Chapter 19
Rahat
The address led me to a building in Canary Wharf.
Not the glass tower stuffed with traders and bankers, but the fringe of it.
One of the newer builds that had gone up fast and leased slower.
It was all steel frame and floor-to-ceiling windows with a ground floor that still had the ghost of a company name on the signage. Whatever it had been, it was gone now.
The reception doors were open and the lobby unmanned.
A single strip of light ran along the reception desk, but all it did was cast the corridor into shadows that could easily conceal a person.
Good, I tried to tell myself that they would give Rex a better opportunity to sneak in undetected.
But it also meant Adam could be standing in one of the alcoves and watching me, right now.
Both lifts were on the ground floor, which suggested Adam had sent them down. I entered one and pressed the button for the fourteenth floor.
I pressed my hand against the wall to steady myself as the lift jerked upward.
My whole body screamed at me to sit down and sleep.
I was so fucking tired. My head was pounding, and honestly, I think that was the least of the pains I felt.
I tried to remember what it felt like to breathe without hurting.
And the vision in my left eye was non-existent.
But I pushed myself upright and lifted my chin. None of that mattered right now.
The lift door opened onto a stripped corridor.
A bare conduit ran along the ceiling. The whole floor had been gutted back to the frame.
It looked like someone had started the job years ago and never returned to finish.
Stacked panels lined one wall, and tools sat open in their cases. Dust gathered on all of them.
At the far end of the corridor, light spilled out through a set of open doors.
I walked towards it, my heels clicking on the concrete floor.
Every step sent a jolt of pain up my spine to the base of my skull.
Yet, despite the wobble in my legs and my uneasy footing, they'd been a deliberate choice.
The heels showed I had no intention of running.
The floor in the room beyond was bare concrete, the same as the corridor.
Adam stood in the centre of the room with his hands clasped behind his back. He smiled.
"Where is she?" I asked.
"Straight to the point." He tilted his head. "You've changed."
"Adam," my voice rasped and trembled. "Where's Priya?"
He motioned to the side of the room with a flourish of his hand before walking over and pulling back a blue room partition. Priya was in a chair. Cable ties at her wrists, looped to the armrest. Her head was up. She was awake and looking at me wide eyed.
"Rahat," she said as her eyes took in the state of me. "Are you okay?"
She'd been kidnapped and tied to a fucking chair and she was asking if I was okay. The notion almost fucking broke me.
"I'm okay," I said. "Everything's okay." I held her gaze for longer than was safe before turning back to Adam. "You said she could leave."
"She can," he said. "When we're done."
I tried not to react. But my stomach churned and my mouth went dry. He was too close to Priya. Too close to hurt her if something went wrong. How long had I been here? A minute? Two?
Fuck!
I turned and moved towards the opposite side of the room. The wall was entirely glass, giving view to The Shard and the vibrant orange and fiery gold of the sunrise. I winced at the bright light that hurt my eyes and made the pounding in my head worse.
He shifted behind me and I avoided turning to look as he sounded like he was moving closer, and if all it took was keeping my back to him to get him away from Priya, then that's what I'd do.
Even if my skin prickled and my knees threatened to buckle in the process.
He came to stand in the window next to me on my left.
To see him, I'd need to turn my head, but from his reflection, it looked like he was carrying a laptop.
The dawn light caught the line of his jaw and the wave in his hair.
He still looked handsome. But there was an edge to it now, a lack of humanity. Plus, he couldn't hold a torch to Rex.
"You owe me some code," he said.
I scoffed. "You could have rebuilt it a million times over by now," I said.
"It was mine. You deleted it." He placed the laptop on a nearby table. "It's you who has to rebuild it."
"Did it ever cross your mind to just ask?"
He smiled and shook his head. "You're right. Maybe there are things that I should have done differently," he said.
"Like not bashing my head or putting a noose around my neck."
He turned to face me. His eyes drifted over my face and landed on my neck. "An unfortunate escalation," he said before resting his hand on my shoulder. "I'd never damage something so beautiful unless necessary."
I pressed my fingernails into my palm to keep from flinching away from his touch. He was away from Priya. That was all that mattered.
"You still don't understand what you are.
" He lifted his hand from my shoulder and trailed the back of it down my neck and chest. I couldn't help but flinch at that.
My nausea spiked. It felt like a parasite crawling over me.
I wanted to scrub my skin raw until there was no trace of him, and even the softest touch caused more pain. "You came back to me."
"No." I shook my head. "I came for her."
He froze, and tilted his head again. His eyes narrowed. For a moment, I thought he planned to hurt me again, but he looked more like a man running a system check.
"You're stalling," he said after a moment.
I moved to the table. "You made a statement, I corrected it." I sat in the chair, opened the laptop, and noted the time on the screen. 05:23. Any minute now.
He studied me, looking for a crack.
I thought about Mum, all those years ago, teaching me chess at the kitchen table, and never once letting me win. She'd said to evaluate every move before taking your own, to ask what my opponent's move last threatened, and if the square I was moving to was safe. Never give a piece away for free.
I gave him nothing.
"Why did you delete it?" Adam asked, surprising me. "When I'd told you to save it."
I looked him straight in the eye. "Because it was mine," I said, holding his gaze. "You had no right to it."
He turned and looked out the window. His reflection floated in the glass in front of the morning sky as the city spread out before him. He rolled one cuff back and then the other.
"I saw you when no one else did," he said. "I nurtured your brilliance."
"You slammed my head into a fucking door."
"I've acknowledged that."
"Well, great, bully for you."
His jaw tightened and he turned to face me fully. "What do you want? An apology?"
"I want you to let Priya go and never come near me or anyone I love again."
"That's not--"
"What I want," I said, cutting off his words, "is for you to understand that whatever you decided was unfinished between us, I finished it. Six years ago." I closed the laptop. "You weren't waiting for me to come back. You were waiting to prove I couldn't leave."
He banged his fists on the table either side of the laptop. "I'm trying my best here, Rahat," he said through gritted teeth.
"Get fucking over it." I looked him straight in the eye. "I left."