Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Noemi
Rian ends up making me wait two more days to leave the house.
Keeping his word, he gets me a light blue dress for the occasion.
It’s almost the exact shade of the calm room.
I pull it on and look in the mirror. The waist is nipped in, the sleeves long, the fabric dotted here and there with little hand-embroidered white flowers.
When I turn to leave the bedroom, he’s waiting patiently in the doorway, holding a white cashmere coat.
His eyes rove all over my body, making my cheeks heat.
“For me?” I ask.
He smirks. “Yes, pretty girl. There are heaters upstairs, but I want my girl to stay warm.”
“Oh, I’m your girl now?” I tease. Sliding my arms into the coat, I smirk right back.
“I’ve never made any secret of that. You’ve always been mine.” He pulls the coat’s lapels close and buttons it, making eye contact with me the whole time.
“So you say. Let’s go upstairs.”
Rian growls a little, but I turn and walk to the front door. He opens it and there are a pack of bodyguards standing there in matching dark suits and sunglasses. I count ten of them in total. Either I’m crazy, or we are about to be the most closely-watched people in the city.
He waves to the elevator. “Two in the elevator with us. The rest of you take the stairs.”
One bodyguard is already calling the elevator. Rian ushers me in when the doors open. Two guards follow, standing stiffly as the elevator ascends.
“This seems like overkill,” I whisper to Rian.
He shrugs. “I hope so.”
The restaurant on the roof is the kind of place I've spent my life not deserving. It’s glassed in on three sides, with the whole city laid out and glittering below.
The tables are dressed in white linen. There’s a host who calls Rian by his last name – Mr. O'Sullivan - and doesn't blink at the four enormous men in suits arranging themselves around us like furniture.
The rest of the bodyguards scatter around the patio
We're the only diners. I clock that, but decide not to ask. A waiter brings wine without prompting. He asks if we have any foods that we don’t eat.
Rian raises a brow at me. I think about it, then answer veal.
There are no more questions asked. The sommelier pours something Rian ordered by nodding once at the wine list. I catch the label as he sets the bottle down.
It's an Albarino, a Spanish wine. I've seen it behind the glass at the wine shop on Court Street, priced at four figures.
I take a sip of my white wine. Crisp, bright, fruity. “Mmm.”
“You like it?” He samples it too, swirling it around in his mouth. “I don’t drink often, but it’s refreshing.”
“Yes.” My gaze darts to the view. It’s lovely, a gorgeous view of downtown Manhattan in the silvering light. I take a big breath of fresh air. “Do you come here much?”
“No. I have food sent down to the penthouse when I’m here. Which, for the last four months, was basically never. I’d all but moved in across the street from your store.”
“Wait, really?” My brow wrinkles. “Where?”
“In the old apartment across the street. I had to watch you closely.”
“You mean you had to watch the Vitellis’ office.”
“Like I told you before, I don’t have a choice.” Rian drums his fingers on his glass. “Once I saw you… once I saw what you did, I was gone for.”
“What I did?” I take a sip of wine. “You’re speaking in riddles.”
He looks at me. “You saved a kid. I was watching one day when there was a car crash at the empty place next door to the bookstore. The car rammed into a phone pole and caught fire. And you, like an angel, pulled a little boy out of the car.”
I remember it. The acrid smoke, the crying boy, the jammed seatbelt.
“You saw that?” I ask, taken aback. “I was just doing what anybody would do.”
“No, you weren’t. The kid’s mom was clearly out of it when she got out.
She sat down on the curb, bleeding all over the place.
But you had eyes only for the kid. You put your coat on him, took him to his mom, and you didn’t leave his side until the ambulance drove away.
” His eyes spear me, swimming with some emotion I can’t name.
“Do you know how many kids would kill for that kind of undivided attention? That kind of care?”
I reach out, touching the back of his hand. “Did… did something bad happen to you when you were a child?”
He stares at my hand caressing his and nods, but doesn’t say anything. God, how bad was his childhood? I’d guessed it was bad, just based on knowing him for a week, but now I’m thinking it was worse than that.
I don’t know what to do, so I just keep stroking his hand. “Hey Rian?”
He lifts his gaze and his face softens. “Yes?”
“You saved me,” I remind him. “I don’t know what kind of demons are in your past, but you aren’t kidnapping girls and forcing them to participate in fucking auctions. No matter how many men you’ve killed, your soul could be blacker.”
That amuses him. “Very true.”
The food arrives in small perfect courses and I eat all of it. Rian watches me more than he eats, which I'm getting used to. The bodyguards watch the doors, the glass, and the sky.
For the next forty minutes, it's nice. He tells me a story about someone he works with named Hale that's mostly about Hale not talking and looking all broody. I laugh, an actual laugh. His whole face changes when I do it.
And I think, traitorously, that I could get used to making him look like that.
I set my napkin down near the end of the meal. "I'm going to find the restroom."
"I'll have someone walk you."
"Rian. I'm going to pee, not flee the country. It's twenty feet, you can watch me the whole way." I stand and push my chair back.
The window beside my head explodes.
I don't understand it at first. There's a sound, a flat crack.
Then the glass behind where my skull was half a second ago turns into a spiderweb and then into nothing. I blink.
Rian is already moving.
He hits me like a wall. One arm hooks around my waist and takes me to the floor hard enough to knock the breath out of me. He covers me with his whole body. Every inch of his enormous frame shields me from the open air where the window used to be.
"Stay down." His voice is perfectly calm, which is terrifying me. "You’re stuck to the floor like glue. Don’t try to look around."
There is an odd sound, almost like several hummingbirds flying too close.
“Shit,” Rian says. “Hold on.”
Then the guns start firing as the world comes apart above us. More glass shatters and rains down, pinging when it hits the floor. I hear the mechanical whine of something in the air, small and close. My brain struggles to catch up as one of the bodyguards shouts and starts firing at the sky.
Bullseye. A shape drops past the broken window. A drone, with something mounted to it, bounces uselessly off the ground. My eyes widen when I see Rian pull a weapon and shoot it once more, to be sure.
“Fuck,” I gasp. It was firing at us.
The drone was just the appetizer, though. The main course comes through the door behind the bar. Three men in dark clothes, moving fast, with guns up. Shit shit shit. I point at them. Rian is hardly looking at me, but he gives me a tight nod.
Of course they came up through the floors. Why did I beg Rian to come to this stupid restaurant?
I see them in pieces, between Rian's arm and the overturned table, dark figures moving fast, guns pointed at us.
The King bodyguards meet them with the crack of gunfire.
The entire roof teems with guards and attackers; I glance at the floor and see our waiter huddled under a table nearby, his head shielded by his hands.
Before I can call to the waiter, tell him to pull one of the thick tables down to better protect himself, Rian shifts off me. He moves up into a crouch, his gun glinting in the sunlight.
I'm looking right at him when the first attacker comes around the ruined table.
Rian shoots him through the throat without an ounce of hesitation.
The second guy gets close enough to touch and Rian seems to take that personally.
He takes the gun out of the guy's hand, breaks a bone in it that makes it dangle uselessly, and shoots him.
All business. Rian puts him on the floor permanently in about two seconds.
The last one coming toward him, he watches patiently, almost bored. Then Rian ends his life so efficiently that I finally understand, all the way down to my core, what I should have understood from the beginning.
He isn't a man who hurts people because he has to. He's good at it, the way a surgeon is good, the way my mother was good with a knife and an orange. It should horrify me.
But right now, doesn’t. Three men died trying to get to me. But nothing gets through Rian. He told me that while lying in my calm room and I half believed it.
Now I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
"Up." He takes my arm and helps me to my feet, his eyes assessing the situation. "Now. With me. Behind me."
I don't argue. We move along the floor toward the elevator while the bodyguards hold the roof. As quickly as it started, it seems to be petering off.
We're almost inside the elevator when Rian makes a sound, short and bitten off, and stumbles half a step. I see the dark patch spreading on his upper arm.
“Fuck.” He looks down, then grits his teeth. “Come on. Quickly.”
"You're hit." I make a grab for him.
"Please, Noemi." He shoves me into the elevator, follows, and slams his palm against a panel. The door slides closed and I hear several thunks. "It's an arm. I have another one."
“Are you okay?” I ask. My eyes are glued to the spreading dark spot on his shirt.
“I’ll be better when you’re secure.” He pops open an invisible panel and hits a button, then a second control. A heavy mechanical sound runs through the shaft, a series of locks engaging somewhere above us.
"Sealing the roof access," he explains. He's got his phone out, blood running to his wrist. Jesus.