Page 1
PROLOGUE
The tap drips.
It’s been dripping for weeks. Troy said he’d fix it, the way he says he’ll fix everything: with explosive exasperation, throwing up his hands like I’ve asked for the world. He’ll never fix it, and I’ve learned to stop asking.
I stand at the sink with my hand coated in cooling suds. The groceries are still on the table. I counted out the change twice in the parking lot, and tucked the receipt into my purse the way I do everything now. Carefully, with documentation, leaving no room for dispute. The change now sits in a neat pile on top of the receipt. It would be dangerous to leave it inside my purse.
On the floor in front of the refrigerator, the plate I was scrubbing lies in pieces.
I should clean it up. Instead, I grip the edge of the sink behind me with my one good hand, listening to the water drip and my own ragged breathing.
There’s a man in my kitchen.
Zevran Komarov.
He fills the doorway the way a storm fills a sky. Six-foot-four, with pale gray eyes glittering with malice. He wears an expensive suit on his broad, muscular body, and there’s an outline of a holstered gun under his open suit jacket. Tattoos climb his throat and decorate his hands. Several of his fingers are circled with black ink, and there are dashes across his knuckles.
He’s looking at me the way a man looks at prey he’s been hunting.
Got you.
I don’t move. My heart races, and I think, distantly, that I’ve been very, very stupid.
Zevran’s gaze moves around the room as though he’s curious about the place I was so eager to flee to. He takes in the peeling paint, the secondhand table, the cheap, store-brand groceries. His lip curls slightly, and I feel the full humiliation of it: this kitchen, this life of mine, seen through his perspective.
His eyes come back to me, and my grip tightens on the sink.
“Moya malen’kaya printsessa.” His accented voice is low and mocking, the Russian a dark ribbon beneath the menace. “I was supposed to get you home safe.”
The memory appears in my mind—his shocked face in the rearview mirror as I peeled out onto the road and sped away. I drove like the devil himself was chasing me.
His expression hardens, and when he speaks again, I feel his lethal words like a hand gripping my throat. “You stole from me.”
“I didn’t steal.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I borrowed.”
His head tilts. The movement is slow and deliberate, meant to unsettle me. It works.
“You borrowed.” He repeats it in that accented voice, like he’s tasting the word and finding it offensive. “You borrowed my car. You left me at a gas station in the middle of fucking nowhere, and you borrowed your way back to—” His gaze moves around the kitchen again, brief and damning. “—this?”
“I had no choice.”
He moves toward me with a deliberate purpose that shrinks the kitchen around us. He stops close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from him and smell the cool, expensive sharpness of his cologne. I have to tip my chin up to hold his gaze.
His eyes search my face, hunting for answers. “Why?”
I cannot think of a single response to that question that won’t end with him wringing my neck.
But that’s when I hear it. The front door slamming and Troy’s heavy tread in the hallway.
The sound of everything getting so much worse.
I’ve learned to read the noise he makes, and the clattering, unsteady footsteps make my stomach sink.
Past Zevran’s shoulder, Troy appears in the doorway where the mobster stood a moment ago, dressed in a faded plaid shirt, khaki pants, and steel-toed boots. His presence fills the room like a bad smell. His drunken, glassy eyes find us, and his brows draw together in stupefied confusion.
Zevran turns his head slowly toward my husband. He gazes at him coldly, as though Troy is the one who’s intruding on us.
Troy takes in his wife backed against the sink by a stranger standing close enough to count my eyelashes. I know exactly how he’ll read this and what it will cost me once Zevran is gone.
