8. Forge #2
Tonight, she sleeps in my bed. The bed is too small for both of us, it's a single, the bed of a man who never planned on sharing it — and she fits against me with her back to my chest, her body warm and real, her breathing evening out as she falls asleep.
I sleep with my arm around her and my gun on the nightstand and my ears tuned to every sound the building makes.
I don’t plan on sleeping, not when the Dimitri and whoever else might show up.
Inessa lasts about two hours before the quiet breaks her.
My arm's around her and I can feel every breath she takes, the way each one starts shallow and careful like she's trying not to exist too loudly. Old habit. Six years of living in quiet fear teaches you to breathe small.
"Forge."
"Yeah."
“My account in the Caymans."
I don't move. Don't tighten my arm. “Yeah, you told me you were skimming."
"I know." She shifts against me, turns so she's on her back, staring at the ceiling I can't see in this darkness. "You don't know what it is."
I wait. She'll get there. Inessa doesn't circle a subject. She walks straight at it, but she picks her moment.
"I started it three years ago. Skimming, like I said. Small amounts, nothing my father would notice in the wash. A few hundred here, a thousand there." Her voice is even. Clinical. Like she's reading a balance sheet. "There's three hundred and forty thousand dollars in it, did I tell you that?”
I process that number. Three years of skimming from a man who’d think nothing of killing someone for shorting him fifty bucks on a payment.
"That's my exit," she says. "That's a car and a fake passport, a rental in Lisbon and enough runway to disappear for a good few years if I stretched it.
I had the route planned. Houston to Miami, Miami to Madrid, Madrid to Lisbon.
I had a bag packed in a storage unit on Westheimer.
Clothes, documents, cash for the first leg.
I could've been gone in ninety minutes from the moment I decided to go. "
"When were you going to go?"
"August. After the quarterly transfer when the books would be messy enough to buy me a head start." She pauses. “But things didn’t go according to plan, and I walked into this place instead.”
The room is dead quiet. The only sound the low hum of the generator and the distant muffle of someone moving. Probably one of the guys on night watch.
"I'm not telling you this because I want you to be impressed," she says. "I'm telling you because you should know I don't need you."
There it is. The thing she's been carrying since the first night. Precision. She needs me to understand the math. She had an out. A clean one. Over three hundred thousand dollars and a route to a country.
She chose this. Chose to stay and fight instead of vanish. Chose to hand over the financial records, blow up her own escape hatch into witness protection, and bet everything on a motorcycle club in Baton Rouge she'd never set foot in before.
She bet it on me.
"I'm telling you," she says, quieter now, "because I don't want there to be anything you don't know. You've earned that."
I think about what that costs her. Not the money.
The money was always just fuel for the plan.
I'm thinking about the plan itself, the three years of patience, the storage unit, the shells, the route.
She built that escape one stolen dollar at a time, in a house where the wrong glance could get her killed.
It was the only thing that was hers. And she's handing it over in a dark room to a man she's known for for a few weeks.
I pull her closer. Feel her ribs expand against my side, a real breath this time, full and unguarded.
"You could still go," I say. "Money's still there. Route's still there, witness protection even, the feds would still do that if you wanted it.”
"I know I could. But I’m not choosing that.”
I find her hand in the dark. Press my thumb across her knuckles. She threads her fingers through mine and holds on like she's done deciding.
"Okay," I say.
She breathes out. A long slow exhale that I feel in my own chest.
Then there is silence. I listen to the generator hum and her breathing settle into something steady, unhurried, no longer small or careful.
She falls asleep and I stay awake. I’m thinking about what her life looked like before, and the fact that she had to plan an escape from her life. I look at the gun on my nightstand, controlled fury building inside me and I know that I will never let anyone hurt her ever again.
A few hours later, she rolls toward me in the dark.
"Forge."
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
"If Dmitri comes before the feds move?—"
"He won't."
"If he does."
I pull her closer. "Then fifteen patched members of the Wild Savages MC and one extremely angry president stand between him and you."
"I don't want you to die for me."
“Wasn’t planning on it."
"Promise me, I’m serious.”
"I promise I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure we both walk out of this." I press my lips to her forehead. "And then I'm going to take you somewhere with no bratva, no feds and no club business. I’m going to spend a whole day just appreciating you and giving you my full attention."
Her hand finds mine in the dark. She laces our fingers together.
"I've never had that," she says. "A day where nobody wants anything from me."
"You're about to."