Page 44 of Cruel Demands

I let my thumb move once along her jaw. “Then don’t start.”

Her eyes search mine. Something in her softens. “Okay,” she whispers.

I release her. She turns onto her side facing me, the blanket between us, her eyes already heavy. Pleasure and alcohol and the long, strange violence of the evening are pulling her under. Her eyes close. For a few minutes, I think she has fallen asleep.

Then she shifts closer. Not much. Enough that her forehead nearly touches my chest. I stay still. She moves again, the smallest stubborn movement, until her face rests against the front of my shirt.

I look down at her. Her breathing evens out. Sleep takes her without permission. It does what I have not been able to do. It takes the tension from her mouth, the fight from her brow, the careful vigilance from her hands.

I lie there in the dark, fully clothed, above the covers, with a twenty-year-old American girl asleep against me in my bed.

There are men who fear me. There are men who hate me. There are men who would pay fortunes to know where I sleep and how to reach me.

Tonight, none of them are the danger.

9

MIKHAIL

The next morning, I wake before she does. That is the first mercy of the day.

For a few seconds, I don’t move. I keep my eyes closed and listen to the room breathe around us. Snow taps lightly against the windows. The heat hums somewhere in the walls. Taylor sleeps beside me with her cheek pressed against my shirt and her hand curled in the fabric near my ribs, as if she caught me in the night and forgot to let go.

I remember everything. That is not unusual. I am not a man who drinks enough to forget. Forgetting is a privilege for softer men.

Still, memory comes differently today.

It doesn’t come as a clean report. Not a sequence of choices and outcomes. It comes in fragments, each one more damning than the last.

Taylor beneath me, laughing once before she remembered to be nervous. Taylor saying she had not done this before and looking at me like she expected the knowledge to make me hate her.

Taylor touching herself beside me in the dark, whispering my name because she thought I was asleep. My hand over hers. Her body trembling against mine. The sound she made into my shoulder when pleasure finally took her apart.

I open my eyes. The ceiling above my bed is washed in dark green paint. Quiet luxury. There is nothing in this room I have not approved. Nothing I did not choose.

Except her.

Taylor sighs in her sleep and moves closer. The top of her head presses beneath my chin. I go still. There are many dangers in my life. Men with guns. Men with money. Men with secrets. Men with old grudges and new ambitions. I understand all of them. I know where to place them, how to measure them, how to break them if breaking becomes necessary.

This girl asleep against me is a danger I do not understand.

That makes her worse.

She is too young. Too hopeful, though she would fight me for saying so. Too proud, which is not the same as prepared. She came to my bed last night dressed in a little black dress and false bravery, and I let myself pretend the bravery meant knowledge. I let myself believe her sharp tongue was armor.

My hand rests on the blanket by her shoulder. I don’t remember putting it there. I don’t remember allowing myself even that much contact after she fell asleep.

Carefully, I lift it away.

Taylor frowns in her sleep.

My chest tightens.

Ridiculous. I have held dying men without flinching. I have watched men beg. I have given orders that changed the shape of families. But a twenty-year-old girl frowns in my bed because I have taken my hand away, and something in me responds like I have done wrong.

I sit up. Slowly. Her hand slips from my shirt. For one frozen second, I think she will wake and say my name again in that ruined little voice from the night before.

She doesn’t. She rolls onto her stomach, one bare knee escaping from beneath the blanket. My shirt rides high on her thigh.