Chapter 3
I don't sleep so much as wait for the night to be over.
The cold comes up through the stone all night and the blanket's too thin to do anything about it, so I lie on the cot with my knees to my chest and my hands jammed under my arms and shake until my muscles ache from it. Somewhere past the middle of the night I stop being able to feel my feet.
By the time the painted-over window turns gray with morning light I've drunk all the water and my stomach's a fist. I take my pills anyway—I don't skip, ever—and the big one goes down into an empty gut and sits there like a stone and turns it.
I breathe slow through the nausea until it eases.
If my suppressant comes back up it's wasted, and every one I waste brings the end of the strip closer, and whatever's waiting on the far side of it.
Fifteen left. I can't afford to lose a single one I don't have to.
Then the bolt scrapes back, and it's hot copper and last night's smoke coming down the stairs, and I know before I look that it's Killian.
He doesn't say good morning. He crosses the room in three steps, takes a fistful of my shirt, and hauls me off the cot like I weigh nothing.
"Up. Dad wants you."
"Okay." My legs are stiff and slow and he doesn't wait for them. He drags me toward the stairs and I go, stumbling, both hands on his wrist just to keep my collar off my throat.
"Move your feet."
"I'm trying—" I trip on the third step and he yanks me up by the arm hard enough that my shoulder wrenches, and my heart's already going too fast, and I haven't even done anything yet.
"God, you're useless." He says it without heat, almost bored, like he's already decided what I am and it's not worth getting worked up about. Somehow that's worse than the rough handling.
He hauls me up out of the cellar and through the house, past pale rooms too big to be for anything, my legs burning and my chest pulling tight the whole way. I don't let it show. He stops at a door, doesn't knock, and pushes me through.
I know it's the father's office before anyone says so.
I can feel it the second the door opens—dark wood, cold light, that poured-over-ice scent hanging thick over everything and heaviest of all right here, because this is where it comes from.
He sits behind a desk that suits his presence, reading something on his phone, and he doesn't look up when Killian shoves me down into the chair across from him. The leather is cold through my clothes.
And something in me just gives.
It's worse with him than with either of the others, and worse in a way I don't have a name for. His scent is thick in here—cold wood, ice—strong enough to reach right through the suppressants that are supposed to keep me from feeling anything like this at all.
My eyes drop, and it isn't fear that drops them.
Some part of me wants to lower them for him.
Wants to go quiet and soft and good under all that weight, wants to lean in toward wherever it's coming from, and I actually sway a couple of inches toward the desk before I catch myself and stop.
I go warm. My whole body wants to give him something, and I don't even know what.
It's the opposite of fear—some old instinct rolling onto its back—and that frightens me more than fear ever could, because it isn't mine and I can't make it quit.
I fix my eyes on the edge of the desk and pin them there. It's as high as I can make them go.
Killian settles against the window frame to my right, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
I wait. I'm good at waiting. I fold my hands in my lap so the shaking doesn't show and I keep my eyes down and I wait for Vincent to decide to see me.
It takes a while. When Vincent finally sets the phone on the desk and turns it to face me, I understand it was on purpose—the waiting, the not-looking. Everything this man does is on purpose.
On the screen: Starla's name at the top. Killian's photo of my split lip underneath. I cringe at the sight of how pale I look. And under that, nothing. Just the gray line that means it was delivered, and read, and ignored.
"Sixteen hours," Vincent says. "Not a word."
I told you. I keep it behind my teeth.
He looks at Killian. "You went into my phone for that number, and you used it without asking me."
"It got her attention."
"Did it?"
"She read it, didn't she?" Killian shrugs. "She knows we've got her kid. That's more than she knew yesterday."
"She read a photograph of a beaten boy," Vincent says, "and she put her phone down and went on with her day.
" He lets that land. He has a way of leaving silence sitting on the table like he's waiting to see who's stupid enough to pick it up.
"That isn't attention, Killian. She’s telling us exactly how much she cares. Which she doesn’t.
" His eyes move to me, slow. "Unless the boy's fine, and he knows he's fine, because he's in on it—and she knows there's no need to answer a threat that was never real. "
"I'm not." It comes out too fast. "I'm not in on anything, I swear—"
"You keep saying that." Vincent leans back. He's not shouting. He never shouts; I'm starting to understand that the quiet is the thing to be afraid of. "So convince me. You know her. Where does she go?"
I want to answer him. That's the part I can't get around—not that he's frightened it out of me, but that I want to.
His scent is still pulling at me and my body's still folded down small and pliant in this chair, and some deep part of me just wants to give this alpha whatever he's asking for.
And underneath that, colder and simpler: there's nothing left in me that needs to protect her.
She looked at a photo of me split open and bleeding and didn't so much as type back.
Whatever I was supposed to owe her, she spent it hours ago.
So I open my mouth, and the words come out clumsy, running ahead of my own thinking.
"She won't—" I stop, start over. "She won't have gone far. Not yet. She never does, the first week. She stays close. Somewhere quiet, a motel usually, and she watches. To see if anyone's coming."
"Close to where?” Vincent asks in his deep, velvet voice.
I swallow around the lump in my throat. "To wherever she ran from. She likes to know if she's being followed before she really goes." The pieces come as I find them, out of order. "She won't touch cards. Only cash. She doesn't trust—"
"How's a woman disappear on cash?" Killian, flat, from the shelf. Not a real question. A test.
"Because she keeps a lot of it. Or stole enough. Somewhere nobody knows about." I don't look at him. "And she'll have a name ready. One that isn't hers."
Vincent's eyes sharpen. "What name?"
"I don't—I don't know this one. She never tells me the new one until she has to." My voice keeps tripping. "But she'll have had it for months. She sets the next thing up before the last one's even finished, she always—"
"Awful lot of detail," Killian says.
Vincent lifts two fingers off the desk, barely, and Killian goes quiet. "Go on."
He's watching me now, really watching, and for one stupid second it feels like being believed, and it makes me talk faster.
"She won't be alone long either. There's always somebody lined up.
So if you're waiting for her to feel bad and come back on her own—that's not going to happen.
She doesn't come back. Not for money. Not for—"
Not for me.
I stop just short of it. But the shape of it hangs there anyway, and the room's gone quiet in a way I don't like, and too late—way too late—I feel the floor shift under what I just did.
"Huh." Killian pushes off the window, slow, and there's something almost admiring in it.
"You hear that? He's got the whole thing memorized. Cash, fake names, the next mark. Isn’t involved at all but he can recite exactly how his mommy skips town.
" He crosses behind me. "That's not a kid who got left behind by accident. "
"I watched her do it my whole—"
His hand closes around the back of my neck. Warm, huge, easy. My shoulders tense up, but he doesn't squeeze, not really. He doesn't have to.
"See, I don't think you watched," he says, close to my ear, almost gentle.
"I think you helped. I think you're the one who packs the bags and wipes the accounts while she smiles at the mark.
I think she left you here as a decoy and you're sitting in my dad's office running the same game she ran on him—poor me, I didn't know anything, I'm just a scared little nobody.
" His fingers tighten, and my breath catches, and my heart lurches up hard against my ribs. "How'm I doing?"
"You're wrong." It's barely a whisper. It's all I've got. "You're wrong, I didn't—"
"Killian." Vincent doesn't raise his voice. Killian's hand goes still, then lifts, and I drag in a breath that shakes the whole way down.
I stare at my own hands in my lap. That's what I get for helping. That's what I always get. Open your mouth to be useful and watch it turn into the rope they hang you with. I should know better. Twenty years and I still, every single time, think that this is the time being good will be enough.
Vincent stands. He's studying me the way he studied the phone—like I'm information he hasn't finished sorting. For just a second, something moves behind his eyes that isn't certainty. A crack. A question. What if the boy's telling the truth?
I see it. I let myself, for one breath, hope he sees it too.
Then it closes, and his face goes flat again, and the hope goes down like the pill did—heavy, and sick, and for nothing.
"Twenty-four hours," he says. "If she hasn't answered by then, we stop waiting on her and start deciding what you're worth on your own." He looks at Killian. "Until then he can earn his keep. Put him to work. Something that'll keep him too tired to try the door."
Killian's hand drops onto my shoulder, heavy, and I can hear the grin in his voice. "Oh," he says. "I've got just the thing."