Page 38 of Savage Princess

When the game finally winds down, Levin gets up, collecting the money from the center of the table. My heart leaps in my chest as I watch him fold bills into a tight roll, grinning at the rest of the men circled around. “Good game, gentlemen,” he says with a lazy smile, tossing a few bills down. “For the rest of your night,” he adds, and then he quickly turns towards me.

“Let’s go,” he says in a low, tight voice as he slings his arm around my waist, pulling me close to him in a show of a slightly drunk man who can’t wait to get his wife alone. His hand slides over the silky material of my dress, palming my ass as we walk towards the stairs, and I feel another heated thrill wash over me at him touching me so eagerly.

I know it likely won’t last when we get back to the motel, notthiseasily, but I can’t help but feel a flicker of hope. I want nothing more than for Levin to tumble me into bed the instant we’re back in the room and not let me out until tomorrow.

I don’t want tonight to end.

“Did you win?” I ask breathlessly as we walk away from the bar, back towards the main street where he can get us a cab, and Levin chuckles.

“I did.” His arm is still around my waist, and it makes me feel breathless at being so close to him for so long, so easily, as if we really are together. “I cleaned them out. Thus why we had to get the fuck out of there.”

The slight slur is out of his voice now—he’s thoroughly sober—and he waves down the first cab we see, opening the door for me quickly. “Between the money and you,” he says as he slides in next to me, “we needed to go before they decided to take back their losings—or take something else they wanted.”

There’s a dark, protective note in his voice that sends another thrill through me. Even hearing that I was in danger there–which I’d already picked up on, really—doesn’t detract from it.

“We made it out just fine,” I tell him with a half-shrug. “And now we have money again.”

Levin looks at me curiously as the taxi winds back towards the part of the city where we’ve been staying. “Aren’t you scared of anything?” he asks me finally. “No matter what happens, you always seem to have this idea that it’s fine. You almost died in a plane crash, Elena. You were stranded on a beach where we could have starved. And still–”

“But we didn’t.” I look over at him in the dim light of the cab, the lights from the street gleaming through the windows and lighting up the sharp lines of his face. “I didn’t drown, and we didn’t starve, and we’ve escaped Diego’s men, and tonight we made it out of the bar with your winnings. What’s the point of thinking about how badly thingscouldhave gone? They didn’t, and with any luck, we’ll make it through everything else, too.”

“Until we get back to Boston.” Levin’s eyes are still on me, and I wonder if he thinks I’m naive. If it makes him like me more or less that I’m managing to stay so optimistic in all of this.

Either way, it’s who I am, I’m learning. I’ve learned more about myself in the last few weeks than in a lifetime of living in the gilded mansion I grew up in.

I think I like the person I’m figuring out that I am.

“Did you get enough money tonight for us to make it?”

“Not without those passports.” Levin lets out a breath. “It was enough to keep us going for a while longer, but not enough to get new identification and pay off a pilot well enough that he won’t take a bribe from someone else. I’m going to need more.”

I’m not sure what it says about me, that I feel relief when he says that. All I can think is that it means this isn’t over yet, that I have more time with Levin—that our inevitable separation is put off for a while longer. I want that more than I want to go to Boston, even if I do miss my sister terribly.

I’ll get there eventually. I feel sure of that. But right now, I’m enjoyingthisadventure, as near-lethal as it’s been at times.

When we get back to our motel for the night, after Levin goes through his usual ritual of checking the room and blocking the door, he sits down heavily on the side of the bed, looking at me.

“So what are we going to do?” I sink down next to him. His expression looks painfully serious, and I can feel my stomach knot with sympathetic anxiety. A moment ago, I’d been feeling pretty good about everything, but it’s hard not to worry when he looks at me like that.

Levin lets out a long breath. “I have a tentative idea,” he says slowly. “But I’m not sure we should do it. It’s not very safe for you.”

“Nothing has been very safe for me,” I point out. “Whether I was actively involved or just waiting on the sidelines while you tried to fix things.”

“Still, I don’t want to be the one to choose to put you in danger.” He rubs a hand across his mouth. “It’s probably better to scrap it.”

“What’s the idea?” Now that he’s mentioned it, I don’t think I can let it go. I’m very curious.

Levin pauses, as if he’s considering whether to tell me or not. “You helped tonight,” he says finally, and I feel a burst of happiness at the idea that I did well. That what I did mattered. “You were a distraction, even though we hadn’t set it up that way, and I think I won more because of you. There are—higher-stakes games that I can get into. The place we went to tonight was nothing much, just a casual game, but there’s a possibility of working my way into bigger games, getting a seat at a table where I can win much more. With you acting as a distraction, I might be able to get away with things that I otherwise couldn’t. But it’s dangerous. If anyone catches us, or even if they feel they have reason to suspect—”

“I don’t care.” I can already feel my skin tingling with the thrill of it just from the idea. It’s like something out of a movie, a romantic gambit that we can embark on together, and I want to help. I want to be a part of this.

Levin shakes his head, standing up as he stuffs his hands in his pockets and glances towards the window. “I don’t want to put you in danger. Before—”

“What do you mean, before?” I suck in a breath, trying to find the courage to ask him about the things we haven’t talked about. “Is this about your wife? Does it have something to do with that?”

Levin’s jaw tightens, and for a moment, I think he’s not going to answer me.

“Lidiya worked for me,” he says finally, still looking away, as if he can’t meet my eyes while he tells me this. “‘Worked’ is a loose term. She was with someone that the Syndicate wanted investigated, or so we thought. They wanted her to be our person on the inside, so to speak, to get information out of him. Of course, the day I got ahold of her to convince her to do the job, she’d broken up with him—she’d found out he was married. It was a hell of a thing to get her to do it.”

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