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I don’t believe a single word of it. Hell no. Delaney noticed on her second day that my right hand aches from a grievous old injury when I have been signing too long, and she started setting my coffee a few degrees cooler so I would not have to wait to drink it. She never once let a meeting collapse, cataloging each name before I needed it. She never once told me she wanted out.

“When did she tell you all of this?” The question is mild, but direct.

“We spoke a few times.” Yelena gives me a watery smile that thins at the edges. “Here and there.”

“A few times, here and there.” I go stalking up to the desk, and my hand is already halfway to my phone. I want to call Delaney up here and ask her to my face whether a single word of this is true. I already know it’s not. Delaney doesn’t run to my ex like a jealous housewife to complain about her workload. If she had a problem with me, she would put it in front of me herself, chin up, and dare me to do something about it.

Then the elevator comes back at me all at once, and my heart races. I feel again the total dark, the floor dropping out from under us, her whole body shaking against mine, knees trembling with fear, as she clawed at my shirt with a stifled cry, holding on to me as though I were the one solid thing in that box that would not fall. In her ear, I murmured that she would live. I meant it more than I have meant almost anything. I would have ripped her back from the brink of death myself.

And I remember what I did the moment the doors opened. I set her aside like a good soldier. Crouching beside Yelena, I lifted her off the tile and carried her down the hall, and I left Delaney standing there alone in her wrinkled clothes, her hands fisting in her skirt, without a backward glance.

Pressure builds behind my ribs like a kettle that has been boiling all day. I have no right to be angry that she’s gone, and still, I’m glowing with rage. I don’t even know what authority I have left to call her back with. Whatever we were to each other went far past a boss and his assistant weeks ago, and I never once put a name to it, not even when I was so infatuated I could not see straight.

My whole life I have refused gray areas. Enemies and allies. Punishment and reward. Clean money and black-market money. Loyalty and betrayal, each with its own price already fixed in my mind. I always know which is which, and I act without hesitation, and that certainty is the whole reason I’m still breathing. Fear is a luxury I stopped affording decades ago. Delaney is the one territory I have never once been able to draw a border around. She is neither a threat I can neutralize nor a debt I can pay off, and she will not stay in any box I try to set her in. She looks straight at the monster beneath the bed and doesn’t flinch.

Yelena is here, back at my side, the woman I have wanted for twenty years. Every rule I live by says I should sweep the others out of my path now, and Delaney first. But I keep thinking about the elevator, about how close I came to taking Delaney against that wall, her body grinding against my erection, with maintenance men just outside the doors, not caring whether she came apart in a scream or a moan. My control doesn’t slip around her; my body betrays me. It snaps clean through, every single time, and I’ve spent forty-four years building that control into the only thing about me that never fails. I crave her ragged breathing, her parted lips, and her defiant eyes in a way that is not decent and is not gentle, and the sheer size of the craving, the ever-tightening heat of it, unsettles me more than I will say out loud.

“Are you angry?” Yelena asks, watching me intently.

I cannot tell her, because I cannot tell myself. I don’t know if I’m angry at Delaney for running, or at Yelena for putting the fear of God in her and chasing her off, or at myself for the whole brutal tangle of it. I only know that one empty desk feels like a piece carved straight out of me. Jesus. Perhaps she made the right call. Distance would give me room to think. The last few days have bled me dry.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I tell Yelena, and it comes out as gently as I’m able to make it. “Not to her, and not on my floor.”

She bows her head, deflated by a softness that is still not warmth. I should comfort her, not give her a good talking to. I cannot make myself cross the space to do it. My eyes keep going back to that stripped desk, and Yelena narrows her gaze like a viper in the grass, seeing exactly where they land.

“Then let me be your assistant,” she says, suddenly all appeasement. “We would be together all day. I learned a great deal while I was abroad. I could do the work.”

Her father kept her wrapped in glass her whole life. Her hands were made for holding ostentatious flutes of champagne, not for running files through the night and copying ledgers until dawn.

“I don’t need an assistant,” I finally grunt.

“I can handle it, Lev. Let me prove that to you. I want to be near you.” It is a breathy request.

“It’s not about whether you’re capable of it,” I assure her. I deftly pull my arm from hers and sit down to the backlog piled to the brim on my desk. “I can work perfectly well without one.”

Yelena doesn’t move. She stands there nipping at her lip and twisting her fingers together.

“What is wrong?” I prompt.

Her eyes fill, and she wipes at her cheek. “No one has ever taken care of me the way you did,” she says. “No one ever will. I still love you, Lev. I never once stopped.”

My heart slams against my ribs. I waited a very long time to hear those words in that voice, and now that they’re here, they land heavier than I imagined they would.

She reaches out and takes my hand in both of hers. “I came back to marry you,” she says, her accented voice severe and hypnotic. “That’s the whole reason I’m here.”

My throat closes.

Marriage is the one memory I don’t let myself touch. I had the ring bought and the evening arranged, every detail set the way I set everything, and I was certain of her yes. She ended us before I could ever ask, told me my need to hold and arrange everything around her was a cage she couldn’t breathe inside. The ring went into a drawer, its satin box slowly flaking, and stayed there for twenty years. And now she’s standing here in my office offering me back the exact future that never happened, as though the drawer had simply been waiting.

I should say yes. I always wanted this. The old, well-worn ache stirs in my chest right on cue, and still the word will not leave my mouth.

A wedding builds itself in my mind without my permission. A woman on my arm in white. But the face that turns up to me under the lights, eyes half-lidded, is not pale and delicate. It’s brown-eyed and sharp-mouthed, already wearing a scowl, halfway into an argument, and it belongs to Delaney.

The fantasy is absurd. So is the wedding night that follows it, where I make love to her until she forgets her own name. The wrong face walked straight into it.

Yelena tightens her fingers around mine. “Say something,” she says, and I can hear the unease starting to climb into her voice, a prickle of it under each word.

I want to reassure her. I start to speak and trail off. I cannot find the words anywhere in me.