Chapter Nine
A Debt Collector at the Door
The two men who came into the studio a little before eleven the next morning did not introduce themselves, and didn't need to. Senna knew the leather, the ink, the particular unhurried way they moved through a space like they owned the air in it, before either of them said a word.
She was alone in the front room when the bell over the door announced them, Imke not due in for another hour, Petra's session not scheduled until the afternoon, and some old, animal instinct made her stay behind the reception counter rather than approach, putting a barrier of furniture between herself and two men whose intentions she couldn't yet read.
"We're looking for Colt," the taller one said, scanning the front room with an attention that felt less like searching and more like cataloguing. "He around?"
"He doesn't work here." Senna kept her voice level, professional, the same register she used with difficult clients, though her pulse had climbed the moment the door opened. "This is my business. He has nothing to do with it."
"Funny," the shorter one said, not unkindly, leaning against the reception counter with a casualness that felt deliberately intrusive.
"Word at the yard is he's here most nights.
Sitting outside. Real dedicated." He glanced around the studio, at the acoustic panels, the framed contract certificates on the wall, with an expression that suggested he was pricing the place in his head.
"Nice setup you've got. Be a shame if something happened to it. "
"Is that a threat?"
"It's an observation." The taller one's voice stayed even, almost bored. "Rein just wants Colt to remember where his loyalties sit. Sometimes a man needs a reminder that the things he cares about outside the club aren't as protected as he thinks they are."
Senna held his gaze, refusing to let the fear show in her face, drawing on the same discipline she used with actors who tried to rattle her into cutting a session short.
"You can tell Rein I said his message came through clearly, and that I'd think very carefully before threatening a woman's livelihood in her own place of business. "
Something flickered in the taller man's expression, a beat of genuine surprise at her lack of flinch, and after a moment he nodded once, gestured to his partner, and the two of them left without further comment, the bell over the door chiming with an ordinariness that felt obscene given what had just happened.
Senna's hands were shaking by the time the door shut. She gripped the edge of the counter until it passed.
? ? ?
She called Colt before she'd fully decided to, unblocking the number just long enough to place the call, her voice tighter than she wanted it to be when he picked up on the second ring.
"Two of Rein's men were just at the studio," she said, without preamble. "Asking for you. Making comments about my business being unprotected. I want to know what's going on."
There was a pause on the line, and when Colt spoke again his voice had changed entirely, gone flat and cold in a way she'd never heard directed anywhere but at Rein in the clubhouse yard. "I'm on my way."
He arrived within twenty minutes, coming through the door with a barely contained fury that filled the room, and for the first time since the confession, Senna watched him direct that anger somewhere other than inward.
"Are you hurt," he said, crossing to her immediately, close enough that she could see the tension in his jaw, his hands hovering near her shoulders like he wanted to check for injury and didn't trust himself to touch her without permission.
"I'm fine. They didn't touch me. They just talked." She stepped back slightly, needing the space to think clearly. "Colt, what is happening. Why is your club sending men to my studio."
He exhaled hard, dragging a hand through his hair.
"Rein's testing me. He's had his suspicions for a week that something's shifted, that I'm not coming back to the fold the way he expects.
Sending men here is his way of finding out whether I still consider you protected territory or whether you've become expendable to him.
If I react the wrong way, if I don't react at all, it tells him something about where my loyalty actually sits now. "
"So this is a message aimed at you, and I'm just the paper it's written on."
"That's exactly what it is, and I hate it more than I have words for.
" His voice cracked slightly on the last word, and for the first time she saw something in his face that wasn't careful control: real fear, aimed entirely outward, entirely at what his world could still do to hers.
"I never should have let you see any part of that life.
I told myself for three years that keeping you separate from the club was protecting you.
I think I was protecting myself from having to watch you understand exactly what I am. "
"What are you going to do."
"Handle it." He was already moving toward the door. "I need to go to the yard."
"Colt." She caught his sleeve before he could leave, and he stopped, turning back with an expression that made her chest tighten. "Be careful."
"I will." He held her gaze for a long moment, something unspoken passing between them, and then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him, his engine roaring to life outside a moment later and fading fast down the street toward Gutleutviertel.
? ? ?
Senna spent the rest of the day unable to concentrate on anything, running the same session notes three times without absorbing them, checking her phone every few minutes with a frequency that would have embarrassed her a week earlier.
Imke, arriving for her afternoon shift, took one look at her face and didn't ask questions, simply took over the day's remaining sessions without being asked, the same quiet competence Senna had come to rely on more than she'd ever admitted.
The text came a little after six, a single line, unadorned.
It's settled. You're safe. I'm sorry.
Senna read it four times, searching for the details he hadn't given her, understanding, even as she searched, that he wasn't going to provide them, that whatever "settled" had cost him was a room in his world he wasn't going to let her enter, the same way she'd once decided there were rooms in his life she didn't need to ask about.
She sat with that thought for a long time after the studio emptied that evening, turning over the strange, uncomfortable symmetry of it: that the very boundary she'd once drawn out of what she'd told herself was respect might be the exact boundary that had let a betrayal grow undetected for six weeks, and that Colt, even now, even trying to change, still reached instinctively for the same silence that had cost them everything.
Greta called that evening, having heard some fractured version of the day's events from Imke, who'd clearly worried enough to break her usual discretion.
Senna gave her aunt the short version, the men, the threat, Colt's departure, the single unhelpful text, and Greta listened without interrupting, the particular quality of her silence suggesting she was turning something over.
"You're angry that he protected you and angry that he won't tell you how," Greta said finally, not unkindly. "Those are both fair things to feel. I don't think they cancel each other out, though. I think you're allowed to be grateful and frustrated in the same breath."
"I don't know how to hold both at once."
"You will. You're better at holding complicated things than you give yourself credit for.
You've spent your whole career doing exactly that, listening for two contradictory truths in the same performance and finding a way to let them both be real.
" Greta's voice softened. "Give yourself the same patience you'd give an actor working through a hard scene. "
Senna didn't have an answer for that either, not that night. She didn't go looking for him. But she didn't sleep, either, turning the single text over and over until the gray hour before dawn, wondering what "handled" had actually meant, and hating that he wouldn't tell her.