Page 8

I know the man.

I knew him from the side first, which is how I learned him at the bar too, the silver at the temple catching the lamp, the same suit he hasn’t changed, the held-breath quality of a body that isn’t at rest but waiting for a thing it already knows is coming. He’s watching me with the exact attention he aimed across the whiskey, the one pointed straight at the brain as though the brain’s the part worth wanting, except now I’m barefoot and tied with the terror still going off behind my eyes like a struck match, and he looks at me as if I’m the one open file in a building full of sealed ones. It’s the identical look from the bar. My entire nervous system can’t work out whether to climb down from the fear or up into a fresh, far more idiotic one.

It’s him. The man from the bathroom. The man whose name I never got, who had me up against the tiles two hours ago with my legs around him, who fucked me stupid in a club bathroom and then cleaned me up afterward with a wet paper towel like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to do for a stranger, who walked out of that bar and has, it would seem, spent every one of those two hours since arranging to have me lifted out of my own bed, folded into a trunk, and carried up the spine of a skyscraper in my pajamas.

Here’s the part I’ll be turning over for whatever remains of my life, however generous a number that proves to be. The shaking doesn’t stop. But underneath it a second current comes up that I’ve got even less language for, because the part of me that ought to still be screaming has found him across the room and gone quiet and, God help me, curious. My breathing changes. It did this at the bar the second he sat down and it does it again now, the same hitch, the same lift in the chest I didn’t authorize, and I despise that he can do this through a foot of solid fear, that some faulty wiring deep in me has put the line of his shoulders under the same heading it used last night, when I had a clear choice and spent it badly and would, I’m now horribly certain, spend it badly again.

He stares at me. I stare back. Neither of us spends a single word, and I count the seconds, because of course I do, one, two, three, three full seconds of the most loaded silence anyone’s ever aimed at me, his eyes going over my face like the answer in front of him isn’t the one he was expecting.

“You could’ve just called,” I say.

5

Adrianos

“I don’t make calls when a face will do the work,” I tell her. “And yours was worth the trip across the river to see.”

Three seconds is all it takes me. She’s still finding her feet on my floor, and by the time she has them I’ve put the coincidence where it goes, which is nowhere. The woman from the bathroom and the woman my people pulled off a list of the four sharpest forensic minds in this city are the same woman. So be it. Two hours ago she had her teeth in my jaw and her heel locked at the back of my thigh, and now she’s in my home in a thin tank top and a pair of sleep shorts, a zip tie on her wrists that’s coming off the second she stops looking like she’ll bolt for the elevator, and not one part of that is the part I need. She’s the best. I need the best. The night handed me both halves of the same problem inside the same skin, and I won’t waste motion being amazed by it. Amazement is for men who haven’t already moved to the next thing.

“Cut it,” I tell Stavros.

He comes in behind her with the knife, and she flinches at the click of it before her brain catches up and tells her the knife is for the plastic. Her hands come loose. She brings them around to the front and works the feeling back into them, turning her wrists in the lamplight to look at the red the tie left behind, not rubbing the marks, studying them, the way you’d hold a receipt up to check the total.

“You could’ve just called,” she says again, the heat gone out of it now that the rest of her has caught up to her mouth.

“This way I have all of you in the room.”

“This way you have a kidnapping charge with my name on the affidavit.” Her eyes come off her wrists and find me, the fear still working in them but no longer running the place, sharing it now with the part of her I met first across the whiskey, the part that disagrees for sport.

“I require your help.”

“Do you know what a normal person does when they want to hire someone? They send an email. They call the office. They show up at a reasonable hour with two coffees and pretend to care which one I wanted. They don’t send four men through my door at three in the morning.”

“I’m not a normal person.”

“No. We covered that at the bar, and we’re covering it again now, and it’s holding up under repetition.” She tips her head at me. “Sane men do not have an accountant extracted from her bed in the dark when the internet has a button for exactly this. It’s green. It says open to work. I pay LinkedIn money so men like you can find me without the trunk.”

“I don’t use the green button.”

“Evidently. You use a hood and a sedan, which is slower, more expensive, and carries a custodial sentence, so as a hiring decision it fails on every axis I can measure, and I measure a lot of them.” She rolls one wrist, and her gaze drops down the front of me once, quick, the suit I haven’t been out of since the bar, and comes back up irritated with itself for having gone. “You’re still in last night’s clothes. So either you came here straight from Lux to arrange this, which is unwell, or you haven’t slept at all, which means you’re making decisions on an empty tank, which is also unwell. I’m collecting evidence, and every piece of it spells the same word, which is unhinged, in case you were wondering.”

The cold moves under all of it, low, where it’s lived since the elevator opened on my own men an hour back. Nikos couldn’t stand a wrinkled shirt on me. He’d look me over across the kitchen island and tell me I was turning into an old man who forgot to change, grinning the whole time, waiting until I gave him the laugh he was fishing for. I cut it off before I’ve finished the breath, because the work is the one room the cold won’t come into after me, and the work is standing on my floor in bare feet pricing my insomnia like a line item.

“I’m not in the mood to be analyzed,” I say. “I need your expertise. You’ll give it to me whether or not you’ve decided to want to.”

“That isn’t how any of this works. There’s a contract. There’s a rate, which in your case has a surcharge for the trunk. There’s a part, somewhere near the front, where I’m not restrained in a stranger’s office in my pajamas.”

“Consider this to be extenuating circumstances. I assure you it’s in your best interest to get on board and make it work.”

“You do that thing where you decide the rules and then announce them as if announcing makes them true.” She steps in toward the desk instead of away from it, the wrong direction for a frightened woman and the right one for this one, the part of her that should still be scared losing ground by the second to the part that would rather win the argument. “And for the record, the trunk didn’t do what you wanted it to do. I wasn’t scrambled. I was working.”

“Working?”

“I counted the turns.”

“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

She lifts her chin a fraction. “If the plan was for me to arrive confused and grateful, the plan had a hole in it. I find holes for a living. It’s the whole job.”