5. Adrianos
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.”
She delivers it like a threat, but it comes out as a résumé, and it’s the most attractive thing a person has said to me in longer than I’ll admit in this room. I keep it off my face, a thing I’m good at and have built a great deal on.
“You liked that,” she observes even though I could’ve sworn I buried it.
“I like a sharp instrument.”
“You like winning, and the part you’ve just understood is that I don’t lose at the things you’re used to winning.
” She opens her mouth to keep building, the case assembling behind her eyes, the long, loaded sentence she’s stacking to walk me into a corner I haven’t seen the edge of, and I’m braced for the first clause of it when her eyes go past my shoulder and stop dead.
The photograph sits on the shelf behind the desk, the single personal thing in a room I keep bare on purpose.
Kalliopi and me on the terrace at Glyfada, both of us squinting into a hard Aegean sun, her laughing at a thing I said that I’ve since mislaid, and me grinning.
Evander took it the summer she pulled the first thread of all this loose, before either of us understood the thread had a hook on the end and the hook went into her.
She’s looking at it now, and the argument leaves her through a seam, all of it at once. The fight drains out of her face and takes the fear with it, and what comes into the empty space is a quiet I don’t understand, her eyes fixed on the frame.
“That’s Kalliopi,” I say, and her name comes out of me plainer than I meant it to. “She’s the best forensic accountant I’ve ever put on a problem. She found the first thread of the thing I’m bringing you into. Found it ahead of my entire network.”
Her eyes hold on the photograph.
“She’s not available anymore,” I continue. “Which is the reason you’re standing on my floor instead of lying in your bed, remembering the pleasure I’ve given you. I need someone to take the work the rest of the way. Apparently, you’re the best at what you do.”
I’m braced for the fight to come back. The contract again, the rate, the surcharge, the office hours, anything, everything really.
“Yes,” she says.
The one word. No argument behind it. She drags her eyes off the frame and brings them back to me. The fight is still in them, but its aim doesn’t feel pointed at me now, and she says it a second time, firmer.
“Yes. I’ll do it.”
I’ve moved men with money. I’ve moved them with fear, and a few with threats of what I’d take from them if they said no. I didn’t reach for any of those tonight. She walked herself to yes, looking at a photograph of a dead woman she’s never met, and the speed of it doesn’t make sense.
“Good,” I tell her. “Then we’re agreed on the part that matters. The rest you can fight me on after sunrise.”
“I assume you’ll have your thugs take me back. I’d appreciate if I could sit in the backseat instead.”
“You’re sleeping here.”
“Absolutely not.” It comes out of her fast. “I have an apartment. I have, in theory, a door. I have a profession that until tonight involved zero river crossings in the trunk of anything, and I have a powerful instinct that sleeping under the roof of the man who put me in that trunk is the single worst proposal anyone’s made me this week. ”
“Knowing how my men work, your door must be in pieces. I’ll have it fixed for you, but tonight, you don’t have an apartment.
It’s a space with the lock kicked off it.
” I come around the desk. She holds her ground, chin up, bare feet planted on marble stone, the marks still pink on her wrists.
I’d respect the spine of it in a man twice her weight, and I respect it more in her.
“The people I’m hunting put the woman in that photograph in the ground for getting close to what you’ll have in front of you by lunch.
You don’t get to walk back out of that into a place with no door on it. ”
“So the fix for my safety problem is to install me in the one address in the city guaranteed to be a target. That’s not a fix. That’s relocating the problem and calling it solved.”
“The fix is keeping you where I can see you.”
It stops her for half a second because it came out nearer the truth than I’d planned, and she’s far too quick to miss the weight riding under the words. Her breath changes. I know that change. I had it against my mouth two hours ago, the small hitch in her chest.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were winding up to be unbearable again. Your pupils just blew wide. Your cock stays in your pants.”
“If that’s what you wish,” I say and wink. “There’s a room down the hall, made up. The lock works, and it works from your side just in case you were wondering.”
“As if that stopped you before.”
“Sleep, koukla.” Her eyes widen at the Greek, the second time tonight she’s heard it from me. “There’s a great deal of work in front of us, and we start early.”