Page 84 of Runaway Queen

He held my jacket out for me, and I slipped my arms in. We went out onto the porch, and Nikolai locked the door behind us.

“Where are we going?”

“Not far.”

He walked me to the edge of the porch and held out a hand while I stepped down the stairs, before turning us toward the garage and my little studio.

Inside, the familiar smells of my oil paints and turps met my nose. I hadn’t been in here since I was trying to finish up Edward Sloane’s portrait of his mother. That was one piece that would never need finishing.

There had to be something wrong with me, because the certainty that Nikolai had killed the local hotshot and set it up in a way that hadn’t brought the cops to our door should be frightening. It wasn’t, though. After all, I was a woman who had grown up around violence. A woman who had cut the throat of her own cousin.

Nikolai was right, in the end. We weren’t so different, deep down inside. Maybe I’d be him, if I’d lived the life he had.

“So, show me,” Nikolai called to me from farther into the studio. He was standing at my covered canvases. The ones of him.

I hurried toward him, suddenly shy to reveal the truth of my years-long obsession with this man.

“No, they’re bad. Amateur, really.”

“Doubtful. Show me, prom queen.”

I shook my head stubbornly. He moved quicker than I could properly see in the dim light. His hand snatched the cloth off the painting sitting on the easel. He stilled as he took it in.

It was the one I’d been working on for a while. A dark forest ringed a puzzle piece of night sky. Stars winked in the darkness like scattered diamonds on velvet. A dark head was tilted back, enjoying the view. Only the back of the head was visible.

Nikolai stared at it for a long time.

“It’s the story. The one you told me that day… in the basement.”

He nodded, not needing more explanation than that. Our shared past thrummed in the air between us.

“Once upon a time, because that’s how all the good stories begin, there was a boy. He was a child of the woods, and the trees were his only friend. At night, he lay in the loam and counted the stars. He was a wild thing, and sometimes, he seriously considered walking farther into the woods and never returning to the world of men. In the end, he couldn’t, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because the boy wasn’t as whole as the animals he played with in the forest. He had a cage around his heart… one without a key. He could smile, and laugh, and pretend to be a real boy, but deep inside, he wasn’t. There was a hole inside him, inside that locked-up place, where he couldn’t reach it.”

“You shouldn’t tell sad tales as bedtime stories.”

“Ah, but this story isn’t sad. One day, when the boy became a man, and his heart was blacker than the purest tar, he met a girl. One who once stared at the stars at night and dreamed of being loved, too. It didn’t matter how terribly he had lived his pathetic life. When she smiled at him, it felt like the fucking sun had finally risen for the first time in his life. He could feel the light on his face when she looked at him.”

Then Nikolai was turning to me and pulling me close. He kissed me lightly at first, smoothing my hair back.

“You destroy me, you know that? No one understands me like you. No one has ever tried to.”

“Yeah, well, ditto. You saw me, even when I was drowning. You saved me,” I whispered against his lips.

It was the quiet, intimate conversation that we should have had, all those years ago, after everything that had happened at Casa Nera. But we had been robbed of so much.

“You saved yourself, Sofia. Your life here, Leo’s happy childhood, your job, your home… you saved yourself, and our son.”

He walked me back toward the table behind me, pressing his hips against mine. He was hard; the man was utterly insatiable.

“Tell me you love me,” he commanded.

“I love you.”

“Tell me you’ll never leave me.” Another command, one that made me smile.

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