Page 4 of Lone Wolf

No. She wasn’t gonna blame herself for Evan’s choices. Not even if she felt panic bubbling up her throat at the thought of him going missing. Clearly he’d gotten back here safely enough to leave his phone behind. He’d probably wander in soon enough with some stupid excuse and get all brooding and moody when she tried to ask what happened.

She’d wait here, give him until nightfall. Not that she was happy about it. In fact, she was the kind of mad she could feel seething beneath her skin.

She stomped over to the RoamZone and with a few furious flicks of her thumbs changed his ringtone to something he’d find maximally embarrassing. Then she glared around at all the annoyingly dust-free surfaces, every last thing in perfect place.

Throwing open the cupboards, she rearranged the height-ordered glasses so they were all messed up. She interspersed salad plates with dinner plates, giving each stack a jagged rise that would make Evan twitchy.

The high midday light was starting to bleed into oranges and golds, the sun not really caring too much about the arbitrary deadline she’d given Evan to get back home.

Shoving her way into the glass-walled freezer, she took a pull of vodka straight from the bottle, some variety that cost more than the national median income and had been, like, filtered eleventy billion times through panda hide.

It tasted fine.

She paced some more.

Dusk was coming on.

She retrieved a box of paper clips from a kitchen drawer, then charged back to the master suite with the levitating bed held aloft by the push of neodymium rare-earth magnets and the pull of steel cables. After lining up the paper clips on the floor, she flicked them one by one into the magnetic field so they pinged invisibly onto the bed’s Houdini undercarriage.

When she ran out of paper clips, she did missile dive-bombs onto the bed to see if she could get it to sway on its cables.

She couldn’t.

In the north-facing window she could see the last reflections of light dwindling in the windows along the Wilshire Corridor as nightfall smothered the sky.

She couldn’t imagine her life if X was gone for real. Even if he was stubborn and a colossal pain, he was the only person who got her, got the kind of rough she’d come from and the kind of rough she still was. Her brain couldn’t compute the levels of lonely she’d feel if he’d finally gone and gotten himself killed.

Or if he’d taken off and left her like everyone always did.

Anger swelled up fast and familiar. She threw open the bureau drawers. His socks were folded tight like hand grenades and lined up with mathematical precision. She pulled them apart and shoved strays in his shirt drawer and threw others across the floor. Then she contemplated cleaning the toilet with his toothbrush, but she thought of that one look he got when his eyes crinkled at the edges and he couldn’t help but be gentle as only a once-brutal man knew how to be.

Then she was bawling. Shit.

Ugly-crying, with snot and everything.

She allotted herself five minutes to be a mess. She only took three.

Then she moved through the bathroom, past the tempting toothbrush and into the shower. Gripping the hot-water handle, she waited a beat for it to scan the vein pattern in her palm. It gave a nearly imperceptible vibration and then she twisted it the wrong way and swung open the secret door disguised seamlessly in the tile pattern.

She entered the Vault.

The Nowhere Man’s inner sanctum, a hidden space he’d retrofitted to be the nerve center of his operations. No more than four hundred square feet filled with server racks, computer hardware, weapon lockers, and an L-shaped sheet-metal desk. Exposed beams matched the pattern of the public stairs to the roof above, the ceiling encroaching down on the forgotten storage area that had never even made it onto the building blueprint.

Aside from X, she was the only person who’d ever seen it.

Collapsing into his chair and clicking the mouse, she brought to life the hidden micro-OLED screens mounted to the three concrete walls that embraced the desk. Two of the walls featured pirated feeds from around the building, an intimate look at the spaces and corridors of the Castle Heights Residential Tower. The other showed the measly file Joey had compiled on Evan’s “father”—a few credit-card charges clustered around Blessing, the most Texas-sounding town in all of Texas.

A fresh swell of regret washed through her for pursuing Jacob Baridon when Evan had told her to leave it alone. The Fourth of the Ten Commandments X lived by—Never make it personal—meant he avoided telenovela drama like this at all turns. Not that he always could. A while back, he’d met his mother briefly and learned that he had a half brother, Andre Duran, who needed his help. Turned out Evan and Andre had actually been in a foster home together like a million years ago and had never suspected they were related. If Joey ever found out she had a half-sibling? She’d be all over that shit. But not X. After helping Andre, he hadn’t been in touch with him even though the guy lived right here in Los Angeles and had a cute daughter and everything.

Never make it personal.

That was Evan.

And yet Joey had pushed him. Found an approximate location for his father. And led him right onto the only kind of terrain Orphan X wasn’t trained for.

She rubbed her eyes. Then she felt someone watching her.

Evan’s little aloe vera plant, Vera III, looked up at Joey from the desk, noirishly lit in the artificial light of the OLED monitors. Inhabiting her bowl filled with rainbow-colored glass pebbles, she was Evan’s only companion here in the penthouse, probably because she placed as few demands on him as he did on her.