Chapter Ten
I watched the café from a parked car across the street, close enough to see the door, far enough that I was simply another tinted windshield among a dozen others on that block.
Daniel Whitfield had been a contained problem for exactly four minutes before he became an uncontained one. I had my men track him down since I learned about the meeting he had with my little journalist.
When Aria walked into that café and sat down across from him, I felt something close to irritation, and beneath the irritation, something dark and sinister. Seeing her around other men always made my blood boil in ways beyond my control.
I watched Yuri enter through the front. Standard procedure—assess, contain, extract the source for a longer conversation elsewhere. I hadn’t ordered anyone to touch her. I’d been explicit about that since the beginning of this situation.
She wasn’t a target. She was a complication. Complications get managed, not eliminated. Yuri, although unsure of what I was doing with her, hadn’t asked what the distinction meant to me. I hadn’t offered to explain it because I didn’t entirely have an explanation that I trusted.
Whitfield panicked faster than Yuri’s presence warranted. That was the problem with frightened men; they made their own danger worse trying to escape it, drawing exactly the kind of attention a quiet exit would have avoided.
And Aria, predictably, impossibly, pushed instead of retreating. I watched her lean forward at the table instead of pulling back, watched her mouth move with another question instead of an apology.
I felt my jaw tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the operation and everything to do with the simple, infuriating fact that she did not know how to be afraid at the right moment.
When Yuri’s second man moved toward the door, I was already out of the car.
The glass crash wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t supposed to be. I’d put my hand through enough chaos in my life to know exactly how to manufacture three seconds of it. In the noise that followed, I crossed the floor, found her arm, and pulled her exactly as far as the side door before letting go.
While in motion, I savored her signature scent, and it did something to me that I wasn’t ready to label. The feeling of being around her after all this time was more intense than I anticipated.
I wanted to linger in her presence—hell! I wanted to do a lot more than that. But I didn’t.
By the time I was back in the car, my pulse was elevated in a way that four years of disciplined calm should have made impossible.
I sat with my hands on the wheel and did not start the engine for nearly a full minute, running through the inventory of everything that had just gone wrong with my own restraint.
She was unpredictable. That had been true since the first day at Meridian Solutions. What was new, however, was that her unpredictability had stopped registering primarily as a risk to manage and started registering as something I looked forward to.
That distinction mattered. I didn’t like how much it mattered. Yet it did.
I looked out the window of my vehicle, watching her scan the surroundings for the man who’d pulled her out of danger. Seeing her place her palm on the spot I’d gripped, with a small grin playing on her lips, thawed something frozen inside me.
I wasn’t sure what it was. But it felt good.
I started the engine and drove away.
***
Like I said, like a drug, I craved being around her, and that pushed me into doing something I hadn’t planned on doing initially.
I set up a meeting with her.
Not as myself. But as a made-up character, Anton Vasylenko, a consultant for an import-export advisory firm with a website that had taken my people eleven hours to build convincingly and would survive exactly as much scrutiny as it needed to and no more.
I had Yuri identify her usual coffee shop near campus, the one she visited three mornings a week without fail.
The plan was to be there on the fourth morning, seated at the table beside the one she always chose.
I’d have a laptop open, a folder of entirely fabricated import documentation visible at the right angle should she happen to glance over.
She would. She glanced at everything. That was, by now, a fact I’d built a small operation around.
On the scheduled day, I sat at the table next to the vacant one I was certain she’d sit at. My laptop was open, the screen positioned at the right angle as planned. I sat there, dressed in tailored black pants and a black shirt with rolled-up sleeves.
I waited. Patiently.
About twelve minutes later, she showed up, the bells at the entrance jingling as she walked in through the door. Her blond hair was piled up into a messy ponytail with strands framing her face. Her worn-in boots scuffed against the floor as she made her way to the counter.
Her outfit was casual—a brown leather jacket over a pair of jeans. She had her backpack slung over one shoulder, her watchful blue eyes discreetly sweeping across the space.
She chatted with the brunette behind the counter for a moment, her lips curling into a beautiful smile. I watched her from my seat, quietly savoring the look on her face.
Aria grabbed her order, beamed at the barista behind the counter, and turned in my direction. I returned my gaze to my lit screen, pretending not to notice her.
She sat down beside me, set her coffee on the table, and dropped her backpack at her feet. She withdrew her laptop, opened it, and began rattling her fingers across the keyboard.
I didn’t speak. Instead, I just made sure my own laptop screen was in her line of sight because I knew it was only a matter of time before she’d take the bait.
And as expected, she did.
It took her less than ninety seconds to notice the folder.
And that’s when I stared at her, as if to say, I can see you snooping.
She caught my gaze, and I thought she was going to flinch or something. But no. She did not.
“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all, her eyes already on the visible header. “Force of habit. I read everything—even the ones I’m not supposed to read.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed,” I said quietly. “It’s customs documentation. Genuinely as boring as it looks.”
“Nothing’s as boring as it looks.” There was an edge underneath her tone, the particular alertness of someone testing the floor before deciding whether to put her full weight on it.
“You’d be surprised.”
“Try me.”
I glanced up at her, my eyes meeting hers in a way that made my heart skip a beat.
“What’s your line of work?” she added, almost immediately. “If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”
I was prepared for this already.
“Import advisory,” I replied. “Mostly Eastern European partnerships, regulatory compliance.” I closed the laptop halfway, just enough to suggest I was willing to be interrupted without suggesting I welcomed it. “ What about you? What’s your line of work?”
“I’m not quite there yet.” She flashed me her student ID. “Journalism student. Financial corruption, mostly. Trade compliance, offshore structures—that kind of stuff.” She watched my face when she said it, openly, almost daring me to react.
I’d built my entire career on not reacting. “Interesting.”
“Interesting? You sure about that?”
“I mean, it sounds considerably less boring than my documentation.”
“You’d be surprised.” She grabbed her coffee.
“Try me,” I said, intentionally repeating her exact response to the same words I’d said earlier.
She stared at me as she slowly sipped her drink, her eyes crinkling at the corners. This was a subtle hint that she was smiling into her cup.
“Most of it’s just numbers that don’t add up in ways nobody bothers to ask about.” She broke the brief silence between us. “Eastern European partnerships, you say.” A pause, her eyes squinting in a whisper. “Which countries?”
Of course, she was going to probe me; it was in her nature to ask uncomfortable questions. But I came prepared.
“Mostly Russia, some Cyprus, occasionally the Baltics,” I replied without hesitation.
Something in her expression sharpened at Cyprus with the specific, controlled interest of a woman filing a fact away rather than reacting to it.
“Hmm. Interesting,” she said, in a tone that suggested she meant something other than interesting.
“How so?” I pressed on, easing into our conversation more than I intended to.
“Cyprus comes up a lot in my research.”
“Really?” I kept my voice level, faintly amused, my eyes discreetly drinking in the details of her face. “It comes up in mine a lot too. Half the shipping routes through that region run through it. Tax efficiency, mostly.”
“Mostly,” she repeated, skepticism lacing her tone.
“You sound skeptical of tax efficiency.”
“No, I sound skeptical of anyone who uses the phrase ‘tax efficiency’ to describe a jurisdiction with four hundred thousand registered companies and a population of under a million.” She said it with a small, sharp smile, no real hostility in it, just the pleasure of someone who enjoyed being right more than she enjoyed being liked.
“But I’m sure your work is entirely above board. ”
“Trust me.” I let the faintest curve touch my mouth. “I’d be terrible at my job if it wasn’t.”
She laughed—short, surprised out of her, like she hadn’t expected the joke and hadn’t expected to find it funny.
In all honesty, I didn’t expect it to be funny either.
But it did, and that laugh of hers did something uncomfortable to my chest, a small, involuntary tightening I had no name for and did not examine.
In the silence that followed, we both stared into each other’s eyes. And the longer I held her gaze, the more strange emotions stirred up within me.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “You never said.”
“You never asked,” I replied.
Her lips curled into that beautiful smile of hers. “Well, this is me asking…what do they call you, other than import advisory?”
I laughed.
I actually laughed.
Nothing loud or clumsy. Quiet and composed.