Cellie's POV
I waited for it.
She looked at my face and at the necklace at my throat and at the specific quality of someone who had just come in from a patio in the dark and arrived back inside glowing.
"Enjoying yourself," she said.
"Yes," I said, simply.
"You're living with him."
I did not confirm or deny.
"You cook for him," she said, and there was something in her voice that was not quite the performance I had come to expect, something rawer underneath it. "You know his schedule. You know where he sleeps." She looked at the necklace again. "He buys you diamonds."
"Valentina," I said, quietly.
"I have wanted him for ten years," she said, and it arrived without the weapon-quality of everything else she had said to me and with something that was just the truth stated plainly. "Ten years. I have been patient and I have been available and I have positioned myself correctly and I have done everything I was supposed to do."
I looked at her.
