I barely remember staggering out of the restaurant and into a cab. I called Adam again, telling him how much I’d enjoyed the meal and that I’d be seeing the guy again that night. Adam’s voice should have been comforting but, as I sat there on the end of my bed, he sounded very far away. Langley might as well have been on another planet. Moscow—and Luka—were right there, touchable and real.
When the call was over, I fell back onto the bed and lay there staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t see the smooth white plaster. I saw eyes that were so cold they pierced me to the very soul...yet with that blistering heat behind them. I reran his words in my head and every syllable licked over me, making me buzz. I like you, Arianna,” he said. “We can have fun together. Don’t you want to have fun?
Don’t I?
I felt that flutter in the pit of my stomach, the one you get at the brink of the first hill on a rollercoaster. Layers of excitement and fear stacked on top of one another and twisted up tight until you don’t know which is which. If it had been a normal date with a guy who made me feel like this, I would have been drunk on anticipation anyway. The knowledge of who he was—what he was—and what he’d do to me if he discovered my secret, made me reel. What in the name of God am I doing?!
This wasn’t some sex game, like that boyfriend my friend Sophie had who liked to tie her up with silk scarves. This wasn’t something you giggled about to your friends and that made you feel adventurous. This was a man who’d kill if one of his deals went sour. What the hell would he do if he discovered I was a spy?
And what if he didn’t find out? What if everything went exactly as planned? Then I’d go out with him, tonight, and have a few drinks and then, at the end of the night, I’d come back to my hotel room or back to his place and we’d—
Could I really do that? Make sex into something I just...did, without emotion, to complete the mission? What if, when it came to it, I didn’t want him?
What if I did?
***
The same car picked me up but, this time, Luka was in the back seat. Sprawled there, half-turned towards me, he looked too big for the car, even huge as it was. As I slid in beside him, the top-to-toe appraisal he gave me made me catch my breath.
I’d gone back and forth several times on what to wear. In the end, I settled on a little black dress that I hoped would pass for classy. I knew my clothes weren’t nearly expensive enough to match up to whatever Luka would wear, but then I was meant to be just a tourist—not one of the super-rich.
The dress seemed to meet with Luka’s approval. I could feel his eyes on my legs, stroking upward along my thighs. I self-consciously tugged the hem down a little. His gaze was unnerving and a turn on but it had another effect, too. For the first time in years, I was able to almost forget that I was in a car. I found I only needed to do my translation trick a little to keep me calm.
The car slid through the streets of Moscow and, again, there was almost no sound. We were cocooned in our own little world inside and it hit me for the first time that the windows were tinted. We could see out, but nobody knew we were in there. We might as well have been invisible—ghosts, flitting through the streets.
Luka looked, if it was possible, even hotter than before. He’d changed into a black shirt and expensive-looking black jeans. The lack of color only emphasized the blue of his eyes. His collar was open just enough to reveal that enticing triangle of hard, tan chest I’d seen at the party. Those broad shoulders and thick biceps looked even better under the more casually-cut shirt and I could see his powerful thighs as they stretched the denim tight. I couldn’t help thinking about what all that muscle would mean in bed. Brutal and hard and able to take me for hours.
I flushed. I didn’t normally think of men in that way. It was like a pheromone or an aura he put out, sweeping my senses every time I was close to him. I was starting to find that my mind went to shreds every time I was around Luka Malakov, reducing me to animal instincts and base needs.
As we sped through the city, he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, his eyes shining in the dim light from the streetlights. Being looked at like that isn’t something I’m used to. And it wasn’t like the restaurant or the park or even at his house in New York. There was something about being in that private little cocoon with him, like being trapped in a cage with a hungry tiger. I should have been terrified. I was terrified, on some level. But I could feel that same connection I’d felt before, crackling in the air between us.
If I was trapped in a cage with a tiger, that made me the deer. The prey. And part of me just wanted to shake my hair away from my neck and offer it up to him to be savaged.
“Where is it we’re going?” I said, more to break the silence than anything.
He gave me a sly smile. “There isn’t a direct translation for its name. The closest I can get is, “the underside of heaven.”
We pulled up right outside two huge, smoked-glass doors. Before the car had even stopped, the doormen were putting their hands to their earpieces, telling someone we’d arrived. They unclipped the velvet rope and showed us straight past the waiting line of people and inside.
The nightclub was vast—one massive room with a ceiling at least three floors above us. The dance floor itself was another level down, a sea of bodies lit up by blue and green lights. At one edge of the room, a shining bar made of what looked like glass stretched most of the length of the club. There must have been twenty bartenders behind it, but they were still working flat out.
As we descended the stairs, I realized my little black dress was horribly out of place. There wasn’t a single woman there without something that shone or sparkled. Even their shoes had crystals or sequins or both. And it wasn’t that their clothes were flashy but cheap—they were flashy and expensive. Designer bags, big rings and pendants—everyone was displaying their wealth. The men were slightly more subdued, but there was still plenty of jewelry on display. I saw a few women glance at me and then away, disinterested—I was too drab to be competition. And then they’d see Luka, behind me, and their perfectly-painted lips would open in shock.
“Do you come here a lot?” I asked over my shoulder. All of the women around me were supermodel-gorgeous, all long legs and high cheekbones. I wondered whether he’d met Elena or Svetlana or Natalia here.
He shrugged. “Sometimes. Is good place to let off steam.” I could tell he was relaxing because his English slipped slightly. Then he smiled. “But it’s more fun with someone new.” And, as I turned to look at him, his fingers brushed my cheek. They left a scorching, tingling trail behind, like the feeling you get when you touch ice fresh from the freezer and it burns instead of freezes.
He took me downstairs and headed through the crowd to the bar. I could feel the energy rise up around us as we plunged in. Back home, I didn’t exactly spend much time in clubs, but I’d been to some at college. Some of it was familiar: the swell and ebb as the crowd reacted to the music, the wide-eyed grins and panting faces as they worked out the stress of the week. As Luka had said, a good place to relax.
But the clubs I’d been to hadn’t had dancing like...this. On the fringes of the crowd, away from the hardcore thrashers, couples were going far further than just necking and groping. A couple of guys had their shirts mostly off and some of the Russian beauties were grinding against hands slid up their skirts and thrust into their tops. It really was like the underside of heaven—people who looked like angels, bathing in sin. A wave of fear mixed with heat rippled down my body. Was this why he’d brought me here?
His bodyguard joined us and followed behind, eyes everywhere. No one in the crowd questioned his suit and tie or thought his stony expression was weird amongst all the excitement. In a place like this, I thought, they’re probably used to bodyguards.
We neared the bar, where the crowd was three deep. I prepared to settle in to wait, but Luka just stepped forward. As he moved in behind people and they turned to see who it was, I saw their faces go deathly pale. They slid aside, a few of them waving him forward, most of them too scared to speak. Within seconds, there was an empty stretch of bar six feet wide.
Luka acted as if he hadn’t even noticed, as if that’s just what crowds did by themselves. It hit me that it probably felt that way to him, by now. I tried to smile politely at the people who’d parted for us, but they just gaped at me. One or two of them wouldn’t even dare meet my eyes.
It started to sink in just how feared this man was. The one who—I caught my breath—suddenly had his hand on my ass.
I braced my hands on the bar and jerked back in surprise. It was wet, and freezing cold. Literally. The whole thing was a giant, sculpted block of ice, glossy smooth and slippery. Intricate tunnels had been bored through it and, at a few words from Luka, the bartender lifted a bottle of vodka and poured a generous shot into a hole in the bar’s surface. The clear liquor raced through the twisting tunnels, heading downward.
“You better catch it,” said Luka with a grin. “Or it’ll spill.”
I looked down. The tunnel ended at the front of the bar in a little ice spout. Probably, you were supposed to hold a glass there to catch your drink. But Luka hadn’t given me a glass.
“Hurry,” said Luka. His eyes were sparkling.
The spout was at roughly groin level. The symbolism wasn’t lost on me. I could see him watching me, gauging my reaction. It was a test, to see if I’d play by his rules.
Drinking a shot like that, with everyone watching, was not the sort of thing I did. But, as I stared into his eyes, I felt the excitement spiraling up inside me. Arianna Scott, languages geek, wouldn’t do it. But Arianna Ross, carefree vacation girl...maybe she would.
Maybe being undercover could be liberating.
Keeping my knees together as demurely as I could, I crouched. By tipping my head back and pressing my chest close to my legs, I just managed to get low enough to put my mouth on the ice spout. Slippery hardness nudged my lips.
Arianna, what the hell are you doing?
Ice-cold vodka exploded into my mouth, colder than I’d ever tasted it. Smoother, too, with none of the harshness of the vodka I’d tasted in the US. And there was a lot of it—the equivalent of two or even three shots back home.
Throughout the whole thing, I kept looking up at Luka. His eyes never left mine for a second, not even to lick over my body as I crouched in that submissive pose.
I swallowed.
What really shook me was that not a single person around us laughed or leered at me. The moment was all about me and Luka - everyone else was too scared to do more than watch.
As I got to my feet, I caught the look the men were giving Luka. Longing. I’d never known that men could look like that. They wanted his lifestyle, his money. But most of all, they wanted that attitude he had, that aura of pure, undiluted evil. They wanted to be intimidating like him. But I knew they couldn’t be. It wasn’t something you can buy or learn. It wasn’t something Luka had acquired because of what he did. It was something he was born with—maybe it had even driven him into crime.
And that same aura was doing something to me. Something about the way he looked at me, like a king looking at a favored maid. Wondering if he should take her off to his bedchambers or just ravish her right there.
His eyes sparkled and then he smiled. If it had been a test, I’d passed.
“We’ll take the bottle,” said Luka in Russian and the bartender nodded and thrust it at him. No money changed hands, so I took it that he had a tab. Given how expensive the whole place seemed and what bottles went for in clubs, I didn’t even want to guess at how much money he’d just spent—and we’d only been here a few minutes.
On the way through the crowd this time, he saw me looking at the other women. Every movement made some part of them flash as it caught the light: rings topped with diamonds, bracelets encrusted with crystals.
“Bling,” said Luka, his accent giving the word a whole new, disapproving tone. “Less of it now, than a few years ago. But here, people still like to show off.”
It wasn’t just the fancy clothes, though. The short skirts and strappy tops were showing off long lengths of gym-toned thigh and perfect, slender arms. They were all graceful as swans. “I feel a little...drab,” I muttered.
Luka suddenly gripped my arm and spun me to face him, pulling me closer at the same time. I think I let out a little gasp of surprise—he did it so abruptly, with no thought for paltry American concerns like personal space. When I met his eyes, I saw the anger there at what I’d said. “There’s nothing wrong with the way you look,” he said in a voice that wouldn’t be argued with.
I blinked up at him, amazed. But, at the same time, I felt my heart unfold from the tight little knot it had become. We stared at each other. For an instant, I saw that arrogant, iron-hard exterior fracture and I glimpsed the man underneath.
It was gone in a heartbeat. But what shocked me to the core was that, no matter how many times I played it back in my mind in the days to come, he always looked the same.
For a second, he’d looked like I felt: helpless.
He turned away from me as if embarrassed and I looked away, too, trying to get control of myself. Pull yourself together! You can’t go gooey just because he says one nice thing! Remember what he is! I tried to imagine what Nancy would do. Probably karate kick him out of a window. He probably says that line to all the women he meets—all of those Russian blondes.
And, even as I thought it, I saw one of them right in front of me. A little taller than me, with a tiny waist and pert, thrusting breasts under her sparkling blue top. She had arrow-straight, gleaming blonde hair down to her shoulders.
And she was glaring at me with total, unreserved hatred. Maybe it was because Luka wasn’t looking in her direction, or maybe she was simply too angry to be afraid, but she looked as if she wanted to jump on me and tear my throat out.
To my relief, Luka pulled me in the other direction, towards the edge of the club. He showed me to a table surrounded by low, black leather armchairs. Every seat was taken.
When we were still ten feet away, the people sitting there nudged each other, stood up and scattered. One of them even wiped the tabletop with his sleeve.
I shook my head in disbelief as we sat down. Luka sat back in his seat. “What?” he asked.
“Everyone’s afraid of you.”
He glanced around and then shrugged, as if that was their fault.
I remembered that I wasn’t meant to know what he did. “Why?
He gave a wry little grin. “Some people are scared of how I do business.”
He lifted the bottle of vodka. He hadn’t brought any glasses, I realized. I watched as he took a long pull. “How do you do business?” I asked.
He locked eyes with me and slowly lowered the bottle. “Without limits.” He passed me the bottle. “Have you ever tried living without limits, Arianna?”