Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Sutton
For three disoriented seconds, Sutton didn’t know where she was when she woke.
The mattress was too firm. The sheets were too white.
The ceiling was smooth drywall instead of the water-stained plaster above her bed in the studio.
The pipes weren’t rattling, and the ambient rumble of the laundromat dryers wasn’t vibrating through the floor.
The silence was thicker, regulated, the hum of an HVAC system doing its job instead of the wheeze of a radiator that worked when it felt like it.
Then the previous night slammed into her in pieces—the muffled gunshots, Ginger’s body hitting the sidewalk, the dark sedan, the two-mile run through back roads with no phone—and she sat up so fast the room tilted.
Her Doc Martins were by the door where she’d left them.
She’d tried to scrub the mud off in the bathroom sink before bed.
The leather was stained a shade darker at the toes.
She’d stared at the dirty water circling the drain, all the while thinking of blood, until her eyes blurred.
Finally, she’d given up, set the boots on the mat, and climbed into the too-firm bed in her clothes.
The room was small, functional, and impersonal. A single bed, a nightstand, a lamp. A desk with nothing on it. A closet with six empty hangers lined up at precise intervals. No art on the walls, no books on the shelf. No evidence that any human being had ever slept or worked in this space.
Her studio above the laundromat was a shoebox with unreliable heat and a stove with only the one burner, but it had her sketches pinned to the walls, her thrift-store quilt on the bed, and three half-dead succulents on the windowsill.
It was hers. This room belonged to no one, and the emptiness pressed against her skin like sandpaper.
She sat on the edge of the bed, bare feet on the cold floor, and tried to make a plan.
Every plan she’d ever made had been built on the assumption that her life was small and manageable and under her control.
As of last night, that assumption had been shot full of holes on the sidewalk outside Iron Rose.
Shot. She raked her fingers through her hair. I should strike that word forever from my vocabulary.
She needed a plan. Something simple to keep her mind from spiraling. Get up. Get dressed. Find coffee. Then she’d figure out the rest.
She put on her boots. The leather was stiff where the stains had dried.
Sebastian leaned against the wall across the way. He looked up when she opened the door.
He looked like he’d slept about as well as she had. Same jeans from last night, but a fresh white T-shirt. His dark hair was damp at the temples like he’d splashed water on his face and called it a shower. A five o’clock shadow covered his jaw.
He’d always seemed so put together, so in control.
Always clean-shaven, perfectly dressed, and hiding behind dark avatars in all the online photos and magazines after Penn was dead.
She’d tried not to follow his rise to stardom.
She’d hated him for it. But his picture had been everywhere.
Even the friends she’d had at the time at school had constantly talked about him, calling him the sexiest hero on the planet.
Even in this less-than-photographic moment, he was drop-dead gorgeous. He exuded calm and absolute confidence. “Morning,” he said, his voice rough.
She opened her mouth to reply and found she couldn’t speak. She nodded, instead.
He motioned down the hall. “Let’s get you some breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry.”
His head tilted a degree. He boosted off the wall and started walking. “Your choice.”
She watched him walk away, noting how his T-shirt fit his body as if it were made for him. It probably was. He and his family had more money than she could spend in a lifetime.
Like so many things, she hated him for that, too. That he got to live a life of ease while she struggled every damn day.
He turned a corner and disappeared from sight. The smell of coffee and bacon wafted down the hall. Her stomach growled loudly, her hunger a gnawing monster. Coffee was part of her plan, so going to the kitchen was allowed. She started walking.
The smell of breakfast turned out to be the most normal thing about the SPS compound. Everything else—the reinforced doors, the key-card access points, the cameras mounted at every junction—made her feel like she’d woken up inside a very polite prison.
When she finally entered the kitchen, Sebastian was holding out a plate to a guy making eggs. The man looked up and grinned. “Hey, you must be Sutton. Sorry, I missed the introductions last night. I’m Jasper, aka Bobcat. I’m usually in the control center. This morning, I’m on KP duty.”
Bobcat? “You’re a tech?” she asked.
The grin widened. “Something like that.”
Sebastian slid a plate across the counter to her with toast and two strips of bacon. A mug of coffee and several sugar packets were already on a table that he pointed to across the room. “Sit,” he said. “Eat.”
Her stomach cramped at the sight of the food. She hadn’t eaten since the granola bar at Iron Rose sixteen hours ago. Her body wanted the plate. Her pride wanted to throw it at him. “All I need is coffee.”
“You haven’t eaten since yesterday. It’s going to be a long day. You’ll need fuel.”
She sat. Not because he told her to—because she was hungry enough that the alternative was passing out right here on the floor. That would be humiliating.
The eggs were decent. The toast was just toast, but it tasted better than she expected. She downed the sugary coffee and glanced around for the pot.
Sebastian arrived at the table with it in hand, refilling her cup. “Did you get any sleep?”
The images had been too horrifying every time she shut her eyes. “What do you think?”
He sat across from her with his own plate. “Claire shared your statement with Blackridge PD, so you won’t have to recite it again.”
That was a relief. “I need to call Dom,” she said between bites. “I need to make sure he’s okay, that the parlor—”
“Dom’s fine. The parlor’s still standing. I called him this morning.”
The fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “You called my boss?”
“The police are speaking to him about the murder, but it’s a formality. He said to tell you to take off as much time as you need.”
“Time off? I can’t take time off. And you don’t get to call my boss. That’s my job. He’s the only—” She caught herself. What was he to her? A friend? More like the closest thing she had to family here.
Sebastian didn’t even glance up from his food. “You’re not going back to work until the threat against you is resolved.”
“The threat against me.” She set the fork down. The food lost its appeal. “I have rent. I have utilities. I have a phone bill, which is currently irrelevant because my phone is sitting on the counter at Iron Rose. I can’t afford not to work. I can’t afford not to work for one day.”
“You can’t afford to be dead, either.”
She blanched. The others in the kitchen tiptoed around.
“So what’s the plan? I sit in that room and stare at the walls until the FBI catches whoever killed Ginger?
That could take weeks. Months. Meanwhile, my life just—stops?
My clients go somewhere else, Dom replaces me, I’m evicted from my apartment because I can’t pay, and when this is all over, I have to start from nothing? Again?”
The again cracked at the end. She hadn’t meant to say it. It revealed too much—the rebuilding she’d done after Penn, the life she’d scraped together from wreckage, the terrifying possibility of watching it collapse a second time because of something her brother had been involved in.
Sebastian leaned back in his chair, wiping his too-perfect lips with his napkin. His expression was unreadable, but his blue eyes scanned over her face with an attention that felt like a searchlight. “I understand that this disrupts your life—”
“Disrupts my life.” A laugh escaped her, bitter and thin.
“That’s a hell of a way to put it. Penn disrupted my life, and here I am, six years later, still dealing with the fallout, still rearranging everything around his choices.
And now you’re doing the same thing—making decisions about where I go, when I work, who I talk to—”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“It’s exactly what you’re doing. You just think it’s justified because someone may be after me.”
Jasper—Bobcat—started whistling, turning off the stovetop and busying himself with his own plate of food at another table along the far wall.
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “Someone is after you. That’s not a philosophical position, Sutton. It’s a fact. You witnessed a murder by what appears to be a professional hitman. He’s not going to leave loose ends.”
“But I didn’t see his face.”
“He thinks you did.”
They stared at each other across the table. The coffee machine gurgled. Somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed.
“Well, good morning.” The voice came from the doorway—calm and measured. “This discussion seems productive.”
Sutton turned. The woman from last night—Vivi—stood in the kitchen entrance. She was dressed in a charcoal blazer over a simple cream blouse. Her hair was in a messy bun on top of her head.
She had a face that was both kind and unnervingly perceptive. “Sutton, I run the operational psychology program here, among other things, and I’d like to speak to you after you’re done about your brother’s death.”
“Forgot to mention she’s the team shrink,” Sebastian said.
“I’m everyone’s shrink when they let me be.
” Vivi shot him a look that seemed to hold an entire unfinished argument.
He stared back with the flat expression of a man who’d been on the wrong end of that look before.
She met Sutton’s eyes again. “Last night’s situation must be bringing up your emotions around your brother’s death. ”