Chapter 1: Blood and Silk
The only sound in the room was the slow, deep rhythm of his breathing. Jennie watched the rise and fall of Leonid’s chest, her eyes tracing the intricate patterns of ink that told stories she’d memorized but would never fully know. His skin was pale against her black silk sheets, a canvas of night and morning. Outside, the manicured gardens were still, bathed in moonlight that filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows and cast long, delicate shadows across the velvet-draped canopy.
She lifted her hand, studying it in the semi-darkness.
The moonlight didn’t reach the dark, rust-colored crescents lodged beneath her fingernails. It had dried to a flaky film. The girl from the café. The one with the stupid, sunny smile who had dared to touch his arm while asking for the sugar. She’d been quicker than Jennie anticipated, putting up a fight in the alley behind the bakery, a brief, messy struggle sealed with a glint of steel and a choked gasp. The memory was a flat, clinical picture in her mind. The only thing that ever stirred any real feeling in her was the man sleeping beside her.
A wave of tenderness, so vast and terrifying it clenched her stomach, washed over her as she looked back at him. She lowered her hand and pressed her fingertips lightly against the tattoo over his heart—a twisting, thorned rose. His skin was warm. Alive. Hers.
He stirred, a faint groan escaping his lips as he turned his head on the pillow. His beautiful black curls were mussed. She ached to touch them, to pull them gently until his eyes opened. She loved his eyes. Dark brown, like hers, but without the perpetual, calculating chill she felt behind her own.
“Lee…nid,” she whispered, testing the syllables. His name felt like a sacred thing in her mouth.
She leaned down, her long black hair forming a curtain around their faces, and brushed her lips against his. They were soft, parted in sleep. She could taste the faint, residual trace of the cigarette he’d smoked before bed, the bitterness of cheap coffee. And underneath it, something else—a metallic sharpness. Was it from her? She’d scrubbed her hands raw at the sink, but the taste of copper seemed to live in her mouth now, a permanent sacrament.
He would be angry if he knew. Not about the killing. He didn’t know about that. He’d be angry because she’d left his bed. Because she’d been gone for over an hour, and he hated waking up to find her side empty. He called it her “midnight wandering,” and he didn’t like it. His displeasure was a physical pain to her, worse than any consequence her family had ever concocted.
His eyelids fluttered open. For a second, just a fraction of a heartbeat, the sleepy, unfocused gaze sharpened. He looked at her, into her, and her blood went cold. He knows. He sees it.
Then the moment broke. His eyes softened, glazed with sleep. “Jen?” His voice was a low, gravelly rumble, thickened by his Russian accent. The sound unspooled something tight inside her chest.
“I’m here,” she murmured, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. “I couldn’t sleep. I was just watching you.”
“Creepy,” he said, but a slow, tired smile touched his lips. He didn’t mean it. He lifted a heavy arm, his fingers finding the bare skin of her waist under her satin camisole. His hand was large, the veins prominent, the rings he never took off cold against her skin. He pulled her closer, and she went willingly, folding herself into the space against his side. Her head found its home on his shoulder, her nose pressing against the tattooed column of his throat. She inhaled him—smoke, cheap detergent, him.
“You smell like outside,” he mumbled into her hair.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. A jackrabbit pulse. “I opened the window. The roses were too strong.”
He just grunted, already sliding back toward sleep. His fingers absently traced circles on her hip. This was the only peace she ever knew. This precise weight of his arm, the rhythm of his breathing syncing with hers, the evidence of her reality tucked safely away under the bed in a sealed bag only she knew about.
“You work tomorrow?” she asked, needing to hear his voice again.
“Da. Lunch shift. Then inventory. Will be late.” The words were slurred.
“I’ll wait for you. I’ll make dinner here.” Her family’s chef could have done it, but she needed the ritual. The cutting of vegetables, the watching of the pot. Something normal. Something a loving girlfriend would do.
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.” The words came out too fast, too desperate. She forced her next sentence to be lighter. “I’ll try not to burn the kimchi jjigae this time.”
He chuckled, the vibration rumbling through her. “Is okay. I like it when you try.” His hand stilled on her hip. His breathing deepened, evened out.
She lay perfectly still, listening to him sleep again. The terror of that momentary sharpness in his gaze receded, replaced by a crushing, devouring love. She would kill a thousand smiling café girls. She would bury them all in the rose garden under the cover of night, where the metallic scent she’d always assumed was the fertilizer might finally be explained. She would do anything to keep this, to keep him from ever looking at her with that clear, knowing focus again.
The first gray light of dawn began to bleach the darkness from the sky. It painted the lines of his face in soft monochrome—the curve of his lip, the dark fringe of his lashes, the small silver hoop in his cartilage. She watched until her eyes burned. Her own personal god, sleeping in her gilded cage. She pressed one last, chaste kiss to his shoulder.
“Moy,” she breathed against his skin. Mine.
In the growing light, the single drop of blood she’d missed, dried and brown on the inside of her wrist, looked like just another freckle.