Crimson Devotion

Mira Castellano had slowly and painfully learned, over the long course of twenty-six years, that certain rooms remember old violence the very same way skin remembers a lasting burn — quietly and permanently, only truly aching whenever touched. The penthouse studio on the fortieth floor of the Alessandro Tower was one of those rooms, even though nothing terrible had ever technically happened inside it. Not yet. She adjusted the diffuser above the set, her fingers trembling slightly from the espresso she'd had three hours ago and nothing since. The client was late. Not unusual for men like Damian Cross — men whose time was measured in board meetings and broken promises to people who loved them less than their empires did. "He's here," her assistant, Priya, whispered, poking her head around the black curtain that separated the studio from the elevator bank. Her eyes were wide in a way that told Mira everything she needed to know before he even stepped into the light. Damian Cross did not walk into a room. He arrived in it, the way weather arrives — inevitable, faintly dangerous, impossible to ignore. He wore black, as he always did in the photographs Mira had studied obsessively for the past two weeks while preparing this shoot: black shirt open at the throat, ink climbing his neck like something trying to escape from underneath his skin. His hair was dark and deliberately swept back, and his eyes, when they finally settled on her, were an unsettling shade of green-gold that made her forget, for one humiliating second, what she was supposed to say. "You're the photographer," he said. Not a question, though there was something almost curious underneath the flatness of it, as if he were reserving judgment until he'd seen a little more of her. His voice had gravel in it, low and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and had simply chosen to spend some of it on her. "Mira," she said, extending a hand she hoped wasn't shaking. "Mira Castellano. Thank you for making time, Mr. Cross." His grip was warm and sure, and he held on a half-second longer than professional courtesy required, long enough that she felt it register somewhere low in her stomach, a small, involuntary jolt she immediately told herself she'd imagined. "Damian," he corrected. "Mr. Cross was my father. I try not to answer to dead men." There was a story in that sentence — she could hear it, buried under the dry delivery — but she didn't chase it. Not yet. She had a job to do, and the job was this: capture the face that half the tabloids in the country wanted to either marry or indict, for a magazine spread that was, according to her editor, going to be the most-viewed digital cover of the year. What nobody had told her — what nothing in the research folder Priya had assembled, three hundred pages of profit margins and scandal and cold-eyed interviews, had prepared her for — was how he would look at her. Like she was the only unscheduled thing in his day, and he intended to make the most of it. • • • They started with the simple shots. Jacket off, sleeves rolled, the tattoos catching the studio light like something inked in ash and firelight. Mira moved around him with her camera, calling small directions — chin down, look past me, don't smile, I need the danger, not the charm — and he obeyed each one with an unsettling, focused stillness, as though her voice was the only frequency in the room he cared to listen to. "You're good at this," he said, during a pause while Priya changed a lens. "At photography?" "At not being afraid of me." He said it lightly, but his eyes weren't light at all. "Most people are. Have been, since I was twenty-three and inherited a company built on decisions I didn't make and consequences I didn't ask for." Mira lowered her camera. "Should I be afraid of you?" She kept her voice level, professional, even as something in her chest had begun beating out of rhythm the moment he'd walked into the light. It was a strange sensation, standing this close to a man the internet had spent years arguing over — half convinced he was a monster, half convinced he was simply misunderstood — and finding that neither version quite matched the low, watchful stillness of the man actually in front of her. Something moved behind his expression — amusement, maybe, or a warning wearing amusement's clothes. "That depends entirely on what you're planning to do with me, Ms. Castellano." The studio was suddenly too warm. She busied herself checking her light meter, aware of him watching her hands, her throat, the pulse she was certain was visible there. "I'm planning to photograph you for a magazine cover," she said. "That's all." "Is it." It wasn't a question, and they both knew it. • • • By the third hour, the professional distance she'd built her entire career on had begun, quietly and without her permission, to erode. It happened in small increments — the brush of his fingers when he took the water bottle Priya offered, careful not to touch Mira's hand but somehow managing to anyway; the way he watched her check the monitor instead of looking at himself, as if her reaction mattered more than his own image; the low laugh he gave when she caught him breaking character to smirk at something Priya said, a laugh that transformed his whole face from marble into something dangerously, achingly human. "You keep looking at me like you're trying to solve something," he said, during a break, while she reviewed frames on her laptop. "I am," she admitted, before she could stop herself. "You don't photograph like the men I usually shoot. Most of them perform confidence. You just — have it. Or you're hiding something so well it looks like confidence." He crouched beside her chair, close enough that she caught the low, warm scent of cedar and something darker underneath it — smoke, maybe, or the ghost of it. "Careful," he murmured. "Keep looking that closely and you might actually see something." "Is that a threat?" "It's an invitation." His eyes dropped, briefly, unmistakably, to her mouth, and then returned to her face like nothing had happened at all, the shift so fast she almost doubted she'd seen it. "I don't extend those often." Mira's pulse was doing something reckless in her throat. She thought about her editor's warning — he's not a man you get close to, Mira, he's a man you survive — and about the folder full of rumors: a business rival who'd vanished after crossing him, a fortune built on foundations nobody dared audit too closely, a reputation for ruin that trailed him like expensive cologne. She thought about all of it, and then she thought about the way his voice had gone rough on the word invitation, and some old, unwise part of her leaned in anyway. "I don't have time for invitations," she said, even as she didn't move away. "I have a deadline." "Then we'd better make the most of the time you do have." His mouth curved, slow and certain, the smile of a man who had never once in his life doubted that he would get what he wanted. "Starting tonight. Dinner. My driver will collect you at eight." "That wasn't a question either." "No," Damian Cross agreed, rising, buttoning his shirt back over the ink and muscle she'd spent three hours photographing and would spend considerably longer than that thinking about. "It wasn't." • • •