Page 18 of Unwritten Vows

Liza

We’re pulling into the parking garage as Derrick tells me he can’t talk about Edoardo anymore. I try to make a show of turning away with my arms over my chest as we pull in, and I walk a couple steps behind him to the parking garage elevator. This conversation is not over.

But I see Derrick’s face change as soon as we step into the elevator. He eyes the one other man in the iron box with us in clear suspicion, but steps in with me anyway. The car that drove us here has already begun pulling away, and I watch it drive out of the car garage as the door closes.

I barely blink before the scuffle behind me ensues, although calling it a scuffle is generous.

Derrick has the man pinned to the wall in an instant and there’s a gun on the floor beside my feet.

I know it must be the other man’s gun right away from the fact that Derrick has his own pointed at the man’s head, and his other hand gripping the man’s throat tight in his fist.

“It takes approximately 45 seconds for this elevator to reach the penthouse floor. That’s how long you have to tell me what I want to know. If you do, maybe I’ll let you live. Who sent you?”

The man’s face is red as a tomato, and I realize quickly that it’s not because he’s embarrassed, but because he can’t breathe. He tries to stammer something out, but Derrick just squeezes tighter.

“What? What was that? You’re gonna have to find a way to speak up around my grip on your neck.”

The man’s eyes flutter and a vein in his neck pops dangerously, throbbing under the pressure of Derrick’s hold.

Derrick digs his gun further into the man’s skull.

Throughout the entire fifteen seconds I’ve been looking on, I haven’t been able to make a sound.

I know I’m looking like a complete fool at the guns, my gaze ping-ponging back and forth between the one on the floor and the one digging into the sweaty head of the man in front of me.

“You’re going to pass out in 15 seconds or so, and you won’t be waking up if you don’t tell me what I want to know. Now .”

“Edoardo,” the man rasps, and Derrick squeezes tighter.

“Why?”

His eyes travel to me and I know as well as Derrick does what the gesture means. I’m instantly terrified. No one has ever come after me. At least, not that I know of. Suddenly, I wonder if they were always there, lurking in the shadows, as I wandered care-free through my life without a clue.

Before I have another second to worry, Derrick moves his fingers savagely, and I hear a hollow, wet crunch. The man lets out one last strangled sound, then falls to the ground as the elevator pings.

“Let’s go,” Derrick says, grabbing the gun off the ground, sticking it into his back pocket, and lashing his arm around my waist to pull me away.

*****

I recover my voice to some degree as Derrick drags me into his penthouse, yelling into his phone.

“Check out the fucking door man that was on tonight—someone had to let him into the elevator. There’s a camera in there; I assume it was off, but check on that too.

And for fuck’s sake, make sure there’s no one else in the surrounding buildings! ”

“What did you do to that guy?” I ask in a breathy, high pitched voice.

“Yeah, clean him the fuck out of my elevator.” He looks at me quickly as my words register and squeezes me to him tighter. He sticks his thumb over the receiver of the phone and says, without missing a beat, “I snapped his trachea.”

I make a strangled noise as he barks another order over the phone and deposits me onto what I assume is his bed. His comforter is a deep, sapphire blue and feathery as warm cashmere against my skin. But I barely register the surprising color and the comfort. I’m shaken to the bone.

“You—you killed him?” I know what a snapped trachea does, and I heard the sound the man made before he fell.

“Yeah,” he says, without even the hint of a flinch in his expression. “Would’ve been quicker if I hadn’t been so… angry.” He looks away from me pointedly and mumbles the last word, but I hear it. And I know it has to do with me.

“But, it was… he fell right down…” I realize this isn’t the point I want to make at all, but can’t think of what I want to say.

“Yeah, I did snap it, and it was less than ten seconds, asshole,” he says to whoever is on the phone. “Just fucking clean it up, and don’t even think about stepping foot into this fucking penthouse tonight, or I’ll blow your ass away quicker than that, got it?”

My phone buzzes and I see that I’m getting a call from Daddy. I don’t want to hear him freaking out right now, so I text him a voice message that I’m okay and staying in Derrick’s guest room tonight, hoping that my voice will soothe him enough not to try calling again.

Derrick tears his own phone away from his ear and throws it onto the night table just after I send the text. He crosses over to the closet in a huff and opens it wide, then turns back to me. “Generic stuff, I know, but I figure you don’t want to sleep in what you’re wearing.”

I raise my eyes to see a closet full of women’s clothes, from pajamas to tasteful crop tops to button downs, to pencil leg jeans—all my preferred style.

I finally take a moment to look around the bedroom I’m sitting in and see it decorated with light accents like the ones in my own bedroom, down to the cotton candy tie-dyed throw pillows.

“What is going on?” I say, my voice barely above a whisper.

“Do you not like it? I wasn’t sure about the side tables, they’re a little too pastel for you, I think.”

I struggle to swallow. I feel like I can barely look at him right now. “Why?”

“Why what? Does it weird you out? I’m not a stalker or anything, I just know you don’t like sleeping in strange places and wasn’t sure what would happen between us. So I studied your bedroom and told my guys to use the same colors and tones that I saw.”

“All those clothes?” I ask, completely gobsmacked by his explanation.

“Little Liza.” He flashes a toothy grin, an expression I can’t believe he can wear after just mutilating a man’s throat in front of me minutes ago. “I have a disgusting amount of money and our parents want us to be married one day. Why wouldn’t I want to make you feel more comfortable?”

It’s such a strange feeling, to have butterflies in my stomach due to terror and desire at the same time. From the way he’s spoken about his past girlfriends, I can’t imagine he’s ever done this for them. So why me?

At the same time, I’m terrified—maybe of him. My mouth feels so incredibly dry, and he’s so casual about everything that has happened…

I curl up into a ball on the bed against the headboard, hugging my knees to my chest. “Thank you.”

He hesitates for a moment, then narrows his eyes at me and cocks his head to the side.

“ Ty vyhlyadish tak, budto khotyesh uprygnut’, moya Zaychik.

” His eyes are still narrowed and playful as he says in Russian, You look like you want to hop away, my little bunny .

I stay silent, and he adds, “I thought girls love this shit. What’s wrong? ”

I don’t know how to answer, and I don’t really care to. He doesn’t seem to understand my shock. Before this night, I had never seen a dead man, much less seen one killed before my very eyes.

His voice is more sincere when he speaks again, walking toward me. “Liza. What is it?”

I feel his hand on my shoulder, gentler than I ever would have imagined it, but with skin more calloused and rough than I expected. “I’m fine,” I say, wanting to shrink away, but not wanting him to stop touching me either, all at the same time.

“It’s not nothing. You’re shaking like a leaf.

” He runs his hand down my arm, leaving tiny goosebumps in his wake.

“You're freezing,” he says, squeezing me.

He wraps his long fingers around my fists and brings both of them to his face, placing them against his mouth and blowing warm air onto them.

The hands he just used to kill a person are so soft on me, and despite my hesitation, it thaws something in me even further.

His lips are so full and soft on my skin, but somehow hard and grim at the same time. His eyes burn into mine, and the sexual tension between us ratchets up from zero to sixty in no time flat, even though I can’t believe I can feel it in my current state.

“What is it?” he asks with shocking tenderness.

I decide to be honest. “I’ve never seen a man killed,” I whisper. “I didn’t think you’d do that. I didn’t think you’d do… all this.” My eyes rove over the room around us.

“Ah… did you misjudge me, princess?”

I swallow and nod.

“Well, I have to apologize then. I’m a cutthroat, heartless man with a black soul. I just pose as the cute, devilish playboy on social media. And this room… well, that was to make you fall for me. Is it working?”

For some strange reason beyond my capability to understand, this knowledge makes me feel inexplicably safer and extremely turned on at the same time.

“It feels like there’s a lot about you that I don’t know,” I say, looking up through my lashes at him trepidatiously.

“And it feels like there’s nothing about me that you don’t know. ”

He gives me a heartbreaking quirk of his lip and a little breath of a laugh.

“Now that’s where you’re wrong. If there’s anything I’ve figured out about you, it’s that I could work a hundred years to try and figure out why you do the things you do and still not find out all of the intricate details. ”

I try to hide my face in my arms, but he takes my cheek in his large hand. “I don’t know what it is about you, Eliza Andreeva, but I’m curious. I want to know those details.”