His eyes burned as they bored into hers, and he let out one of those low laughs that made her stomach tense.
“That doesn’t sound like any ghost,” he said, his voice dark and sure. “It sounds like an older man who took advantage of a young girl too drunk to fight him off.”
Alicia jolted cold, then flashed hot, as he turned her entire life on end that easily. She swayed where she stood.
“No,” she said, feeling desperate, as some great wave of terror or emotion or something rolled toward her. “My father said—”
“Your father should have known better than to speak to you like that.” Nikolai scowled at her. “News flash, Alicia. Men who aren’t predators prefer to have sex with women who are capable of participating.”
Her head was spinning. Her stomach twisted, and for a panicked moment she thought she might be sick. She felt his words—so matter-of-fact, as if there could be no other interpretation of that night, much less the one that she’d held so close all these years—wash through her, like a quiet and devastating tsunami right there in her own hallway.
“What’s his name?” Nikolai asked, in that soft, lethal way of his that lifted the hairs at the back of her neck. “The man who did these things to you? Does he still live next door to your parents?”
He was the first person she’d told. And the only one to defend her.
Alicia couldn’t understand how she was still standing upright.
“That doesn’t sound like a question a monster would ask,” she whispered.
“You don’t know what I’d do to him,” he replied, that dark gleam in his gaze.
And he looked at her like she was important, not filthy. Not a whore. Like what had happened had been done to her, and hadn’t been something she’d done.
Like it wasn’t her fault after all.
She couldn’t breathe.
His gaze shifted from hers to a spot down at the other end of the flat behind her, and she heard the jingling of keys in the hall outside. She felt as if she moved through sticky syrup, as if her body didn’t understand what to do any longer, and turned around just as Rosie pushed her way inside.
Rosie sang out her usual hello, slinging her bags to the floor. Nikolai stepped closer to Alicia’s back, then reached around to flatten his hand against the waistband of her trousers before pulling her into his bold heat. Holding her to his chest as if they were lovers. Claiming her.
“What...?” Alicia whispered, the sizzle of that unexpected touch combining with the hard punch of the revolution he’d caused inside of her, making her knees feel weak.
“I told you we were taking this public,” he replied, his voice a low rumble pitched only to her that made her shiver helplessly against him. “Now we have.”
Rosie’s head snapped up at the sound of his voice. Her mouth made a perfect, round O as if the devil himself stood there behind Alicia in the hall, no doubt staring her down with those cold winter eyes of his. And then she dropped the bottle of wine she’d been holding in her free hand, smashing it into a thousand pieces all over the hall floor.
Which was precisely how Alicia felt.
* * *
Nikolai stared out at the wet and blustery London night on the other side of his penthouse’s windows while he waited for the video conference with Los Angeles to begin. His office was reflected in the glass, done in imposing blacks and burgundies, every part of it carefully calculated to trumpet his wealth and power without him having to say a word to whoever walked in. The expensive view out of all the windows said it for him. The modern masterpieces on the walls repeated it, even louder.
It was the sort of thing he’d used to take such pleasure in. The application of his wealth and power to the most innocuous of interactions, the leverage it always afforded him. War games without a body count. It had been his favorite sport for years.
But now he thought only of the one person who seemed as unimpressed with these trappings of wealth and fame as she did with the danger he was well aware he represented. Hell, exuded. And instead of regaining his equilibrium the more time he spent with Alicia, instead of losing this intense and distracting interest in her the more he learned about her, he was getting worse.
Much worse. Incomprehensibly worse. And Nikolai knew too well what it felt like to spiral. He knew what obsession tasted like. He knew.
She was a latter-day version of his favorite drink, sharp and deadly. And he was still nothing but a drunk where she was concerned.
He’d ordered himself not to hunt down the man who had violated her, though he knew it would be easy. Too easy. The work of a single phone call, an internet search.
You are not her protector, he told himself over and over. This is not your vengeance to take.
He’d sparred for hours with his security team in his private gym, throwing them to the floor one after the next, punching and kicking and flipping. He’d swum endless laps in his pool. He’d run through the streets of London in the darkest hours of the night, the slap of the December weather harsh against his face, until his lungs burned and his legs shook.
Nothing made the slightest bit of difference. Nothing helped.
She’d all but pushed him out her front door that night, past her gaping flatmate and the wine soaking into her floorboards, her eyes stormy and dark, and he’d let her.
“Rosie calls me Saint Alicia and I like it,” she’d whispered fiercely to him, shoving him into the narrow hall outside her flat. She’d been scolding him, he’d realized. He wasn’t sure he’d ever experienced it before. His uncle had preferred to use his belt. “It’s better than some other things I’ve been called. But you looming around the flat will be the end of that.”
“Why?” he’d asked lazily, those broken, jagged things moving around inside of him, making him want things he couldn’t name. Making him want to hurt anyone who’d dared hurt her, like she was his. “I like saints. I’m Russian.”
“Please,” she’d scoffed. “You have ‘corruptor of innocents’ written all over you.”
“Then we are both lucky, are we not, that neither one of us is innocent,” he’d said, and had enjoyed the heat that had flashed through her eyes, chasing out the dark.
But by the next morning, she’d built her walls back up, and higher than before. He hadn’t liked that at all, though he’d told himself it didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. He told himself that again, now.
It was the end result he needed to focus on: Veronika. The truth about Stefan at long last, and the loose thread she represented snipped off for good. Whatever he suffered on the way to that goal would be worth it, and in any case, Alicia would soon be nothing but a memory. One more instrument he’d use as he needed, then set aside.
He needed to remember that. There was only a week left before the ball. Nikolai could handle anything for one last week, surely. He’d certainly handled worse.
But she was under his skin, he knew, no matter how many times he told himself otherwise. No matter how fervently he pretended she wasn’t.
And she kept clawing her way deeper, like a wound that wouldn’t scar over and become one more thing he’d survived.
He’d picked her up to take her to the Tate Modern on the opening night of some desperately chic exhibit, which he’d known would be teeming with London’s snooty art world devotees and their assorted parasites and photographers. It wasn’t the kind of place a man took a woman he kept around only for sex. Taking a woman to a highly intellectual and conceptual art exhibit suggested he might actually have an interest in her thoughts.
It was a perfect place for them to be “accidentally spotted,” in other words. Nikolai hadn’t wanted to dig too deeply into his actual level of interest in what went on inside her head. He hadn’t wanted to confront himself.
Alicia had swung open the door to her flat and taken his breath tha
t easily. She’d worn a skimpy red dress that showed off her perfect breasts and clung to her curves in mouthwatering ways he would have enjoyed on any woman, and deeply appreciated on her—and yet he’d had the foreign urge to demand she hide all of her lush beauty away from the undeserving public. That she keep it for him alone. He’d been so startled—and appalled—at his line of thought that he’d merely stood there, silent and grim, and stared at her as if she’d gone for his jugular with one of her wickedly high shoes.
Alicia had taken in the black sweater with the high collar he wore over dark trousers that, he’d been aware, made him look more like a commando than an appropriately urbane date to a highly anticipated London art exhibit.
Not that commandos wore cashmere, in his experience.
“Have you become some kind of spy?” she’d asked him, in that dry way that might as well have been her hands on his sex. His body hadn’t been at all conflicted about how he should figure her out. It had known exactly what it wanted.
When it came to Alicia, he’d realized, it always did.
“You must be confusing me for the character my brother plays in movies,” he’d told her dismissively, and had fought to keep himself from simply leaning forward and pressing his mouth to that tempting hollow between her breasts, then licking his way over each creamy brown swell until he’d made them both delirious and hot. He’d almost been able to taste her from where he stood in the doorway.
Alicia had pulled on her coat from the nearby chair and swept her bag into her hand. She hadn’t even been looking at him as she stepped out into the hall and turned to lock her door behind her.
“Your brother plays you in his Jonas Dark films,” she’d replied in that crisp way of hers that made his skin feel tight against his bones. “A disaffected kind of James Bond character, stretched too thin on the edge of what’s left of his humanity, yet called to act the hero despite himself.”
Nikolai had stared at her when she’d turned to face him, and she’d stared back, that awareness and a wary need moving across her expressive face, no doubt reflecting his own. Making him wish—
But he’d known he had to stop. He’d known better from the first with her, hadn’t he? He should have let her fall to the floor in that club. He’d known it even as he’d caught her.
“I’m no hero, Alicia,” he’d said, sounding like sandpaper and furious that she’d pushed him off balance again. Hadn’t he warned her what would happen? Was that what she wanted? She didn’t know what she was asking—but he did. “Surely you know this better than anyone.”
She’d looked at him for a long moment, her dark gaze shrewd, seeing things he’d always wanted nothing more than to hide.
“Maybe not,” she’d said. “But what do you think would happen if you found out you were wrong?”
And then she’d turned and started down the stairs toward the street, as if she hadn’t left the shell of him behind her, hollow and unsettled.
Again.
Nikolai saw his own reflection in his office windows now, and it was like he was someone else. He was losing control and he couldn’t seem to stop it. He was as edgy and paranoid and dark as he’d been in those brutal days after he’d quit drinking. Worse, perhaps.
Because these things that raged in him, massive and uncontrollable and hot like acid, were symptoms of a great thaw he knew he couldn’t allow. A thaw she was making hotter by the day, risking everything. Oceans rose when glaciers melted; mountains fell.
He’d destroy her, he knew. It was only a matter of time.
If he was the man she seemed to think he was, the man he sometimes wished he was when she looked at him with all of those things he couldn’t name in her lovely dark eyes, he’d leave her alone. Play the hero she’d suggested he could be and put her out of harm’s way.
But Nikolai knew he’d never been any kind of hero. Not even by mistake.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NIKOLAI HADN’T HEARD his family nickname in such a long time that when he did, he assumed he’d imagined it.
He frowned at the sleek and oversize computer display in front of him, realizing that he’d barely paid attention to the video conference, which was unlike him. Stranger still, no one remained on his screen but his brother.
Nikolai wasn’t sure which was more troubling, his inattention during a business meeting or the fact he’d imagined he’d heard Ivan speak his—
“Kolya?”
That time there was no mistaking it. Ivan was the only person alive who had ever used that name, very rarely at that, and Nikolai was looking right at him as he said it from the comfort of his Malibu house a world away.
It was the first time he’d spoken directly to Nikolai in more than two years.
Nikolai stared. Ivan was still Ivan. Dark eyes narrowed beneath the dark hair they shared, the battered face he’d earned in all of those mixed martial arts rings, clothes that quietly proclaimed him Hollywood royalty, every inch of him the action hero at his ease.
Nikolai would have preferred it if Ivan had fallen into obvious disrepair after turning his back on his only brother so cavalierly. Instead, it appeared that betrayal and delusion suited him.
That, Nikolai reflected darkly, and the woman who’d caused this rift between them in the first place, no doubt.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ivan asked in Russian, frowning into his camera. “You’ve been staring off into space for the past fifteen minutes.”
Nikolai chose not to investigate the things that churned in him, dark and heavy, at the way Ivan managed to convey the worry, the disappointment and that particular wariness that had always characterized the way he looked at Nikolai, talked to him, in two simple sentences after so much silence. And yet there was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to simply take this as a gift, take his brother back in whatever way Ivan was offering himself....
But he couldn’t let himself go there. Ivan’s silence had been a favor to him, surely. He knew where it led, and he wanted nothing to do with that particular prison any longer.
“I’m reeling from shock,” he said. “The mighty Ivan Korovin has condescended to address me directly. I imagine I ought to feel festive on such a momentous occasion.” He eyed Ivan coolly, and without the faintest hint of festive. “I appreciate the show of concern, of course.”
Nikolai could have modified his tone, the sardonic slap of it. Instead, he kept his face expressionless, his gaze trained on his brother through the screen. Your brother is an idiot, Alicia had said, so emphatically. It felt like encouragement, like her kind hand against his cheek even when she wasn’t in the room.
But he didn’t want to think about Alicia. She didn’t know what he’d done to deserve the things his brother thought of him. And unlike her confession of the sins of others, Nikolai really had done each and every thing Ivan thought he had.
Ivan’s mouth flattened and his dark eyes flashed with his familiar temper.
“Two years,” he said in that gruff way of his, his long-suffering older brother voice, “and that’s what you have to say to me, Nikolai? Why am I not surprised that you’ve learned nothing in all this time?”
“That’s an excellent question,” Nikolai replied, his voice so cold he could feel the chill of it in his own chest. “If you wanted me to learn something you should have provided some kind of lesson plan. Picked out the appropriate hair shirts for me to wear, outlined the confessions you expected me to make and at what intervals. But you chose instead to disappear, the way you always do.” He shrugged, only spurred on by the flash of guilt and fury he knew too well on his brother’s face. “Forgive me if I am not weeping with joy that you’ve remembered I exist, with as much warning as when you decided to forget it.” He paused, then if possible, got icier. “Brother.”
“Nikolai—”
“You come and you go, Vanya,
” he said then, giving that darkness in him free rein. Letting it take him over. Not caring that it wasn’t fair—what was fair? What had ever been fair? “You make a thousand promises and you break them all. I stopped depending on you when I was a child. Talk to me or don’t talk to me. What is it to me?”
Ivan’s face was dark with that same complicated fury—his guilt that he’d left Nikolai years before to fight, his frustrated anger that Nikolai had turned out so relentlessly feral despite the fact he’d rescued him, eventually; even his sadness that this was who they were, these two hard and dangerous men—and Nikolai was still enough his younger brother to read every nuance of that. And to take a kind of pleasure in the fact that despite the passage of all this time, Ivan was not indifferent.
Which, he was aware, meant he wasn’t, either.
“One of these days, little brother, we’re going to fight this out,” Ivan warned him, shoving his hands through his dark hair the way he’d no doubt like to shove them around Nikolai’s neck and would have, had this conversation taken place in person. Nikolai felt himself shift into high alert, readying for battle automatically. “No holds barred, the way we should have done two years ago. And when I crush you into the ground, and I will, this conversation will be one of the many things you’ll apologize for.”
“Is that another promise?” Nikolai asked pointedly, and was rewarded when Ivan winced. “I understand this is your pet fantasy and always has been. And you could no doubt win a fight in any ring, to entertain a crowd. But outside the ring? In real life with real stakes?” Nikolai shook his head. “You’d be lucky to stay alive long enough to beg for mercy.”
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