20. Adrianos #2
"That's what you took from that sentence?"
"They're difficult to keep alive."
Her mouth falls open. For half a second, neither of us says a word.
Then she points at me. "That. Exactly that."
"What?"
"You think because something matters to you, you get to put it somewhere safe and control the conditions until it survives."
The amusement vanishes. Her finger lowers. Something in her expression shifts, but she doesn't retreat. I could tell her she's wrong.
She's not.
I remember Nikos laughing at breakfast. Nikos asleep against my chest. Nikos asking me questions I answered impatiently because I believed there would always be another morning to answer them properly.
I remember a coffin too small for the amount of grief it contained.
Then my parents.
Petros.
Every person reduced to past tense because I wasn't fast enough, careful enough, ruthless enough.
Now Elena stands in front of me arguing for the right to walk outside while somebody with millions hidden across Europe knows her name.
No.
"I'm not debating this."
Her eyes narrow. "Because you're losing?"
"Because you're staying."
"Adrianos."
"You're staying where I can protect you."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then the men go with you."
"How many?"
"Enough."
"That's not a number."
"It doesn't need to be."
"It does to me."
Of course it does.
"Four."
Her eyes widen. "Four?"
"Two close. Two distant."
"That's not security. That's a parade."
"You'll survive the embarrassment."
"I have spent years being invisible. Four armed men rather undermine the aesthetic."
"Adjust."
She studies me for a long moment, and when she speaks again, the anger has changed. It's quieter now. More dangerous.
"You're afraid."
Every muscle in my body stills.
"No."
"You're a terrible liar."
"I'm an exceptional liar."
"Not about this."
She steps closer. There's barely a foot between us now.
"This isn't about whether I understand the risk," she says. "I do. It's about you deciding that fear gives you ownership over every choice I make."
"I don't own you."
"Then act like it."
I look at her and see the car coming again. Her body against mine when I dragged her clear. The sound of metal striking stone, and how easily the angle could have been different.
Ten centimeters. Half a second. A mistake.
That's all death ever needs.
"You don't understand."
"Then explain it."
I can't. Not because I lack the words, but because saying them would make them real. I can't tell her that when I woke to find her side of the bed empty, my first thought wasn't that she'd gone to work.
It was that someone had taken her.
I can't tell her that seeing her bent over those screens made something inside my chest unlock so violently I wanted to break every window in the city just to have somewhere to put it.
I can't tell her that I'm beginning to measure rooms by where she is standing in them. So, I give her the only thing I can.
An order.
"You're staying."
Her jaw tightens, and she turns toward the door. "Fine."
I blink. That was too easy. "Fine?"
"Yes."
"You're agreeing?"
"Absolutely."
I don't believe her for a second.
She reaches the door and looks back at me.
"If you lock me inside this penthouse, I'll need something to occupy my time."
"You have work."
"I do."
Her smile arrives slowly, and I don't like it.
"I'll investigate you instead."
I stare at her.
She continues pleasantly, "Every company. Every account. Every property. Every shell corporation. Every suspicious payment you've made since puberty. I have excellent pattern-recognition skills and apparently nowhere else to be."
My mouth threatens to move, but I stop it.
"You wouldn't."
"Try me."
She opens the door.
"Elena."
She glances over her shoulder.
"Two men."
Her brows rise.
"Two," I repeat. "When you leave. You tell security where you're going, and you don't change plans without telling them."
She considers it.
"One."
"Two."
"One and a driver."
"The driver is security."
"Then you've smuggled in two using vocabulary."
"Correct."
Her eyes narrow.
"Fine. But they do not follow me into bathrooms."
"Agreed."
"Changing rooms."
"Agreed."
"Coffee shops."
"Depends on the coffee shop."
"Adrianos."
"Fine."
She points at me. "And nobody tells me where I can and cannot go."
"They advise."
"They can advise silently."
"That's not advice."
"It's my favorite kind." She fires back, and then she's gone.
I stand in the middle of the office, listening to her footsteps fade down the hall. A minute later, I hear the investigation room door open. Not the elevator.
Of course she's gone back to work.
I walk to the doorway and watch her through the open door. She's already seated before the screens, handbag discarded beside the chair, fingers moving over the keyboard as though the last twenty minutes never happened.
As though she didn't just dismantle half my argument and force me to negotiate the other half. As though I didn't almost tell her the truth.
This should be simple.
Elena is useful. Brilliant. She sees patterns my people miss, and whoever controls OB6 has noticed. Protecting her is operational necessity. Nothing more.
That's the explanation I should be able to accept.
But operational necessity doesn't explain why I counted the seconds between her hanging up downstairs and walking into my office.
It doesn't explain why the thought of her returning to her apartment alone makes violence gather beneath my skin.
It doesn't explain why, when I woke and found the bed empty, fear reached me before reason did.
I have buried too many people.
My son, my parents, men who trusted me. People I should have protected.
I look at Elena through the doorway as she pushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear and leans closer to the screen, completely absorbed in numbers that might lead us to whoever has been dismantling our world piece by piece.
Something cold settles beneath my ribs. This isn't about protecting my forensic accountant anymore. It hasn't been for some time. And there is one thought I refuse to finish, because finishing it would give it a name.
No. Not yet.