Page 73 of Velvet Vaughn

“Leo’s apartment, I meant.” An easy, unbothered laugh. “Sorry. It’s been a strange week for everyone.”

“How’d you hear about it?”

“Uh, Marcy mentioned he was dealing with a security issue.” Danica’s smile remained fixed in place. “You know how it is in this business. Secrets have a remarkably short shelf life.”

Marcy didn’t know. She thought Leo was working from home to keep his head down before the wake, full stop. Leo had told her that himself, in the safe house office, with Anja standing three feet away.

“It’s a small world,” Anja remarked.

“The smallest.” Danica’s attention shifted past her shoulder toward someone else. “Excuse me. I need to pay my respects to Curtis before I head out.”

She walked off unhurriedly, and Anja watched her go as a sharp, specific warning began to build. Two priorities collapsed into one thought: find Leo and don’t lose track of the woman who knew something she shouldn’t.

She was three steps into the mourners, angling toward the spot where she’d last seen him, when a glass shattered near the dais and someone screamed.

#

Curtis Lennox was on the ground.

Leo moved before he consciously decided to.

One second he was laughing at some story Marv had told and the next, he was on his knees on the flagstones with Curtis’s head in his hands. The older man’s face had gone white, his breath coming in short, ragged pulls.

“Curtis, look at me.”

Curtis’s eyes rolled toward him, unfocused, his mouth working around words that didn’t form. Lydia was screaming his name from behind Leo, and someone shouted for a doctor. The crowd pressed around them, a tight wall of nervous twittering and horror.

“Give him room,” Leo barked.

A man in a black suit and a badge that read “David” dropped to his knees on Curtis’s other side, his medical bag open. “I’ve got him. Step back, sir, give me space to work.”

Leo didn’t move. He watched the man’s hands pass over Curtis’s chest, checking his pulse, and something in the motion struck him as wrong. There wasn’t time to chase the thought because a loud peal split the air.

The fire alarms were going off.

The shriek of sound hit like a physical blow, scattering the crowd in every direction at once. Smoke curled from the service corridor at the rear of the courtyard, thin and gray, and the wall of mourners became a stampede within two seconds. People shoved toward the main gate, women’s heels catching on the flagstones, someone’s champagne flute shattering underfoot.

“Leo!” Anja’s voice vanished beneath the noise.

He turned toward it and lost her instantly, the crowd closing between them like water filling a gap.

“Mr. De Luca.” David was on his feet now, his bag abandoned on the ground, his hand closing around Leo’s arm with a grip that didn’t match the surrounding panic. “Mr. Lennox is asking for you. This way, sir. Quickly, before the smoke gets worse.”

Leo spun around and glanced at the empty ground. “Where’s Curtis?”

“They’ve got him on oxygen in the service corridor, away from the crowd crush. He wants you there.”

It should have felt wrong. Later, Leo would replay the scene a hundred times and find the seam in it, the place where the story didn’t quite hold. But with Curtis’s deathly pale face on his mind and Lydia’s screams still ringing in his ears, it felt like the only true thing in a courtyard full of chaos. He let the man tug him through the boxwood hedge.

The passage beyond was narrow, lit by a single bare bulb and smelling of bleach and cold concrete. No Curtis. No oxygen tank. Just the imposter reaching into his jacket. Leo’s instincts screamed a full second before his mind caught up to why.

He threw an elbow into the man’s forearm as the syringe cleared the fabric. The needle veered wide, clattering against the concrete instead of finding his neck. His attacker recovered fast, driving a shoulder into Leo’s chest and slamming him hard against the wall, forcing all the air from his lungs.

“Should’ve gone easy,” the man muttered before charging him again.

Leo caught the second strike on his forearm and drove a fist into the man’s ribs. He used the half-second of distraction to grab the arm holding another syringe he’d produced from his pocket and wrench it sideways. The needle skittered across the ground. The man cursed and threw a knee that Leo barely deflected, pain lancing up his thigh. Then they were grappling in the narrow space, with no room to swing, just weight and advantage and Leo’s hands finding the man’s throat.

“Stop.”