Eduard
She doesn't come quietly.
I didn't expect her to. I find I would have been disappointed if she did.
She stands in the middle of my living room, gold hair in loose waves around her shoulders, wearing the oversized sweatshirt and soft pants she went back for while I held the café doorway. She takes in the floor-to-ceiling windows and the city thirty-two floors below, then she turns and looks at me.
"You kidnapped me," she says.
"You got in the car willingly."
"You didn't tell me it was your car. Or that your car was a moving vault. Or that we'd be driving for forty minutes." She pauses. "Or that you live on the moon."
"It’s only thirty-two floors."
"Eduard." She says my name like she wants it to function as a complete sentence. I've been addressed by generals, by judges, by a man holding a knife to my ribs, and none of them have ever made my name sound quite so much like an indictment. "This is kidnapping."
"You're not restrained."
She dips her head and looks at me from the top of her eyes. “Yet,” she mutters, collapsing onto the couch.
She shouldn't be funny right now. She watched a man die barely two hours ago. She's standing in a stranger's fortress in her softest clothes, and she's still reaching for the joke, still throwing light at the dark to see if it sticks. I've watched hard men crumble over less than her last two hours.
Her arms are crossed over her chest, and I watch as she momentarily loses herself and pulls them apart to lean on her knee and hide her face in her hands. Then she gathers herself again.
The apartment isn’t warm. My sister has said so on several occasions in the tone of someone leaving a note in a margin. I've never felt the lack of it until now, watching a barista in a sweatshirt sit in my living room like a lit window in a dark building.
The sweatshirt slips off one shoulder when she recrosses her arms.
I grab a bottle of water from the fridge.
"You said I couldn't stay at the café," she says. "You didn't say anything about bringing me here."
"Jasper was handling the detail at the building. This was the most secure option available in the timeframe."
"The timeframe." She repeats it back at me with a flatness that doesn't suit her face.
"What timeframe? You didn't explain anything.
You said we needed to go, and then you opened the car door, and I got in because I was scared.
Now I'm thirty-two floors above the city in a penthouse that looks like a photograph of a penthouse, and my cats are alone, and you still haven't explained anything. "
She's right. I didn't explain. I made a calculation, she was in shock, moving her was the priority, and explanation during extraction is a liability. That's the truth of it. It's also, I'm aware, not a sentence she'll find satisfying.
There's a second truth underneath it that I'm handling separately. When I found out the hit was happening and I wasn’t there to protect her, something in my chest made a decision before my brain was consulted. Every action since has been my brain drawing up paperwork to justify it.
I carry the water to her and set it on the low table in front of the couch.
She holds my gaze as I sit in the chair across from her.
It's the correct distance for the situation.
Close enough that she can see my face. Far enough that she doesn't feel cornered. Far enough, also, for me, because from the moment she crashed into my chest, I haven’t wanted anything more than her hands on me.
"The man who looked at you last night," I say. "He works for an organization called the Popov crew. They operate in the eastern quarter of the city. They've been building a problem that I've been monitoring."
"Gerald," she says.
"Gerald was part of that problem. He was moving their money. He got sloppy, and someone decided he was a risk."
She stares at the mug. "They killed him because he knew too much."
"Probably. He was inept at best. He got caught up in something much bigger than him. I’d been watching him to try and get some intel on what the Popov’s are actually doing."
"And the man who saw me-" She stops. Works through it. "He saw me see them."
"That's the presumption."
"Which means I know too much."
"Which means you're a variable," I say. "And they'll want to close it."
She's quiet for a moment. Outside, the city is turning dark, the kind of night that envelopes everything at this height. The moon comes through the east windows and finds her, catching the loose hair at her temple, and the line of her throat when she swallows.
She takes a slow breath. "Okay," she says. "I understand that part. I hate it, but I understand it." She looks up at me. "What I don't understand is why here. You could have taken me to a hotel. You could have called the police. You could have—"
"The police can't protect you from this."
She twists her face into a look of disbelief. "You don't know that."
"I know exactly that." I don't say it harshly. "A patrol unit and a report won't stop the Popov’s. They have people in most of the precincts that touch their territory. A hotel has too many points of access that I don't control. This building has three. I control all three."
She absorbs this. I watch her do it, watch the bright, open quality of her face work through something that doesn't want to be worked through.
"So I'm here because it's a fortress," she says. "Not because—" She stops herself.
"Not because what?" I ask, not following her train of thought.
"Nothing," she says too quickly as she sips her water. Sets it down. But the sentence she didn't finish stays in the room.
"How long do I need to stay here?" she asks.
"I don't know yet. A few days. Possibly more. My cousin is tracing the man who saw you. Once we know who he is, we’ll know how much of a problem exists."
She nods slowly. She's doing that thing she does, the thing I've watched her do across the counter when a customer brings her something difficult, gathering herself back to the surface from wherever the difficult thing sent her.
Taking a beat. Choosing to be okay before she's actually okay.
It works better than she probably knows.
It's also, I'm discovering, very difficult to watch from four feet away without wanting to cross to her.
"My cats," she says.
"Someone will go to the café this morning. Check on them. Make sure the building's secure."
"Someone?"
"Yes, probably Natan."
She blinks. "Who's Natan?"
"One of my cousins. He's reliable."
"Is he good with cats?"
I think about Natan. Six foot four, two hundred and thirty pounds of deliberate stillness, hands that have done things I've asked them to do and never complained. "He has a certain kind of patience," I say.
She looks at me with the expression I imagine she wears when she suspects I'm being precise in a way that's technically true and practically useless. "That's not an answer."
"He won't frighten them."
"Rhodes is sensitive. And Lucifer has a special diet.”
"I'll tell him."
"Socks doesn't like men she doesn't know."
"I'll tell him that too."
"Red—" She stops. Her jaw tightens for a second, and I understand it's not about Red.
She's listing the cats because the cats are something she can solve, something specific she can hand over and feel like she's still managing something, and she's holding onto that because everything else is outside her control.
I know that mechanism. I've used it myself.
"I'll have him send you a photograph," I say. "When he checks on them."
She looks at me. Something shifts in her expression, a small fracture in the frustration, warmth getting through the frustration the way light gets through a curtain that doesn't quite meet, and she looks away before I can read it fully. "Fine," she says. "Okay. Fine."
She's not fine.
I stand and cross to the windows, partly to check the street below out of habit, mostly because the chair had stopped being far enough.
The city comes alive at night. From up here, Calloway Street is eight blocks east and invisible.
I know where it is anyway. I suspect I'll always know where it is now, the way you know where a wound is.
She stares at me. The silence runs out to its edge and she doesn't fill it with anything, which is the first time I've known her to resist that impulse.
"I need to talk to Delilah," she says. "Tell her to take a couple of days off. She will have a field day when she finds out I’m at the apartment of the man I molested.”
The edge of her words brings that unfamiliar pull at my mouth, and I know I’m smiling. I don’t even care.
“Well, well, well…” she says, trailing off. “I never thought I’d see the day that Mr Grumpy gave me a smile. Challenge complete.”
“What challenge?” I ask, “And who is Mr Grumpy?”
Her face lights up. A steady shift from frustration and fear to achievement, and maybe almost joy.
“You’re Mr Grumpy, and I made it my personal endeavor to get you to smile.”
“I’m not grumpy,” I argue. “I just don’t get molested very often.”
Her face drops. “Ha ha,” she mutters.