Page 38 of The Last Dance

He grunted, more an animal noise than an answer, but didn’t let go.

I stroked his hair, slow, letting my fingers comb through the strands that had finally come undone from the gel and the night. He made no move to stop me. If anything, he leaned into it, letting the weight of his head settle on my shoulder.

I kept at it, over and over, because I’d read somewhere that animals needed repetitive touch to believe they were safe, and I was pretty sure he was the closest thing to an animal I’d ever met.

I listened to his breathing, slow and ragged at first, then evening out, each inhale and exhale stretching the distance between us and the world outside this room. It was like waiting for a bomb to finish ticking and realize it had no reason left to explode.

He fell asleep first. I could tell by the way his hands relaxed, the thumb stopping its motion, the tension in his jaw dropping a fraction. I kept stroking his hair, even after I was sure he’d gone under, because I liked the sensation of keeping him here, tethered to my world.

I didn’t sleep. Not right away. My brain was running in a loop: checking for new wounds, replaying the memory of the bullet, the glass, the way his face had looked when I’d told him “I’m here.”

I’d been fucked by Vadim before, but never like this. Never with this level of desperation running underneath, the fear that tomorrow he’d wake up and find me gone. He’d fucked me like a man trying to erase a crime scene, and I realized, with a thrill and a little terror, that I wanted to be the evidence he could never scrub out.

I wasn’t sure if anyone had ever seen him like that. Not Sasha. Not Lin. Maybe not even Yuri. I filed the knowledge away in a mental safe deposit box, a secret I’d never spend unless I needed to. But it made me feel dangerous in a way I hadn’t before.

Chapter Ten

~ Iren ~

The click of the door shutting behind her was surgical, and I felt it slice the air between us before I’d even managed to put down my coffee.

Sasha stood dead center in the sitting room—deliberate, symmetrical, the way a model plants herself for a lighting check—and scanned the space as if auditioning the furniture for roles in her personal psychodrama.

She wore a sleeveless black dress so precisely tailored it looked glued to her spine, and her heels stabbed tiny, impossible wounds into the silk carpet with every step.

The only sound was the distant whine of the groundskeeper’s hedge trimmer outside and the hush of her own breathing, which was perfectly even, as if she’d been training for this moment since childhood.

She let her gaze rake me from top to toe—pausing just long enough at the bandaged cut on my face to imply I was already marked for deletion—then pulled her phone out and set it face down on the lacquered table between us. No eye contact yet.

That was intentional.

“Slept well, I hope,” she said, voice sugared over with the faintest accent—unplaceable, but expensive.

I didn’t bother answering. She wasn’t interested in my sleep schedule, and I wasn’t interested in the opening act. I did notice she didn’t ask how my face was doing. Or whether I’d enjoyed being a moving target last night.

She perched on the arm of the couch, one leg crossed over the other with mechanical precision. Her hands were naked—no jewelry except a thin, almost invisible platinum band on her right index finger—and she rested them in her lap, knuckles white.

“You know,” she began, speaking to the air just above my head, “Vadim collects beautiful things. Always has. Since before he had the money to buy them, really.”

“Is that so?” I said, not bothering to disguise the sarcasm.

She smiled, or did something in the same tax bracket as smiling. “It is. But he gets bored easily. It’s not his fault; he just doesn’t believe anything is permanent. He likes to own things for a while, display them, enjoy them. And then—” She made a vague, upward-flicking gesture with her fingers, as if erasing a name from a whiteboard. “They’re replaced.”

I let the silence hang. It was better that way. She thrived on interruptions, needed them to feel in control of the tempo.

She went on, “Of course, sometimes he keeps things a little longer, especially if they come with… interesting attributes. But you should know you’re not the first.” Her eyes landed on me with all the warmth of a January sidewalk. “And certainly not the most impressive.”

“Impressive how?” I asked. “Is there a leaderboard, or do you all just do time trials?”

She blinked, slowly. “You think this is funny.”

I shrugged. “It’s the only thing that keeps me from screaming.”

She shifted, uncrossing her legs, then crossing them again. “There were others before you. Boys. Men. Some even younger, which—honestly—would be a bit cliché if it weren’t so entirely predictable.” She paused, letting that one settle in the cushions for a moment. “They all thought they were special. None of them are here anymore.”

“Are you here as a warning, or just to offer the house tour?”

She smiled for real, then. It was not a smile I’d seen before. “I just think you should know your place in the history of the collection.”