Chapter 23
PIPER
Iwake up on a bed that isn’t mine, in a room that smells like the sea, and I keep my eyes closed to listen before I let anyone know I’m awake.
At least one person is moving. A chair creaks near the window when a man shifts his weight, and he settles again without hurry, patient enough to wait for me to stop pretending.
Someone else may be standing still where I can’t hear him.
The last clear memory I have is someone forcing me down in the back of the second SUV.
My mouth tastes medicinal, and my head aches behind my eyes.
Whatever they used was meant to keep me quiet and undamaged.
I take a slow inventory before I move, the same careful sweep I run on a room before I decide how to work it.
My wrists and ankles are free, and I’m still wearing the clothes I put on this morning in a house I may never see again.
Someone laid a blanket over me while I was unconscious.
Nobody bothers to keep a body warm if they mean to throw it away.
I open my eyes and Adrian is sitting six feet from the bed with his legs crossed and his reading glasses folded in his breast pocket, watching me exactly as he watched me across a desk while examiners spread my forged certificate between us.
He looks patient, faintly regretful, and in no hurry at all.
“You’ve been out about three hours,” he says. “There’s water and bread on the table beside you. You’ll want the water before you try to stand.”
I look at the water but don’t touch it, and he almost smiles.
“It isn’t drugged, Piper. If I wanted you unconscious, you’d still be unconscious.
” He gestures at the room, the good furniture, and the shuttered window with the last gray light leaking around the edges.
“You’re a guest here, in the sense that matters.
Drink the water. The next part is easier if you’re thinking clearly, and I’d honestly prefer you thinking clearly. ”
I drink the water, because the logic is sound, and dehydration is a luxury I can’t afford with three passengers I haven’t told him about.
I sit up slowly. The room tilts and settles.
Through the gap in the shutters I catch a blade of light off open water, level to the horizon, with no shoreline breaking it anywhere I can see.
I do what my father taught me before he taught me anything else, which is to assess my surroundings.
This room has one door and two windows, all unusable with someone else keeping me from them.
The bed is bolted. The lamp is too light to matter, and the chair is too heavy to lift fast. No clock, which means no precise way to track time passing, which is deliberate.
A person who wants you compliant lets you see the time.
A person who wants you unmoored takes it away. Adrian took it away.
“Where am I?” I ask.
“Somewhere that took a boat to reach and will take a boat to leave.” He says it conversationally, which is worse than cruelty. “You can spend the evening at the window counting the men outside, or you can sit up and have the conversation I came a long way to have. I’d recommend the conversation.”
I get myself into the armchair across from him, because the bed puts me at a disadvantage, and I refuse to give him an inch.
Lazar stands by the door, broad and silent, with one gun visible and probably more under his jacket. He studies me with the same practical detachment he showed at the marina. Someone told him not to damage the cargo, and I’m the cargo.
“I need to know where Callum is,” I say, before Adrian can start.
“He was in Riverdale when I started the alert. He was never part of this.” Adrian uncrosses his legs and leans forward, elbows on his knees, and for one second, he looks almost kind.
“Your brother did nothing, Piper. I knew he had a habit of switching off his phone and slipping his escort. I didn’t need to know where he went.
I only needed you to believe that this time was different.
” He spreads his hands. “You built the rest yourself. You taught your brother to disappear, so you’ll always answer a call that says he has. ”
The floor drops out from under two months of my life.
Every dark phone, every lost tail, and every unexplained hour I stacked into a case against my own brother never once proved he betrayed us.
I still don’t know where Callum went on those nights, but I took his oldest survival habit, the one I taught him myself in a diner when he was scared and seventeen, and built it into evidence.
I sat across from Nikita and helped him conduct an investigation on the one person I was trying to protect.
Adrian didn’t have to manufacture any of Callum’s absences.
He wound me up, pointed me at my own brother, and watched me do the work.
“You used me against him,” I say.
“I used your love for him against you. There’s a difference, and you of all people should appreciate it.” He settles back. “I don’t waste a good instinct. I find the lever and I pull it. You do the same thing. You’ve done it your whole life.”
“Don’t tell me what I am,” I say.
“Why not? I’m the only person in your life who sees it clearly.
” Adrian keeps the same even, reasonable tone he used across the desk during the verification meeting.
“You walked into a dead man’s house with a forged certificate and a plan to strip it before anyone noticed.
You told yourself it was survival. Your brother’s debt, your mother’s mess, the world owing you a floor to stand on...
I’ve read your file, Piper. I know the story you tell yourself, because I tell myself the same one. ”
“We’re not the same.”
“You think we’re different?” He tilts his head.
“I gave the Rusakov family twenty years. I made the numbers work when Arkadi burned money on vendettas. I kept the estate breathing through four years when the man who owned it was rotting in an unmarked hole, or so the whole world believed. I filed the papers, paid the taxes, and held a dead empire together with my own two hands. Not one Rusakov ever looked at me as anything but the help. I took what I was already managing. I told myself I’d earned it, because I had.
” He leans in again. “You’ve said those exact words to yourself.
I earned this. They owed me. It was mine before I took it. ”
I don’t answer, because the words are sitting in my own head, worn smooth from a lifetime of use.
I earned this. They owed me. I said them through every smaller estate job and every piece of questionable paperwork Dorian’s curriculum ever made possible.
I said a version of them five months ago, when I first stood in a dead man’s hall, deciding his estate owed me a way out because no one else ever had.
I hear my own excuses in his, and I can’t reject his logic without rejecting mine.
“You see it now,” he says softly. “That’s the thing about our particular talent. We’re never stealing. We’re always collecting a debt.”
I make myself breathe. He’s doing to me what I’ve done to a hundred marks, holding up the version of me that agrees with him and waiting for me to nod.
The difference is the part I can finally admit.
I used to tell myself I only ever hurt people in the ledger, that a stolen cigarette case was a number and nothing more.
Nikita’s face the night he saw his mother’s things scattered across the world proved that was a lie.
My thefts were never clean. They cost real people, and I spent years refusing to look at who paid.
I can see the harm now, and I can stop calling it something else.
Adrian sees the harm just as clearly, and he calls it payment.
He’s going to spend a man’s life and three heartbeats he doesn’t know about to collect it.
“You fed Shilov the codes,” I say, to move him off me, to get the whole of it while he’s talking. “You controlled the storage access. You set up the public events to flush Nikita out.”
“I confirmed he was alive for Rahil. That’s all the events were.
” He says it like it costs him nothing, which it doesn’t.
“A dead man doesn’t buy a necklace to keep his forger safe.
A dead man doesn’t dissolve his own shells the week his wife gets nervous.
Every room I put you in, I was reading him through you.
By the second gala, I was certain you were his weak point.
” He shrugs. “Shilov wants him. I want what I built. You were the clearest way to give us both what we’re owed, because you’re the one thing on this earth Nikita Rusakov will risk anything to get back. ”
There it is. Adrian hands me the whole plan in a reasonable voice, because he believes he’s the wronged party. I’m not leverage because they hate me. I’m leverage because Nikita loves me. Adrian has watched that love grow for two months and priced it to the dollar.
“He won’t come how you expect,” I say.
“He’ll come exactly how I expect. I’ve known him for twenty years—far longer than you have.
” Adrian stands, smooths the front of his gray suit, and retrieves the reading glasses from his pocket as if there’s paperwork somewhere that needs him.
“You should rest, and eat what they left. Whatever you’re planning, and I know you’re planning something, factor in the water.
There’s a great deal of it.” He pauses at the door.
“For what it’s worth, I’d have preferred a world where none of this touched you.
You’re the only person I’ve met in a long time who might have understood me. ”
“I do understand you,” I say. “That’s how I know you’ll lose.”