Own the Exits

Danika

I did not close the door.

Kazimir ended the call with one thumb and walked back down the hall as if I had not just heard him turn into a different man. He stopped at the crack I had made and looked at me through it, ice still in his face, the foreign cold already packed away.

“Operational,” he said.

“That did not sound like a grocery list.”

“It was not for you.”

“Everything in this house is for me. That is the joke.” I opened the door the rest of the way. My sweater had slipped again. I left it. “Who were you talking to?”

“A contact.”

“In what language? Because it was not Russian, and it was not the voice you use when you tell me to lock my door.”

His gaze flicked to my mouth, then away. “You hear a tone and invent a crime. Get dressed. If you want a fight, do it where I can see your hands.”

“I want the city,” I said.

Silence. A small one. He had not expected that.

“No.”

“Then I will walk out in this and let the gate cameras write Father a poem.”

He stepped into the suite without asking. The door clicked shut behind him. We were back in the same air we had ruined last night, close enough that I could smell cold on his shirt.

“You are not going into Saint Petersburg because you are bored.”

“I am going because I have not bought my own coffee in three months, and if I stay in this wing I am going to put my mouth on that scar just to make you speak a language I understand.”

That landed. I saw it in his throat. He looked at the scar as if I had touched it, then at my bare shoulder, then at my eyes.

“Get dressed,” he said again, quieter. “Coat. Boots. Nothing that makes you a target from a window.”

I blinked. “That is a yes.”

“It is a controlled no that looks like a yes. You ride with me. You do not leave my side. You do not speak to anyone I have not cleared. You have one hour.”

I should have felt victory. I felt the leash. I still went to the closet and stripped the sleep shirt with my back to him because I wanted to know if he would turn.

He did not turn all the way. I watched him in the mirror. His eyes stayed on the balcony glass, but his jaw was tight, and when I bent for the black knit dress I caught the way his hands flexed at his sides. I pulled the dress on slow. It clung to my breasts and the cut of my waist. I added tights and boots and a coat that still showed too much throat.

“You said nothing that makes me a target.”

“You ignored me.” He looked then. Fully. The look was a weight between my legs. “Keep the coat closed.”

In the corridor he walked half a step behind my shoulder, close enough that his knuckles brushed the back of my coat when we turned. The house watched. Guards watched. I felt like a girl being taken out of a church and like a woman being marched toward a sin.

The car was black and already warm. He opened my door. I slid in and he came around, folded his height into the driver’s seat, and locked us in. Leather. Heat. The faint metal smell of a holster under his jacket.

We pulled through the gates. For a moment the city was only lights on wet stone, and I forgot to breathe.

“You can look,” he said. “You cannot wander.”

“Do you ever say anything that is not a fence?”

“Yes.” He checked the mirror. “Not to you.”

The air in the car thickened the way it had on the mat. My dress had ridden up when I sat. I did not pull it down. His eyes stayed on the road and still I felt them, as if his attention could touch skin.

“Why did you let me out?” I asked.

“Because if I say no to every small thing, you will choose a large one.”

“So this is training.”

“This is you learning that I can give you a street and still own the exits.”

I turned in the seat. The belt cut between my breasts. “Say own again.”

He did not. His hand tightened on the wheel. The other rested on his thigh, close enough to mine that if the car took a corner hard our legs would meet.

We did. His knee pressed mine. Heat shot up the inside of my thigh, sudden and crude. I did not move away. Neither did he, not at first. Then he did, as if the contact had been an accident he refused to commit to.

“You felt that,” I said.

“I feel everything in this car. That is the problem.”

I let my coat fall open. The knit hugged my nipples in the climate vent’s cold. I watched his throat work.

“Problem for who?”

“For the man who has to keep you alive while you try to turn a lockdown into a seduction.”

“If I wanted to seduce you I would have stayed in the suite and asked you to check the bath.”

His mouth flattened. “Stop talking.”

“Make me.”

He glanced at me then, a cut of ice and heat, and the look went down my body like a hand. I was wet against the tights. I sat in it and hated how alive it made me, how the cage and the want had become the same pulse.

“Coffee,” I said, because if I kept going I was going to put my palm on his cock through his trousers just to see if the control was a lie. “Pushkin. The one with the windows.”

“No windows on the street.”

He took me to a place I did not know, a side street café with thick glass and a back room. He went in first. He stood while I sat. He watched the door while I wrapped my hands around a cup I had ordered myself, and the smallness of that freedom almost undid me.

“You look like you might cry,” he said, not unkind.

“I look like I might throw this at you.”

“You won’t. You wanted the city. Drink it.”

I drank. Bitter. Good. His body blocked most of the room from me, a wall in a coat. When I stood, I had to brush past him in the narrow aisle. My chest dragged across his. I felt him harden against my hip, unmistakable, and I heard the breath he stole and locked down.

“Operational?” I whispered.

“Danika.”

My name in that voice was worse than a hand. I stepped out before I did something that would get us both shot in a café.

Back in the car the silence had weight. Rain started, thin and mean. His knuckles were white on the wheel.

“You can hate the rules,” he said. “You cannot hate that I am good at them.”

“I don’t hate that you are good.” I watched his profile. “I hate that I want the part of you that is not.”

He looked at the mirror again. Once. Twice. The third time his whole body changed. The heat in the car did not die. It sharpened.

“What?” I said.

“Turn around slowly. Do not point.”

I turned. Through the wet rear glass, two lanes back, a motorcycle slid between cars. No plates. Matte black. The rider’s visor was a blank.

“Friend of yours?” I asked, and my voice had gone thin.

“No.”

Kazimir changed lanes. The bike followed. He took a sudden right. The bike took it with him, smooth, like it had practiced our route.

His hand left the wheel and settled on my knee, not tender, a hold to keep me in the seat if he had to drive like a man who expected glass to blow.

“Head down if I say so,” he said. “Do not open that door. Do not play brave.”

The bike came closer. Rain beaded on the visor. For a second I thought of the language on the phone, the cold in his mouth, the way he already knew my exits.

“Kazimir,” I said. “Is this why you let me out? To see who would come?”

He did not answer. His eyes were on the mirror, and the motorcycle with no plates stayed with us through the next light, then the next, a second shadow in a city I had been so desperate to touch.