Page 4
A few minutes—or maybe longer—passes, and then something in the whole room changes.
The laughter dies. The whispers thin into a hush. Even the music seems to lower itself. I lift my head and follow every turned gaze toward the entrance.
A man stands framed in the doorway, looking exactly like Maksim, a phone still pressed to his ear. He wears a flawlessly tailored suit. His hair is trimmed and silver-gray. He looks older than Maksim and far too attractive, and slowly he lowers the phone, his eyes already fixed on me on the floor.
His presence swallows everything else in the space. Conversation forgets how to happen. He crosses the room straight toward me, unhurried, certain of the ground beneath him, and the staff moves out of his path like water. Guests half-rise as he passes, respect and fear moving through them in a single current. Even Vanessa goes still in her booth, her painted smile faltering for the first time all night.
Why do they all look so scared?
Without one word, he pulls off his jacket and drapes it over my soaked, shivering shoulders. Cedar wraps around me instantly, warm, clean, and grounding.
“Are you all right?” he asks, low and rough. His voice is Russian-accented, thick with quiet authority.
I look up into steel-gray eyes and lose every word I own.
From here, he’s the most attractive person I’ve ever laid eyes on. Maksim doesn’t even register beside him. His face holds the hard, deliberate lines of a sculpture, all rugged bone and shadow. I feel like I’ve kissed a version of this face — the same straight blade of a nose, the same high cheekbones, the same stubborn jaw—and yet it isn’t Maksim’s. It’s rougher. Silver where Maksim dyes his black.
And with that, it finally lands. Maksim has a brother. He only ever talked about him drunk and mean, in flat, ugly stories — my brother — never with a name, never with a face, never once letting on they wear the same one.
He’s his twin.
He helps me up with a gentle grip on my arm. “Thank you,” I whisper. “I’m fine, really.”
“Such a little liar, solnyshko,” he murmurs.
The word grazes the side of my neck and leaves heat behind it. Then he turns, and the room drops ten degrees.
“Who did this?” he says. It is not a question.
Nobody answers. Vanessa’s mouth opens and closes.
His gaze finds Maksim, and I watch my ex go the color of ash. “It was an accident,” Maksim says. “She’s clumsy, she—“
“Apologize to her.” The command lands quiet and absolute.
“She started—”
“Apologize to her.” His jaw tightens hard around it.
Maksim meets those eyes, goes paler still, and lowers his head like a scolded boy. “I’m sorry,” he mutters.
Vanessa follows a beat later, sour and reluctant. “Yes. Sorry too.”
The man releases them with a glance and turns to the room. “Delete every photo and video from tonight. All of it. Now.”
Thumbs fly across screens. I have no doubt they scrub the whole thing clean.
Who on earth is this man, I think, dizzy and bleeding into his cedar-scented jacket. Why does half this room bend the second he speaks?
“Come,” he says to me, his hand hovering at the small of my back without quite landing. Even that near touch feels like being burned. “Not here.”
“Thank you,” I manage.
“No.” A faint, dangerous smile curves his mouth. “I should thank you.” He tilts his phone toward me, and on the screen sits a call placed from my own number four minutes ago. A staffer’s voice, tinny, is still asking whether he is the emergency contact for a Delaney Cox.
“Tell me,” he says, amused and low, “why a woman I have never met keeps me listed for her emergencies.”
My skin catches fire.
