PRICE OF SAFETY

ELENA'S POV

The guest room smelled like cedar and expensive detergent.

I stood in the center of it for a long moment after Dante's housekeeper, a woman who'd introduced herself as Rosa and smiled at me like she'd been instructed, then closed the door behind her. The room was bigger than my entire Queens apartment. The bed was also bigger than my entire Queens apartment. A blue duvet sat unrumpled. The cleanness showed that it was the kind of blue that had never met a takeout container or a midnight cry session.

I sat on the edge of the mattress.

"You're going to stay here," Dante had said it like it was already decided. Like my opinion was a formality the situation couldn't afford.

And the terrifying part, the part that kept my heart racing and my body glistening with sweat, was that he hadn't been wrong. I had nowhere else to go. My apartment was compromised. My job was gone. David had apparently signed my name to a debt he never intended to pay, and somewhere in this city, a man named Tony was bleeding from a gunshot wound and blaming me for it. The moment I left this house, his men could be breathing down my neck and they wouldn't have smiles on their faces.

I pressed my palms flat on the duvet and stared at the ceiling.

Three days ago, my biggest problem was whether to take a double shift on Saturday to get something new for David.

Now I was living in a billionaire's penthouse because the alternative was dying.

I almost laughed. Almost.

—

The next morning, I woke to the smell of coffee.

It smelled nothing like the burnt hours-old coffee from a diner pot. It was dark and rich and slightly smoky that was literally passing beneath my door and pulling me back to consciousness.

I lay still for a moment, confused by the softness beneath me, by even the smell, and then light that was shining on my face through the thick curtains. Then the previous day assembled itself in my memory, piece by piece, like a puzzle I didn't want to solve.

I sat up quickly. I was in Dante Moretti's penthouse. Because my ex-fiancé was a coward and a criminal and I had a target on my back.

I sat still for a minute, then realized that I couldn’t lie there all day.

I found the bathroom, marble, naturally. Everything was marble in this house. I splashed water on my face, and made a decision. I could hide in this room indefinitely, eating whatever Rosa brought, if she did, and pretending none of this was real, and it was just a dream that I was going to wake up from. Or I could put on clean clothes and face whatever this was.

I worked three jobs and served entitled men all day, my fiancé cheated on me with my boss. A man wanted me dead because he believed that I shot him. There was no way things could get worse.

I put on clean clothes.

The kitchen was at the end of a long hallway that opened suddenly into a large space that instantly made me feel small. There was a kitchen island long enough to be a runway and the coffee machine looking like it required a graduate degree to operate.

Dante was already there.

He stood at the island with his back half-turned to me, jacket gone, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, reading something on his phone. A cup of coffee sat near his left hand.

He was so focused on what he was looking at that he didn't notice when I stepped in, or had chosen not to acknowledge it, which, I was beginning to suspect, were sometimes the same thing with him.

I cleared my throat.

He looked up. Those dark eyes landed on me and stayed, moving quickly down my body and then back to my face. I felt too exposed standing there and was suddenly conscious about the gown I was wearing. Some gown that had been laid on the bed while I had a bath.

"You slept," he said.

"I did," I replied and moved toward the coffee machine, because I needed something to do with my hands and also because I was going to need caffeine to survive whatever this day was. "Is this… am I allowed to…" I looked at the machine and I wasn't wrong. I wasn't used to this type of coffee machine.

"Sit," he instructed, already moving.

He reached past me to the machine, close, just briefly, the sleeve of his shirt near my shoulder, so close I could see the popping veins on his forearm. I didn't stare at them for long because he was already pulling his arm back with a cup of coffee that smelled like heaven. He set it in front of the stool nearest me. "Milk. Sugar."

Not a question. Two small ceramic dishes appeared from nowhere.

"I can make my own coffee," I said.

He ignored me and returned to his side of the island and his phone.

I sat and added milk, took a sip and tried not to let it show how good it was, because surrendering to the coffee felt like surrendering my will to stay here.

We were quiet for a moment.

I wondered why a billionaire like him was making his coffee himself when this building was enough to hold as much staff as he needed.

I was still thinking about it when a plate appeared in front of me, eggs, toast. Rosa dropped it and was already walking away.

"I'm not hungry," I said.

Dante didn't look up from his phone. "Eat."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at the eggs. Ate the eggs.

"I have rules," I said when the plate was half empty.

He looked up then. Slowly. And for a second his lips twitched like he found me amusing.

"If I'm going to stay here, and I want it on the record that I don't think I have a choice which is a different thing than choosing to be here, then I have rules,” I said and stopped to catch my breath.

"I'm not a guest you need to manage. I'm not a problem you need to contain. I'll stay in my room, I'll stay out of your way, and I'll figure out how to sort this out as fast as possible. But I'm not going to just…" I gestured vaguely.

A pause. He watched me like he had all the time in the world and had already decided how this was going to end.

"Are you finished?" he asked, his eyes already back on his phone.

"Mostly."

"The Kozlovs are not a problem you just… sort out," he said the “sort out” like it amused him. "Tony will walk out of the hospital in two days. He will come looking. What you are is a woman whose name is attached to a debt, whose face is now associated with a man who shot one of their collectors, and whose apartment they have already been to twice since yesterday."

My stomach dropped. "Twice?"

He took a sip of coffee and said nothing, which was apparently answer enough.

"So I can't go home."

"And I can't go to the police because…"

"Because you'd be implicating yourself in an assault charge, and because the Kozlovs have people there too." He set his phone down. "I'm handling it."

"You're handling it." I stared at him. "What does that mean? How does someone handle Russian organized crime over breakfast?"

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something more restrained than that, and somehow more unsettling.

"Carefully," he said.

I finished my coffee. Set down the cup. Decided that getting more information out of Dante Moretti before he was ready to give it was probably like trying to get more heat from a stone, and filed the question away for later.

"Then I need something to do. I can't just sit in that room."

He studied me for a moment. “There's a library. Third door on the left." He picked up his phone again. "Do not go past the fourth door."

"Why not?”

“You do not.”

I almost said something sharp and then thought better of it. Picked up my coffee. Stood.

"Thank you," I said. "For yesterday. And the coffee."

He didn't answer. But I felt his eyes on my back all the way down the hall.

—

The library was real. Floor to ceiling shelves, a window seat, an armchair that had been sat in enough times to have a permanent impression. I pulled a book at random and sat in the window seat and watched the city and tried to think.

Since yesterday, I had been trying to run away from thinking about what had happened in the last 48 hours. I didn't want to think about it but it was ravaging my thoughts now. David had borrowed two hundred thousand dollars and had used my name. He was already out long before I caught him with Vivienne. What was the possibility that he had been cheating on me long before… oh God. I had devoted my life to him because I believed that we were going to get married.

And then a few hours later, I had sex with a stranger. I was so lucky that I had left before he knew anything about me. It would have been devastating that I had sex with him in less than two hours after we met. He probably did that all the time and wasn't going to remember me.

I pressed the spine of the Italian book against my forehead and breathed. Somewhere in this city, David was probably with Vivienne, in her father's money, untouched. Living a life I had subsidized and that he'd handed to someone else the moment a better offer arrived. He had looked at me in that restaurant and told me I wasn't enough.

The anger came then, not the wet, collapsing kind from the night at Murphy's bar. I was going to survive this. I was going to fix it. I didn't know how yet, but I had survived worse than rich men who thought I was disposable. I had been surviving that my entire life.

—

I heard him before I saw him.

I'd wandered further down the hall than intended, the library book still in my hand, following some idea about finding a glass of water. I was thirsty and I didn't remember the way back to the kitchen.

The door was open. I wasn't the one who opened it.

He was at the far end of what was clearly a private gym, one wall mirrored, one wall glass, equipment arranged. He hadn't seen me. He was in the rhythm of something, a boxing combination against a bag that swung with each impact, his movements controlled and devastatingly precise.

His shirt was gone and sweat covered his body.

I should have kept walking. The normal thing to do, the smart thing to do was to keep walking. Instead I stood in the doorway with an Italian book I couldn't read and watched Dante Moretti move around the bag, hitting it and breathing heavily.

I noticed the scar along his left side and there was another across his right shoulder, smaller. His back was broad and the muscles beneath shifted with each punch and I was storing all of this information in my head against my will. It was purely as an involuntary biological response, just like standing there and being unable to move. It was absolutely not because I was affected by him.

He stopped.

His hands caught the bag and stilled it. I should have moved then but I couldn't. He turned, and found me immediately, like he'd known I was there the whole time, had simply been waiting to see how long I'd stand there.

His expression didn't change.

"I was… em, I was looking for the kitchen," I stuttered.

"The kitchen is in the other direction." He said, coming closer.

"Yeah, yeah, know that now."

He reached for a towel draped over the equipment nearby, pressed it to his face.

"The fourth door," he said, but I just stood there, staring.

"Go find the kitchen, Elena."

I went and found the kitchen.

I drank my water standing at the sink and told myself very firmly that I had larger problems than the architecture of Dante Moretti's shoulders, and that I should focus on them.

The problem was that the image of him, the muscle in his torso, the popping of his arms and the way he had stilled the bag, eyes finding me without searching, had already installed itself somewhere behind my ribs and was making no effort to leave.