Chapter 5
ISAAK
The penthouse has six bedrooms. I put her in mine.
I tell myself there's logic. The other five sit on the far side of the floor, past two hallways and a stairwell.
If someone comes for her in the night I want her behind the door with the steel core, not three rooms away where I'd reach her too late.
That part's true. It's also not the reason, and I know it isn't. I take the lie anyway, the only soft thing I've allowed myself in a decade.
She figures it out inside an hour. I'm in the kitchen pretending to read a logistics report when she comes out of the bedroom holding her duffel bag, the canvas one with the rope burns on the strap.
She stops in the middle of all that marble and looks around the apartment like she's pricing it for auction.
"There's one bed," she says.
"There are six bedrooms."
"There's one made bed. I checked. The other five are mattresses and dust." She drops the duffel at her feet, a small declaration of war on my floor. "You had a week. You couldn't have a second bed made up?"
"I could have." I turn a page I'm not reading. "I didn't."
"Why not?"
I look up at her then, because the honest answer would frighten a sane person, and she is the only one in years who wouldn't flinch from it.
The honest answer is that the thought of her asleep on the other side of two hallways, where I couldn't hear her breathe, kept me up the one night I tried it in my head.
I don't say that. I'm reckless about her, not stupid.
"Because you'll be safer where I can see you," I say, "and because I wanted to find out how long it would take you to come out swinging. Six minutes. Lev owes me money."
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't storm off either. She walks her duffel into my bedroom and unpacks it into half my closet, which I take as two things at once. A declaration that she's staying. A promise she'll make me regret the terms.
The war starts the first night and never really stops. She finds the thermostat and sets it for growing orchids.
"It's seventy-eight in here," I tell her.
"It's a tomb in here. I'm from a place with weather." She doesn't look up from the panel. "You'll adjust. Cold's just a thing rich men pay to feel instead of having a personality."
"I have a personality."
"You have a closet organized by season. That's a symptom, not a personality."
My closet has run on the same order for years, dark to light, weight to weather. By the third morning her boots are in it, one tipped over, dried arena mud flaking onto the cedar, a sports bra hung on the tie rack like a flag planted on a hill.
I should hate it. A man who's spent his life making rooms behave should hate a woman who turns his into a tack room.
Instead I stand in the doorway of my own closet looking at her muddy boot on my floor, and what I feel is closer to the thing I felt the first morning the ranch dogs decided I was furniture.
Claimed. Lived in. Like the place finally has somebody in it instead of just me.
The first real shot I fire in the war, I fire where she can't dodge it. I don't tell her. I learned a long time ago that the only gifts worth giving are the ones nobody can hand back.
Her father's three old men are sitting on a ranch with a dead boss, a daughter gone to the city, and a payroll that stopped the day he died.
So I fix it. I put Hollis, Cruz, and Dewey on a standing wage out of one of my legitimate holding companies, dressed up as a caretaking contract so it can't read as charity.
I send men who think they work for a real estate firm to patch the foreman's leaking roof and replace the dead well pump.
I tell nobody. There's no version of this where I get credit.
She finds out anyway, because Hollis can't lie to her on the phone and never could. She comes out of the bedroom that night with the phone still warm in her hand, her eyes wet, her mouth working like she can't decide whether to thank me or take a swing.
"You paid the hands," she says. "You fixed Hollis's roof."
"I bought a ranch. The ranch came with staff and deferred maintenance. It's an asset. I maintain my assets."
"Cut it out." Her voice isn't angry. That's the problem. Angry I can work with. This is rawer, a woman braced to hate me finding a crack where the hate won't stick. "You did a kind thing and dressed it up as accounting so I couldn't thank you. Why?"
"It's not a kind thing. It's a wage and a roof repair. I have a folder for it."
"I know what the folder says. Tell me the reason that's not in it."
"Because your hand's off the payroll sixty days and three old men are eating cereal for dinner."
She goes still with the cup she's picked up. "How do you know about the cereal?"
"I know every number in my investments." I keep my voice flat. "It's not charity. It's maintenance of an asset."
"You are the worst." But the sharp edge is gone from it. "The actual worst."
"Of course you do." She crosses the marble and stops on the other side of the island, close enough that I have to decide not to look at her mouth.
"Dewey called me crying. Sixty-eight years old, crying, because some real estate company nobody's heard of fixed the well pump he's been hauling water around for two years. You did that."
"A holding company did that."
"A holding company that you own."
"Most of them are." I keep my voice level, the voice I use to make a thing boring so she'll put it down. "Go to bed, Nora. There's a cold front coming. You'll want the thermostat at its usual jungle setting."
She looks at me for a long moment, reworking something behind her eyes.
I can see the killer she walked in here to find shifting by one small confusing degree, refusing to quite line up with the man who fixed an old cowboy's roof for nothing.
I think, not for the first time, that I've made an enormous mistake letting this woman close enough to watch me do anything decent.
Then the war gets its second front.
She comes out for coffee on the fourth morning in one of my shirts and not one thing under it. White cotton, my size on her, the hem riding the tops of her thighs. Two buttons done at the middle, the rest hanging open at the throat where the collar keeps sliding off one bare shoulder.
No bra. I can see the shape of her tits through the cotton every time she leans for the pot, the soft weight of them, one nipple gone tight against the fabric in the cold air she keeps cranking the thermostat to fight. Bare feet on the marble. A sleep crease down one cheek.
She isn't, by any standard I was raised with, trying.
That's what takes the back of my skull off.
She's not done up for me. She's wearing my clothes like she owns them, scratching the back of one calf with the top of her other foot, pouring coffee she'll complain about, and my cock has a very clear opinion about all of it that I am not going to act on at eight in the morning across a kitchen island from a woman who thinks I had her father killed.
I set my cup down before my hands get involved.
"You're staring," she says, not turning around.
"It's my shirt. I'm allowed to mourn it."
"Mourn it from over there. You're fogging up the kitchen." She turns then, slow, leaning back against the counter so the collar slides off that shoulder again, and there is nothing accidental about any of it. "Something on your mind, Mr. Radulov? You've got a look."
"I'm deciding whether to have you arrested for theft of property or just take it back off you myself."
"Big talk for a man who hasn't moved in a full minute." She sips her coffee, watching me over the rim, enjoying this. "Go on, then. Take it back. I'll even hold still."
I do move then, one step, because I am only made of so much. She lets me get close enough to smell the coffee, the sleep-warm skin under my own cotton, then plants one finger flat in the center of my chest and stops a man twice her size with the pressure of a screen door.
"Ah-ah. We're not married yet. You'll have to wait for the paperwork like everybody else." She pats the spot she just stopped me at, twice, the way you'd gentle a horse you've decided not to let through the gate. "Coffee's in the pot. You're welcome."
She walks off in my shirt with my heartbeat still under her fingerprint.
I stand in my own kitchen and laugh, out loud, alone.
Fifteen years since anyone outmaneuvered me.
She did it before nine, in my own clothes, with a coffee cup in one hand and not one goddamn thing she wanted from me except the pleasure of watching me want her.
That night I take a Cohiba out to the terrace, the good kind, a habit older than half my enemies. I don't get two pulls into it before the door slides and she comes out, wrapped in a blanket she's stolen from somewhere. She drops into the other chair like she owns it.
"Those are going to kill you," she says.
"A lot of things are going to kill me. They're at the back of a very long line, and most of them are better looking than you'd think.
" I roll the cigar between two fingers. "Does the smoke bother you, or do you just like telling me what to do?
I can't tell yet, and I'd like to know what I'm working with. "
"Both. Obviously both." She tucks her bare feet up under her in the chair.
"I like telling you what to do because nobody else on this whole coast will, and it's the only entertainment you've left me.
And the smoke bothers me, because I'm going to be the one kissing you eventually. I'd rather not kiss an ashtray."
I go still with the cigar halfway to my mouth. "Eventually."
"Don't make it a thing."
"You said it. I'm just admiring the confidence." I tap the ash off, slow, watching her watch me do it. "For the record, when you do get around to it, I'd put the cigar out first. I'm a generous man."
"Generous." She snorts. "You're a loan shark who reorganizes his closet by mood."