I am a monster, he'd said, and she could see that he believed it.
But she didn't. She couldn't.
She ached for him. In a way she was very much afraid-with that little thrill of dark foreboding that prodded at her no matter how she tried to ignore it-would be the end of her. But she couldn't seem to make it stop.
"Nikolai," she said when she couldn't stand it any longer-when she wanted to reach over and touch him, soothe him, and knew she couldn't let herself do that, that he wouldn't let her do that anyway, "if you were truly a monster, you would simply be one. You wouldn't announce it. You wouldn't know how."
A different expression moved across his face then, the way it had once before in the dark, and tonight it broke her heart. That flash of a vulnerability so deep, so intense. And then she watched him pack it away, cover it in ice, turn it hard and cold.
"There are other things I could do with my thumb," he said, his voice the rough velvet she knew best. Seductive. Demanding. "That wouldn't kill you, necessarily, though you might beg for it before I was done."
But she knew what he was doing. She understood it, and it made her chest hurt.
"Sex is easier to accept than comfort," she said quietly, watching his face as she said it. He looked glacial. Remote. And yet that heat inside of him burned, she could feel it. "You can pretend it's not comfort at all. Just sex."
"I like sex, Alicia." His voice was a harsh lash through the room, so vicious she almost flinched. "I thought I made that clear our first night together. Over and over again."
He wanted to prove he was the monster he said he was. He wanted to prove that he was exactly as bad, as terrifying, as he claimed he was. Capable of killing with nothing more than his thumb. She looked at that cold, set face of his and she could see that he believed it. More-that he simply accepted that this was who he was.
And she found that so terribly sad it almost crippled her.
She got up and went to him without consciously deciding to move. He didn't appear to react, and yet she had the impression he steeled himself at her approach, as if she was as dangerous to him as he was to her. But she couldn't let herself think about that stunning possibility.
Nikolai watched her draw near, his expression even colder. Harder. Alicia tilted her head back and looked into his extraordinary eyes, darker now than usual as he stared back at her with a kind of defiance, as if he was prepared to fight her until she saw him as he saw himself.
Until she called him a monster, too.
"Do you want to know what I think?" she asked.
"I'm certain I don't."
It was a rough scrape of sound, grim and low, but she thought she saw a kind of hunger in his eyes that had nothing to do with his sexual prowess and everything to do with that flash of vulnerability she almost thought she'd imagined, and she kept going.
"I think you hide behind all these rules and boundaries, Nikolai." She felt the air in the room go electric, but she couldn't seem to stop herself. "If you tell yourself you're a monster, if you insist upon it and act upon it, you make it true. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy."
And she would know all about that, wouldn't she? Hadn't she spent eight long years doing exactly that herself? That unexpected insight was like a kick in the stomach, but she ignored it, pushing it aside to look at later.
"Believe me," she said then, more fiercely than she'd intended. "I know."
His hands shot out and took her by the shoulders, then pulled her toward him, toward his hard face that was even more lethal, even more fierce than usual. His touch against her bare arms burned, and made her want nothing more than to melt into him. It was too hot. Too dark.
And he was close then, so powerful and furious. So close. Winter and need, fire and longing. The air was thick with it. It made her lungs ache.
"Why don't you have the good sense to be afraid of me?" he said in an undertone, as if the words were torn from that deep, black part of him. "What is the matter with you? Why do you laugh when anyone else would cry?"
"I don't see any monsters when I look at you, Nikolai," she replied, winning the fight to keep her tone light, her gaze on his, no matter how ravaged he looked. How undone. Or how churned up she felt inside. "I only see a man. I see you."
His hands tightened around her shoulders for a brief instant, and then he let her go. Abruptly, as if he'd wanted to do the opposite.
As if he couldn't trust himself any more than she could.
"You don't want to play with this particular fire," he warned her, his expression fierce and dark, his gaze drilling holes into her. "It won't simply burn you-it will swallow you whole. That's not a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's an inevitability."
Alicia didn't know what seared through her then, shocking and dark, thrilling to the idea of it. Of truly losing herself in him, in that fire neither one of them could control, despite the fact there was still that panicked part of her-that part of her that wished she'd gone home and done her laundry that night and never met him-that wanted anything but that. And he saw it. All of it.
She had no idea what was happening to her, or how to stop it, or why she had the breathless sense that it was already much too late.
"Get your coat," he growled at her. "I'll take you home."
Alicia blinked, surprised to find that she was unsteady on her own feet. And Nikolai was dark and menacing, watching her as if no detail was too small to escape his notice. As if he could see all those things inside of her, the fire and the need. That dark urge to demand he throw whatever he had at her, that she could take it, that she understood him-
Of course you don't understand him, she chided herself. How could you?
"That's unnecessary," she said into the tense silence, stiffly, and had to clear the roughness from her voice with a cough.
She straightened her top, smoothed her hands down the sides of her trousers, then stopped when she realized she was fidgeting and he'd no doubt read the anxiety that betrayed the way he did everything else.
"You don't have to take me home," she said when he didn't respond. When he only watched her, his expression brooding and his blue eyes cold. She frowned at him. "This night has been intense enough, I think. I'll get a taxi."
* * *
The ride across London-in the backseat of Nikolai's SUV with him taking up too much of the seat beside her because he'd informed her a taxi was not an option-was much like sitting on simmering coals, waiting for the fire to burst free.
Not exactly comfortable, Alicia thought crossly. And as the fever of what had happened between them in his penthouse faded with every mile they traveled, she realized he'd been right to warn her.
She felt scorched through. Blackened around the edges and much too close to simply going up in flames herself, until she very much feared there'd be nothing left of her. A few ashes, scattered here and there.
Had she really stood there thinking she wanted more of this? Anything he had to give, in fact? What was the matter with her?
But then she thought of that bleak look in his beautiful eyes, that terrible certainty in his voice when he'd told her what a monster he was, and she was afraid she knew all too well what was wrong with her.
"You can go," she told him, not bothering to hide the tension in her voice as they stood outside the door that led into her building in a narrow alcove stuck between two darkened shops.
Nikolai had walked her to the door without a word, that winter fire roaring all around them both, and now stood close beside her in the chilly December night. Too close beside her. Alicia needed to get inside, lock her doors, take a very long soak in the bath-something to sort her head out before she lost whatever remained of her sanity, if not something far worse than that. She needed him to go. She dug for her keys in her bag without looking at him, not trusting herself to look away again if she did.