Page 88 of The Drifter

Craine laughed.

It was a real laugh, easy and pleased, and it made my hand tighten on the phone until the case creaked.

"Clint. Please. I have nothing against your mother. Lovely woman, from everything in the file. Victoria had her grievances there—Lord, did she—but Victoria was a jealous hag, God rest her, and her taste in enemies was always more personal than mine." The warmth never flickered. "No. Nothing will happen to your mother. Nothing at all. As long as you do what you're told."

"And what's that going to be?"

"Right now? Focus on our chat. That's all. One thing at a time—that's how you cross country on foot, isn't it? One thing, then the next." A pause, indulgent. "What comes next, comes next."

"Fine."

I waited for the line to die.

It didn't. He let one more beat go by, unhurried, a man savoring the last of a good glass. When he spoke again, the courtesy in his voice had honey all through it.

"Oh—and Clint. One more thing. Why don't you bring your girlfriend along?"

Everything in me stopped.

"Sasha, isn't it? The hotel woman. Lovely. Bring her. I find these conversations go so much more smoothly with a little insurance in the room—might keep you from doing anything stupid."

The call ended.

I sat in that cool, leather cabin with a dead phone in my hand, Texas sliding by miles below, my brothers' eyes on me and her hand finding mine from the next seat, warm and steady and asking.

And all I could think, in the roar of the quiet, was that the two women I loved most in this world were both inside a stranger's reach—one already taken, one sitting beside me. I had to figure out how to walk into that man's chat and bring both of them home out of a war I never started.

27

SASHA

He told me.

He could have not told me. He had the phone in his hand and his brothers' eyes on him and every reason in the world to fold me in cotton and keep me from the worst of it.

He told me, anyway.

He turned in his seat and took both my hands and looked at me from close. His voice was level in the way I'd learned to be afraid of. He said the man who had his mother wanted me in the room, too. By name. That the man had called me the hotel woman, and wanted me there, and had a word for what I'd be.

Insurance.

I heard it land in me somewhere far down. I waited for the fear to come up and take me, and it didn't come. That surprised me. I sat in that cool, leather seat and waited to fall apart. Instead, something in me went very quiet and very still, the way the lobby goes still at the dead hour, the way a building goes quiet when there's nobody left in it but you.

I had been used my whole life.

That was the thing nobody understood, and the thing that steadied me now, cold and strange. I knew what it was to be the body in the room that made the transaction go smoother. I had been that at the desk for fifteen years—the calm face, the useful hands, the person you put between the guest and the trouble so the trouble never touched the guest. A man wanted to use me as insurance. Fine. I had been insurance before. I was, God help me, good at it.

"I'm still coming," I said.

Clint closed his eyes.

"Sasha—"

"Don't. You promised me the truth and the choice. You just gave me the truth. Now, it's my choice, and you don't get to take it back because it went the way you were afraid it would." My voice didn’t shake, and I was proud of that. "I'm not getting off the ride now."

He looked at me for a long moment. Whatever he saw, he stopped fighting it. He brought my knuckles up to his mouth and held them there. He didn't say anything, because there was nothing left to say that wasn't already between us.

The plane came down hard.