Page 53 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

“Come on my hand for me, right now,” he orders, and the thrum of his voice is the only steady thing in the whole swaying box.

I’m right on the edge, every muscle in me locking down, shaking at the thought of what comes next, one breath from falling apart. My whole body is reaching for the release he is dangling just out of reach, and I hate that even here, even now, he is the one deciding when I get to break, and all I can do is wait for my sentence.

A sharp ding cuts through the elevator like a sledgehammer.

We both freeze. The display clears, the numbers wake up, and the mechanical hum grinds back to life, vibrating up through the floor. Reality slams down over me all at once. There are maintenance workers, maybe even cops, on the other side of these doors, and I’m half undressed, practically without panties on, with my boss’s fingers still inside me.

Lev moves first, as if by muscle memory. He slides his hand out of me, quick and clinical, and my body is left hollow and aching, forlorn, right on the edge. He tugs my skirt down, straightens my blouse, and steps back into his own space.

He’s the composed Mr. Volkov again, beautiful, polished, deadly, by the time the car climbs a single floor. The mask drops back over his face, smooth as lacquer and complete, and the speed of it leaves a cold, empty hollow behind my ribs. A minute ago, he had me falling apart against a wall, whispering filth and ultimatums into my hair. Now he could be a stranger who happened to share the ride, and I don’t know which version of him is the lie, or whether both are manipulative.

The intercom clicks on, and a woman’s voice comes through; her tone is neutral. “The system’s fully restored. The doors will open on the fourth floor.”

“Understood,” Lev says into the panel, cool and even, all elegance, and gives away nothing at all about the last ten minutes.

I crouch and gather the scattered files up off the floor with hands that won’t stay steady. Neither of us says one word about what just happened between us, and the silence is another little white lie. His tie is still lying there on the elevator floor, a dark line between his shoes and mine, and neither of us bends to pick it up. It feels like the only honest thing left in the box, and we’re both going to walk out and leave it behind.

The doors slide open, and Yelena is kneeling on the floor right outside them like an apparition.

She’s in a fresh dress, the undone bow at her neck trailing loose, barefoot on the cold tile, her face streaked with tears. Behind her, flanking the doors, a cluster of maintenance workers shift uncomfortably on their feet, not sure where they’re supposed to look.

“Lev,” she sobs, covering her mouth the instant she sees him. “I thought something had happened to you. I thought I had lost you all over again.”

He’s at her side in a few strides that nearly break into a run, before I can take a full breath, before the doors have even finished opening. I trail out in his wake, and I have never felt more like a piece of furniture someone forgot to move. He crouches down in front of her, and his hands linger over her.

“Does your chest hurt?” he asks, and presses a hand there. “Are you breathing all right?”

She flinches, then shakes her head, and the tears only come harder.

A technician steps forward hesitantly, wringing his hands. “I’m so sorry, sir. The control board shorted out. We will run a full diagnostic on every car in the building tonight, I promise you.” He glances down at Yelena. “The lady came down the second she heard the car had dropped. She knelt right there on the floor and would not let any of us move her, no matter what we said.”

Lev’s eyes drop to her bare feet, scraped raw and pink against the tile. I watch him take it in, and something twists hard and mean and sickening in my stomach.

“You came all the way down here alone, in your condition,” he says, running a hand through his thick hair, and there is no anger in it anywhere, only worry. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I was so afraid I would never see you again,” she admits, voice dipping into a whisper, barely able to breathe around the crying.

He sighs at the sight of her ruined feet. “Let me look at those. You’ve gone and hurt yourself.” He gathers her up off the floor, careful, one arm under her knees, the other at her back, cradling her against his chest as though she is spun from gilded glass, and she turns her face into his shoulder, where she hides a small smile and lets out a contented breath. Over his shoulder her gorgeous eyes catch on mine. He carries her straight into the service elevator and doesn’t look back at me.

He doesn’t remember, I think, that I’m standing here at all.

I stand there in my wrinkled clothes, still slick and aching from his hand, and watch him carry another woman away in his arms, and a sadness sweeps over me like a frigid breeze, worse than anything that came before it. My knees, heavy with fatigue, are barely holding me up. His fingers were inside me ninety seconds ago. He has already forgotten that they were, and some traitorous part of me is still anticipating when this will happen next.

His promise was not a lie. I understand that much now. He threw his own body over mine without half a second of hesitation, ready to hit the wall first if we fell. He meant every word. For those few minutes in the dark, I was watching his walls crack just a little. He cared, and the tenderness in his hands was real.

But the second Yelena appeared in that doorway, he turned into a different man, and my own foolish heart sold me out. Every hard edge in him folded away for her out of some old instinct worn deep over twenty years. Next to that, I’m an accident that ambled into his life, a woman with no history and no claim on him, and he’s already carrying the real one away.

“Ma’am, you should sit down for a while,” one of the workers says, hovering close and touching my elbow gently. “You’ve had a bad shock in there.”

“Thank you all the same,” I say graciously, and pull my mouth into something like a smile for him as a peace offering. “I’m perfectly fine.” I turn for the stairwell instead of waiting one more second for that cursed elevator, because I would rather crawl up sixteen flights than step back into that box.

My knees buckle on the very first step, and the worker grips my wrist tight before I go down the flight. I straighten fast, glower, and pull free of him, because I refuse to let one more person watch me fall apart today. My body is still trembling, half from the drop and half from him.

I can’t tell the two apart anymore, and that frightens me more than the elevator did. I want a shower and a gulp of wine. I want to run the water to drown out my thoughts. I want to scrub Lev’s warmth and his promise off my skin until there’s nothing of him left on me at all.

Somewhere on the climb, with only the click of my heels on concrete for company, a strange, flat calm settles over me. By the time I reach the top floor I’m steady, and my face gives away nothing, even while my mind obsesses over every second in that box.

I pass his office on the way to my desk, and the door is not shut all the way. I should keep walking. What do I care if he is fucking her in his office? I know that I should keep walking and sit down and do my job and let the last of my dignity survive the afternoon. Instead, Yelena’s voice slides through the gap and roots my feet to the floor, and I stand there in the hallway and listen like the pathetic thing she has already decided I am.