13. Touch What's Mine

Elena's POV

Kozlov waited until we were standing.

Dessert had come and gone untouched, a dark slice of chocolate on a white plate, the cream slumping off its side while nobody ate. Jax rose first. I rose after him, because that was the rule, and my chair scraped the tiles, and every eye at the table followed the sound.

"Mrs. Vance." Kozlov came around the end of the table, unhurried, smoothing his tie. "You can't leave without letting me say goodnight properly."

I kept my eyes on his shoes. Black. Polished.

He reached for my hand.

It looked like manners. An old-fashioned gentleman, lifting a lady's fingers to kiss them. I had seen it in films. Nobody had ever done it to me, and for one confused second I almost gave him my hand the way you pass someone a plate.

But his fingers didn't take my hand. They closed around my wrist.

Not hard. That was the worst of it. Cool, dry, almost gentle, a ring of fingers settling into place exactly where Mark's used to go.

Everything in me stopped.

I knew this grip. My breath caught halfway in and stayed there. My arm went heavy and boneless. The room drew back from me, the candles, the voices, a spoon touching china somewhere, until it all seemed to be happening on the far side of a window, and I was somewhere small and quiet, and very far away.

"You're trembling," Kozlov said softly. "There's no need."

His thumb slid under the edge of my sleeve.

He pushed the silk up an inch, slowly, the way you lift the lid on a pot to see how it's coming along. Cool air touched my skin. I felt him find it: the old mark on the inside of my wrist, gone yellow at the edges, the shape of someone else's thumb.

"Ah," Kozlov murmured. He sounded pleased, like a man who'd found the last puzzle piece under the sofa. "So that's what the sleeves are for."

He looked past me, at Jax. "How tender of you."

I couldn't move. I couldn't even count.

Then a hand came into the edge of my sight. Long fingers. A pale scar across two knuckles. It closed around Kozlov's wrist.

Not mine. His.

Jax didn't yank. He didn't twist. He only held on and pressed, slow and patient, the way you work a tight ring off a swollen finger. I felt Kozlov's fingers loosen on my skin one at a time, until they opened and let me go.

Air rushed back into my chest. I pulled my arm in against my ribs and dragged the sleeve down over the mark with fingers that wouldn't work properly.

Around the room, chairs shifted. Two of Kozlov's men had come off the wall. Behind me, Gideon's boots crossed the tiles and stopped. The candle beside my plate was the only thing in the room still moving.

"She's mine, Viktor." Jax's voice was so low I felt it more than heard it. "Nobody touches what's mine. Not my men. Not my guests. Not you."

"I was saying goodnight."

"You were testing me." Jax let go of his wrist. "In front of your own men, so they'd all see whether I let it go. I don't. You'll pay for that hand, Viktor. Not tonight. But every one of them will be watching when you do."

I looked up then. I couldn't help it. For one second Kozlov's smile went perfectly still, and something old and patient looked out from behind it. Then he rubbed his wrist, almost fondly, and inclined his head.

"I look forward to it."

Across the table, Mark sat with his glass halfway to his mouth and his new watch sliding down toward his knuckles. He didn't say a word.

"Elena," Jax said. "Walk."

I walked.

The car door shut, and Zima's warmth was gone, and the cold leather pressed through the silk at my back. Gideon pulled away from the pier. The case of money sat on the seat beside him like a passenger.

Nobody spoke.

But the silence wasn't empty. It had a sound. Tires hissing on wet road. The engine, low and even. And under both, something else, a hum like a refrigerator in a dark kitchen at three in the morning, the kind you only hear when everything else has stopped.

My wrist burned. Not from pain. From being held, and from being let go.

I looked at Jax.

I didn't mean to. My eyes went to him the way they always went to a man after something happened, to see what was coming next. His face in the passing streetlights: light, dark, light. His jaw locked. The hand that had held Kozlov's wrist lay open on his knee, then closed, then opened again, as if it could still feel the bones.

"Don't," he said.

I flinched. "Don't what?"

"Watch my face like that. Like you're checking whether I'm about to hit you." He didn't turn his head. "Look out the window."

I turned my face to the glass. Black water. A string of lights on the far shore, smeared by the rain.

I lasted four seconds.

My eyes came back to him. They wouldn't stay away. In Mark's house, looking away from a man's face meant missing the moment it changed, and every nerve I had was trained never to miss that moment.

But it wasn't only that, and that was what frightened me. He had held another man's wrist until it opened. His hand was still closing on nothing. And I wanted to know why.

He turned his head and looked at me.

Neither of us said anything. The hum filled the car until I could hear my own pulse inside it.

"Elena." Very low. A warning. I didn't know what it was warning me about.

I didn't look away.

And because I couldn't hold his eyes any longer, and couldn't let go of them either, I said the only thing I had.

"The man beside him."

Jax went still.

"The young one. He wore his watch turned to the inside of his wrist." My voice was barely there. "He checked it three times. When we sat down. While the money was counted. When Kozlov said your drive home." I swallowed. "And the last time, he looked out the window. At the road. This road."

I braced for him to tell me I was wrong.

He didn't. He looked at me a moment longer, and then past me, at the case of money on the front seat.

"He didn't lose anything tonight," Jax said quietly. "He just paid to watch me carry it all home."

All of it. The money on the seat. And me, in the back, in his silk.

"Gideon."

"I see them." Gideon's eyes met ours in the rearview mirror.

I twisted around on the seat.

Far back along the harbor road, two headlights had swung out behind us. Then two more. They hung there in the dark at the same distance, patient as men waiting at a table.

Then, all at once, they went out.

Jax didn't take his eyes off the rear window. He reached under the seat, and his hand came back holding a gun.

"Elena," he said. "Get down on the floor. Don't come up until I say your name."