “Asha, let me give you a ride home. You shouldn’t be going back alone—”
“No.” Her tone is flat, the word sharply final. “I don’t want you to know where I live. My privacy is important.”
“I’m not letting you just get back in that Uber and go home alone!” I glare at her, huffing out a frustrated breath. “You’ve just spent time with someone that both my organization and Nikolai have flagged as a danger, someone who you yourself didn’t want to see again because he upset you, and you want to just go home without having someone to check and make sure—”
“It’s myhome, Finn!” She explodes, spinning around to face me again, her eyes narrowed. “If I can’t feel safe there, then I might just as well go ahead and hang it all up, leave the city, and start over somewhere new. I amnotgoing to just tell you where I live, and I am not going to let myself be made afraid to go home.” Asha turns on her heel, starting to go back to the Uber that she told to wait. I want to grab her elbow, pull her back, and make her listen to me, but I knowexactlyhow furious she’d be if I did that. It wouldn’t be pretty, that’s for sure.
“Asha—” I call after her anyway, and she pauses briefly, halfway between me and the car. “I’m trying to protect you. I—”
“I’m not yours to protect, Finn.” She doesn’t look at me as she says it, her shoulders tensing, and then she stalks to the waiting car without another word.
I watch her for a moment as she gets into the Uber, the decision of what to do warring back and forth in my head. She clearly wants her privacy—but I can’t reconcile letting her leave without being certain that she’ll get home safely. I’d never be able to live with myself if something happened to her—for more than just because I’m responsible for putting her on this job.
Everything I’ve seen of her has indicated that she’s tough, independent, and stubborn—but there’s something about her that makes me want to protect her…to take care of her, no matter how much I know she’d buck against it.
Fuck it.I swing my leg over my bike before I can stop myself—before the Uber can get too far—firing up the engine and peeling out into the road as I follow the car. She might not have been willing to ride with me, but I sure as hell can follow her and make sure that she gets into her apartment building safely.
She’s in this situation because of me. BecauseIdecided she was the best way for us to get what we needed without putting lives in danger.
Now, I’m not so confident that hers might not be after all. And I’m not going to let anything happen to her.
Asha
Imanage to keep the tears in until the Uber drops me off. I think, for a split second as I get out of the car, that I hear a motorcycle’s engine—I spin around, looking down the dark street for any sign of a bike following me, but there’s nothing there that I can see. Just the lights of traffic from the main road, and then the low darkness of mine.
I grip my keys in my fingers as I walk to my building, inwardly cursing Finn for making me worry at all. I know his heart was in a good place—he’s asked me to do this job, and his job is security for the Kings. It makes sense that he’d be worried about making sure I got home safe, wanting to follow me, to ensure that nothing happened. If I’d let him, he’d probably have followed me all the way up to my apartment. And then—
My eyes flutter closed for just a moment as I put in the code to open the outside door, slipping into the pine-scented lobby of my apartment building and heading for the stairs. I don’t want to be touched after that session with Matvei—but somehow, the idea of it beingFinntouching me feels differently. It wouldn’t even have to be sexual. I feel, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that if I asked him to lay in bed with me and hold me while I fell asleep, he’d do it, even if it meant him spending the whole night wanting me while nothing happened.
It’s the kind of thing that could make me fall in love with him, I think as I step into my apartment and triple-lock the door behind me, tossing my keys onto the counter and contemplating a drink. But all I really want is a shower and to go to bed—before I can even make my way to the bathroom, I feel the tears start to well up.
I close my eyes tightly, trying to hold them back, wrapping my arms around myself as if I can physically push the emotion deeper and lock it away, but of course, I can’t. It wells up, everything I’d forced myself not to feel while I did what Matvei wanted from me tonight, and I sink my teeth into my lower lip, groping for the edge of the counter to hold onto as I start to cry.
It was almost too much. He’d been as pleased as a cat that caught a songbird that he’d gotten another night with me despite Nikolai’s refusal to let him back into the club. It confirmed that Finn was onto something with his plan—Matvei would likely drop some useful information before too long simply because he won’t be able to keep himself from bragging to me. He’s an arrogant, reckless, spiteful man, and my skin crawled every time he touched me.
He could see that Finn didn’t like me being there, too—and he’d exploited it. He hadn’t suspected that Finn was more than a bodyguard, but I know he’d made sure that Finn could hear what we were doing, that his commands and sounds of pleasure could be heard well down the hallway where Finn was waiting. And what he’d said after—
