Chapter 15
Samuel
The familiar hum of the office felt different.
Every sound was a potential detonation. The hiss of the main doors opening down the hall made Samuel’s pen skid across the document he was supposedly reviewing. The click of heels on the polished floor behind his chair tightened the muscles across his shoulders into painful knots.
He kept his head down, his eyes burning into the same paragraph of a patent application for the last twenty minutes. The words were a grey, meaningless slurry.
A shadow fell across his desk. He flinched, a full-body recoil he barely stifled.
It was Alina.
She leaned over the partition, her expression a mix of amusement and concern. “Breathe, Ruiz. You look like you’re waiting for a firing squad.”
She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, the scent of her peppermint tea wafting over.
“I come bearing good news. The squad is otherwise engaged. Wise is in court all day. Judge Landry’s marathon session on the Vandelay appeal.
I heard the clerk say it could go past eight.
I doubt we’ll see his shadow until tomorrow. ”
She straightened, a grin breaking across her face. “Which means,” she announced, holding up a bag of obscenely expensive sea salt and vinegar chips, “we can chill. Maybe even have a little party.”
Samuel looked from her face to the bag of chips. A response was required. He felt his facial muscles engage, pulling his lips upward.
“Sounds good,” he forced the words out.
Alina, blessedly, didn’t seem to notice the dissonance. She was already tearing into the bag with a satisfying crinkle.
“See?” she said around a mouthful. “The universe provides. Now, eat a chip and try to look at something that isn’t a deposition. For both our sakes.”
The relief hit him then. Not as a gentle wave, but as a sudden, violent withdrawal of pressure, leaving him lightheaded and weak-kneed under his desk.
He isn’t here.
The shadow would not fall across his desk today. The low voice would not summon him. The gaze would not dissect him from across a room. The air in the bullpen seemed to expand, becoming breathable again.
But as the initial, dizzying surge of safety receded, something else seeped into the space it left behind.
A hollow feeling. A peculiar flatness. The high-alert tension had been agonizing, but it had been a purpose.
Now, with the threat removed, there was just…
the empty office. The blurry document. The passing of time.
A treacherous, quiet thought whispered: So he’s just… gone?
He recoiled from it, mentally slamming a door. He couldn’t examine that. He wouldn’t. The relief was the only permissible emotion. It was the lifeline. He clung to it.
For the rest of the day, he operated like an automaton.
He answered emails. He refilled his water glass three times.
He jumped when George dropped a heavy binder on his desk.
The relief, initially so potent, began to curdle as the hours stretched.
The reprieve was temporary. Tomorrow was a cliff edge on the horizon.
∞∞∞
Sam had stayed late again.
He’d told himself it was to make up for the lost hours of his day in the closet. In truth, it was an attempt to outrun the clock, to delay the inevitable return to his apartment, where the only company were the four walls that seemed to press closer every night.
It hadn’t worked.
With a final, defeated motion, he tapped the key to shut down his computer.
The lobby was lit only by the security lights behind the reception desk. The night guard nodded to him as he wished him a good night. Then he was through the revolving doors, and the city night hit him.
The air was a slap; a cold, damp fist that stole his breath and needled his skin. He pulled the lapels of his coat together, fumbling with the top button, and buried his chin into his scarf.
He turned left, heading for the subway entrance three blocks away. His footsteps echoed too loudly on the sidewalk, a solitary, rapid percussion.
He walked fast, head down, eyes on the cracked concrete a few feet ahead. The cold was a mere annoyance, a surface sensation. Inside, he was burning.
The soft, initial press of lips.
The searing heat of Gael’s tongue sweeping into his mouth, the taste of dark roast and something indefinably male.
The crushing weight of a body pinning him to the door.
The sound.
Oh, God, the sound he’d made.
The shove came from behind, a hard blast of force between his shoulder blades.
The world tilted, the sidewalk rushing up to meet him in a sickening lurch. He stumbled forward, arms wheeling, a choked gasp ripped from his throat.
A hand, or hands, snatched at the strap of his briefcase. The leather, slung across his chest, went taut, a brutal garrote that yanked him sideways. There was a sharp pop as the strap tore from the case. A hot, tearing burn erupted across his collarbone and shoulder.
Before he could process the loss, before he could even draw a full breath to scream, the second blow landed.
It was a fist. Or an elbow. It didn’t matter. It connected with his right side, just below the ribs. The air was punched from his lungs in a single, painful whoosh, leaving him a vacuum, a silent, gaping hole.
He folded around the pain, and a second shove finished the job. The ground vanished from under his feet. He was falling.
Time elongated. He saw the wet, glittering concrete of the alley floor rushing up.
He had a detached, almost academic awareness of the physics: the angle of his fall, the inevitable impact.
His hands flew out instinctively, meeting the ground first. The skin of his palms tore on the gritty surface.
A millisecond later, his knees struck, the shock jolting up his thighs.
He crumpled onto his side, nose smashing into the ground.
He lay there, curled around the pain in his ribs. He tasted copper and grit; blood from a bitten cheek, or maybe it was his nose, the filth of the alley. The cold of the concrete seeped through the wool of his trousers, a shocking, immediate chill.
The cacophony of guilt and memory was replaced by a ringing, hollow silence.
It was a bizarre, almost welcome clarity. This pain was clean. It was direct. It had a cause he could point to: a mugger, an alley, a city. It required no soul-searching, no theological debate. For the first time in days, his mind was not a battlefield.
Then, light.
Blinding, halogen-bright headlights speared the alley’s mouth.
A car door opened.
Footsteps followed. Not the shuffling, predatory steps of his attackers, who had already melted away with their prize. These were crisp. Rapid. Decisive.
A figure moved, blotting out the searing glare of the headlights, resolving into a silhouette that knelt before him.
Samuel’s vision swam, water and pain and shadow distorting the edges.
The world was a shaky, handheld film. He saw the sharp, dark lines of a tailored overcoat, the dull gleam of a watch against a cuff, the familiar, stark planes of a face he had spent all day fearing and, in his deepest, most secret self, waiting for.
Gael?
The thought was nonsensical. A fragment of delirium. It couldn’t be. It was a hallucination born of shock and guilt, a final, cruel trick played by his own fevered mind.
Was this part of the punishment?
A divine tableau: struck down for his sin, and here was the instrument of his temptation, appearing as his would-be savior.
Is this the end?
Is this how I repent?
The questions fluttered, moth-like.
Then strong hands were on him. They touched his neck, fingers pressing gently against his pulse. They moved to his ribs, probing the epicenter of the white-hot pain. A voice cut through the high-pitched ringing in his ears, low, urgent, woven from a timbre he knew in his bones.
“Don’t move. Just breathe.”
Samuel tried to obey, dragging in a thin, wheezing breath that sparked fresh fire in his side.
Then he was being lifted. The cold, filthy concrete fell away. He was gathered up, and the solid wall of a chest replaced the hard ground. His face was pressed against fine wool, soft against his cheek.
He inhaled, and the scent flooded him; sandalwood, clean linen, and beneath it, the faint, sharp, metallic trace of cold air. It was a scent that lived in the space behind his sternum.
It smells familiar.
The thought moved through his mind slowly, thick as syrup.
Where do I know that smell from?
A deep rumble vibrated through the chest he was held against, traveling into his own bones. “Hold on.”
The headlights swung, painting the alley walls in a dizzying carousel of light and elongated shadow. The world became a swirl of dark brick and blurred light.
He felt himself lowered, the world settling into the embrace of cool, butter-soft leather.
The last thing he registered, as the pain and the shock finally overrode the last strings of consciousness, was the sound of car turning on.