Chapter 2

Arianna's Pov:

Voss's wife? Was Nikolai married? When?

I kept questioning myself.

I didn't move, I didn't speak, I just stood there with the tray in my hands and the silence pressing in from every direction, and I told myself to breathe.

Asher, the guy who had just said something about Voss's wife, raised his glass again and smiled into it like this was all very entertaining. Like he hadn't just cracked something open inside me.

Nikolai said nothing. He was still watching me. He had the patience of someone who had learned that silence was more useful than words, and he was using it now the way other people used pressure.

"You can all leave," he said finally, not as a request.

Asher drained his glass and stood without argument. Marco and his friend were already gathering their things. The room emptied in under a minute. The door clicked shut.

And then it was just us.

I should have left with them, but I don't know why I didn't. My feet simply refused, and by the time my brain caught up with the instruction, the moment had already passed.

I set the tray down on the nearest surface, carefully.

"Niko…." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I should go back downstairs…."

"Sit down, Arianna."

The way he said my name was like he had been keeping it somewhere cold.

I sat without defiance. My body has gone stiff and cold.

He moved to the bar. He poured two glasses of vodka and he set one in front of me like it was a formality we were both going to observe. He didn't sit. He stood on the other side of the low table with one hand in his pocket and looked at me as if he were intrigued.

Five years . Five years since I had walked away from him in that parking lot with my hands shaking and my heart already in pieces. Five years since I had told him things I didn't mean in a voice I had practiced until it didn't shake, because if it shook, he would have known.

He would have known, definitely. Five years of seeing those eyes that still haunts me.

He looked…. different, and not. The jaw was sharper. There was a stillness to him now that hadn't been there before, something that had settled in behind his eyes. He wore money the way he had always easily worn confidence. The suit was perfect. The watch was quiet about what it cost. He was broader in the shoulders and there were faint lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn't existed at twenty-three.

He was, if it was possible, more devastating than he had been before. That felt deeply unfair.

I had let myself believe, over the years, that whatever he felt for me had eventually burned itself out. That he had grieved what I'd done, hated me for a while, and then moved on. Maybe built a life or married someone else, which, apparently, was true. I had told myself the story so many times that it had started to feel like a fact. And which scared me.

He had forgotten me. He had moved on. I was a chapter he had closed.

"You look like you're calculating something," he said.

"I'm not."

"You always did that when you were scared." He picked up his glass and turned it once in his hand. "You'd go very still and your eyes would go somewhere else."

I looked at him directly then, because I didn't want him to think I was scared. Well, even if I was. "Congratulations on the marriage."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was not quite a smile. "Is that what you want to talk about?"

"I think I should go…"

"I heard you the first time." He set the glass down steadily. "I said sit down."

The quiet in the room was a different kind of quiet than before. The kind that had weight. I folded my hands in my lap and stayed where I was.

"How long have you been working here?" he asked.

"Eight months." I replied, trying to keep my voice calm.

"And before that?" He questioned, and I had to clear my throat.

"Does it matter?"

"Humor me."

I looked at the untouched glass in front of me. "A pharmacy. A laundry service. A call center for about three weeks before I quit." I paused. "It matters to you where I've been working for the past five years?"

"It matters to me where you've been," he said, quietly. "For the past five years. Yes."

My throat tightened. "Niko…"

"Do you know what I did," he said, "the night they told me you were dead?"

I went still.

"I went to identify the body myself." He didn't raise his voice. "They said it was too badly burned to be certain. I stood in that room for two hours. Two hours, Arianna. And then I went home and I sat in the dark, and I made myself a promise."

The air felt suffocating and thick now.

"What kind of promise," I said, and it wasn't really a question. I already knew, somewhere behind my sternum, that I didn't want the answer.

He looked at me across the table. His expression was calm in a way that was more frightening than anger would have been. Anger you can predict because anger has edges.

"That if you were ever alive," he said, "I would make you regret every single thing you did to me. Every word. Every lie." He paused briefly, then. "That I would make you feel even a fraction of what you made me feel."

I stood up. The chair scraped back and I stood up because the alternative was sitting there and absorbing that, and I couldn't. "I had reasons. You don't know…."

"I know everything." His voice didn't change. "Sit down."

"Stop telling me to sit down."

"Then stop standing up like you think you're going to leave."

We looked at each other. My heart was doing something violent and useless behind my ribs.

"Niko…." I said his name carefully, like I was handling something that might break….. or something that might bite. "Whatever you think I did to you. Whatever you think you want to do to me." I stopped and started again. "Please. I have a life now. I have… there are people who depend on me. Please don't…"

"Don't what?"

I made myself say it. "Don't kill me."

The room was very quiet for a second, and then he laughed. It wasn't a warm laugh. It wasn't cruel, exactly. It was the laugh of someone who found the situation genuinely, darkly funny, and wasn't trying very hard to hide it.

"Kill you." He repeated it like he was testing the shape of the words. "Arianna. Do you really think that's what I want?"

"I don't know what you want."

"Yes you do." He leaned forward, and his eyes were very steady. "You've always known what I want. That's why you ran."

I didn't have an answer for that. He wasn't wrong, and we both knew it.

He straightened up and picked up his glass again, like the conversation had reached somewhere he had been steering it all along. "I'm not going to kill you. That would be a waste."

"Then what?"

He took a slow sip, he set the glass down, and looked at me with a patient, absolute certainty, like he had spent years deciding exactly what he was going to say when this moment came.

"I'm going to keep you beside me" he said simply. "And when I do, your body, your mind, everything you are." His eyes didn't move from mine. "It all belongs to me.”