Chapter 5
Kai
DIANA JENSEN LIVES in the sky, and every minute I spend with her, I’m reminded that she is not one of us mere mortals.
She has an elevator that opens directly into her penthouse.
Not into a hallway of a shared floor. Not into a vestibule with someone else’s door across from hers.
The brass panels part, and you are standing in her living room.
She owns the entire forty-second floor of a building that faces the harbor, and there is nothing tall enough in front of it to interrupt her view of the water.
This woman has the wealth that buys altitude. Forty-two floors between her and the rest of Halo City. The ground, she only visits when she feels generous enough to grace it.
I let all of that sink in every minute I am here.
Last night, when I arrived for the first time, I stood in her foyer with my duffel bag and thought about her lying in my bed.
In my studio apartment. The sheets I bought from IKEA.
She hadn’t said a single word about any of it, and that silence is its own kind of charity.
But being in a penthouse where the shower alone is bigger than that entire studio, I’m embarrassed she set foot in my apartment at all.
I’m staying in one of the guest rooms. King-sized bed, blackout curtains. The closet was already open when arrived, and inside it, seven suits hang in a neat row. Tags still on. The fabric is dense; the stitching invisible.
I don’t recognize the brand, but the tags tell me everything I need to know.
I brought two suits with me. Bought them with money I’d saved. They are decent suits from a decent department store. The color is fine. The fit is fine. Everything about them is fine until you hang them next to what she gave me, and then fine stops being a word and starts being an insult.
She told me not to worry about it. It’s a uniform. My employer providing work attire. That was the explanation, and it was a reasonable explanation.
The problem is not the suits. The problem is my brain. My brain, which has decided to make this personal when it has no business being personal.
I don’t want things from her. I don’t want her buying me clothes because I cannot return the gesture. I can’t walk into a store and buy Diana Jensen a single thing she doesn’t already own ten of, in a better version.
There. I said it.
And I know how it sounds. It sounds stupid. There is no reason for me to buy her anything. There is no reason for me to even think about buying her anything. She is a job. She is a target. I am supposed to seduce her and make her walk away from Jack Rutherford. That is the plan.
I don’t want this heaviness in my chest. I don’t want to feel this.
This morning, I put on one of her suits. It fits perfectly. I look at myself in the mirror and see a stranger. A well-dressed stranger.
Then, by nine-thirty, the penthouse is a law office.
Two men arrive together. Both are well-dressed and older than Diana. They set up at the dining table, laptops out, files spread across the glass top in a system I’m sure makes sense to them. The woman who follows them is Carol, Diana’s secretary.
The third man is a barrister. I know this because Carol calls him Mr. Jones, and because he carries himself with the particular gravity of someone who speaks for a living.
Sixty, maybe older. Silver hair. A face carved by decades of courtrooms. A handshake he doesn’t offer me when he walks past. He goes straight to Diana’s office, and the door closes behind him.
I stand in the hallway and take inventory. The two solicitors and Carol are at the dining table, and they are discussing the case. The senator’s name comes up. I remember what Diana told me yesterday. I recognize him from the news.
Diana told me to stay in my room. That there is nothing to guard. And looking around, she is right. But I can’t sit in my room. Not with four strangers in her home. I’m her bodyguard. The word means something to me.
I walk to the far end of the penthouse, past the kitchen, along the long hallway, and I stop outside her office. If she doesn’t want me inside, fine. I can stand out here. I don’t need to hear them discuss what the senator has been doing. I already heard enough.
My mind is still chewing on that, on how I would prefer to spend my anger on my own revenge plan instead of some low-life senator, when I hear a moan through the door.
A moan through a heavy, solid wooden door.
Am I hallucinating?
She’s in there with the barrister, discussing a very important case.
I try to convince myself of that. I try to make my brain accept it.
But my heart is starting to palpitate because I heard the moan again, and it sounds familiar.
Exactly like the one I heard the night before.
Even gagged, and this one is clearly not gagged, I know from deep inside my bones that this is the same woman.
My body goes rigid. My vision wobbles a little. I clasp my hands behind my back and squeeze hard.
What the fuck.
I hear it again. Longer this time. Followed by a grunt that is of a male. Deep. The grunt of a man who is chasing a high and is about to blow.
My heart does this thing—this terrible stutter—I’ve never felt before.
Not in war. Not when I think about Jack Rutherford, because all of that is adrenaline and rage feeding me.
This is different. This is a hook in my sternum, pulling, and I don’t know what is on the other end of it, but it is dragging me under.
I take a step toward the door. My hand is already reaching for the handle. I am going to open it. I am going to walk in there and—
And what? What am I going to do? She is my assignment. She is a woman in her own home doing whatever she wants with whoever she wants, and I have zero authority to—
Another moan. Louder.
My hand clasps over my own mouth before I can make a sound back. Sweat is trickling down my spine. I can feel it crawl past the waistband of the pants she paid for.
I reach for the handle again, and my fingers tremble.
My pulse is everywhere. Throat, wrists, the backs of my eyes.
I can hear my own blood rushing in my ears, and underneath it, the sounds from behind that door, and I want to break the door off its hinges.
I want to put my fist through the wood and—
“Hey.”
One of the solicitors. He walked down the hallway with a coffee mug in his hand and a grin on his face. Then he winks at me.
“They’re fine in there,” he says. Low voice, conspiratorial, one man to another. “Old friends, those two.” He pats my shoulder, and my entire body is a grenade with the pin halfway out.
“You’ll get used to it,” he adds, then walks back toward the living room, and I am still standing here with my heart trying to punch its way out of my chest.
I take a step back. I press my spine against the wall.
What is this?
What is happening to me?
She is fucking the barrister. Right now. Behind this door. She is in there with a sixty-something-year-old man, and she is—
I hear her cry out. Sharp. That peak, I recognize. The sound she made when she came last night, when her body convulsed under mine, and she soaked the comforter.
She just came. Not with me.
My vision blinks from an emotion I don’t have a word for. There’s a hole in the center of my chest and it’s eating me alive.
I have been angry my entire life. Anger is home.
I know anger the way I know my own hands.
This isn’t anger. This is worse. This is standing outside a closed door, listening to a woman make sounds I want to belong to me, and feeling my heart crack down the middle over it.
A pain with no wound. No bullet hole. Nothing I can press gauze against and fix.
She is cheating on Jack Rutherford.
That thought arrives, and I lean harder into the wall. She is Jack Rutherford’s woman, and she is sleeping with the barrister Rutherford works with. This is good. This is exactly what I need to—
I can’t finish the thought.
Because the thought underneath it is this: she is doing with someone else what she did with me, and I want to kill this man. Not for Jack Rutherford. For me.
I press my palms flat against the wall, harder, and I breathe. In through my nose. Out through my mouth. The way you breathe when the world is falling apart, and you need to keep your hands steady enough to shoot.
Through the door, I hear her laugh. Light. The laugh of a woman who just had an orgasm and feels good about it.
I close my eyes.
I don’t understand this. I don’t understand any of it. I came here to take his woman. To humiliate him. Diana Jensen was supposed to be a tool. A means. A weapon I aimed at my father’s life and fired without looking back. She was never supposed to be this.
I look down at my hands, and they won’t stop shaking.