Chapter Four | TORIN
Chapter Four
TORIN
Noa slept like she expected the world to try something and wanted it to know she’d be annoyed when it did.
She was on her side in the middle of the king bed, one knee drawn up, one bare leg out from under the sheet, my shirt riding high enough on her thigh to make the chair feel like punishment.
Her brown hair had dried loose over the pillow after her shower, darker near the ends, soft around a face that looked younger in sleep and no less dangerous for it.
The drive was under her pillow.
She’d moved it there sometime after she finally went under, half-asleep and still stubborn enough to keep the evidence close. I’d watched her do it. I’d watched too much of her all night, if a man wanted to be honest about it.
I wasn’t in the mood to be honest.
The room had gone quiet in the hours before morning.
The St. Julian kept its expensive silence wrapped around us with thick carpet, sealed windows, climate control humming low through the walls, and the faint sweetness of white flowers near the glass.
Outside, Halo City sat under low June cloud, the towers below blurred silver at the edges, the streets darkened by bay air and beginning to fill with delivery trucks, black sedans, and people who had no idea a federal prosecutor was dead while the drive he’d never received was tucked under Noa Dahl’s pillow.
I should have kept my eyes on the door.
I had watched the door. I’d watched the window reflection, the street below, and the corridor shadow through the crack under the frame. I’d checked the lock twice and walked the service exit route through my head until I could have run it blind.
Then my eyes went back to Noa.
She’d walked into Claudia Kent’s office with her chin level and her claws out, and she’d been under my skin since.
I’d been shot at, burned out, followed, and outnumbered before.
I knew what to do with danger. Danger had direction.
It came at you or it didn’t, and a man with decent instincts and a faster hand could solve most of what followed.
Noa was different.
She had dark eyes, sharp hands, and a mouth that made a man want to shut it for her in ways that would get him thanked or maimed depending on how he tried. She infuriated me. She tempted me. She watched too much, missed nothing, and made every room smaller by being in it.
I had spent three years building the life that had put me in this chair.
A work permit I couldn’t afford to put at risk.
Money wired home every month because my family in Ireland still counted on me being the son who made it out and stayed out.
Years of military discipline behind me, and now HPG in front of me — structure, command, risk, intelligence, force, and decisive action all moving under one roof.
Vance Landon had built the kind of operation men like me understood.
Former FBI. No tolerance for corruption.
No wasted motion. He didn’t need to raise his voice to make an order carry.
Men followed him because his calls were clean, fast, and usually right.
I respected that. I had earned my place in his system, and I knew exactly what that was worth.
Then Noa shifted in my shirt, and the sheet slid another inch up her thigh.
My cock went hard with the kind of immediacy that made a mockery of discipline.
“Christ,” I muttered, low enough not to wake her.
Noa opened her eyes.
She fixed her gaze on me, dark and clear. One second asleep, the next looking straight at me like she’d never really gone under at all.
Her voice came rough from sleep. “Are you praying or complaining?”
“Both, from the look of things.”
Her eyes dropped down my body, brief and entirely deliberate. “That sounds like a personal problem.”
“It’s becoming less personal by the second.”
She pushed up on one elbow. My shirt pulled across her breasts, and I gripped the arms of the chair hard enough that the upholstery gave under my fingers.
Noa noticed. Her mouth curved, not quite a smile. Worse than a smile.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I spent the night in a chair while you stole half the bed and most of my self-control.”
“You volunteered for the chair.”
“I’m noble that way.”
“You’re something that way.”
I stood because staying seated made me feel like the room had already beaten me. Her eyes followed me up. The king bed sat between us, white sheets rumpled around Noa’s thighs, the morning light turning everything cool and pale except the heat sitting low in my blood.
I crossed to the window and looked down at the street because looking at her was going to end with my hands where they had no professional reason to be.
Noa sat up behind me. Fabric shifted. Pillow moved. The small, hard shape of the drive disappeared from under it and went somewhere else.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The evidence is safe.”
“The evidence,” I said.
“Almost reasonable.”
“I count the thing people are willing to kill you over.”
“You counted my pockets from the reflection.”
“I did.”
“At least you admit it.”
“I’m not shy.”
“No one has accused you of that.”
My phone lit on the desk before I could answer. Landon.
I picked up. “Talk to me.”
“Status?”
“No movement overnight. Hotel held. We’re still in place.”
“No confirmed name yet,” he said. “We’ve narrowed the access point, but I’m not giving you a guess. A guess gets people killed.”
“Agreed.”
“Keep her inside if you can.”
Noa’s head turned toward me. She couldn’t hear Landon, but she heard enough in my tone.
“That may prove complicated,” I said.
“It usually does with you.”
“That’s why you send me.”
“You’re employed because you survive complicated situations and don’t confuse noise with action. Call if anything changes.”
He ended the call.
Noa crossed her arms. “He said to keep me inside.”
“He gave an order with room for reality.”
“That sounds like breakfast.”
“That sounds like you’re learning.”
“Food first. You can be unbearable afterward.”
Her stomach chose that moment to make a quiet, unhelpful sound.
I looked at her.
Noa pointed at me. “Don’t make that face.”
“This face?”
“That exact one.”
“This is the face of a man who was right before the evidence arrived.”
“You must be exhausted from being you.”
“I draw strength from accuracy.”
She stared at me for one second, then turned toward her duffel. “Fine. Breakfast. But if this is your way of inspecting the hotel while pretending to feed me, you should know I already got there.”
“It can be both.”
“It is both.”
“Then we agree.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You rarely do. I’ve learned to hear it in the tone.”
“That isn’t a real skill.”
“It still works.”
She took her clothes into the bathroom and shut the door before I could watch her take my shirt off. I stayed where I was and looked out at the low morning sky until the bathroom door opened again.
By the time Noa came out, she was in clean clothes from the duffel: black utility pants that fit close enough to move in, a soft slate-blue top with long sleeves pushed to her forearms, the same jacket with the inner pocket zipped, and her flat dark boots laced tight.
Her hair was still loose, brown waves falling around her shoulders, and the change should have helped.
It didn’t help at all.
The clean shirt covered more than mine had. Somehow that made it worse, because now I knew what mine had looked like on her.
Noa caught my face. “You look disappointed.”
“I’m managing.”
“You’ll recover.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
“Good. I’m hungry.”
“That’s more frightening than the men outside.”
“You don’t know there are men outside.”
“That’s why we’re going downstairs.”
I checked the hallway through the peephole, then opened the door with my body between Noa and the corridor.
The hall was empty. A housekeeping cart stood at the far end.
No voices carried from the lift bank. The hotel breathed around us in soft expensive layers, all polished wood and thick carpet and lighting designed to make rich people believe morning had arrived for their convenience.
Noa stepped out behind me.
I kept her on my left, away from the wider sightline down the corridor. She noticed and let me do it without comment. She moved with me the second the stakes changed.
We took the lift to the lobby level. Noa stood beside me, hands relaxed, eyes on the reflected doors. Her reflection looked calm enough to be bored, but her shoulders had the gathering stillness I’d started to recognize. She could move fast from there.
The doors opened onto The St. Julian’s main floor, where the city’s wealthy came to pretend peace could be purchased by the night.
Morning had polished the lobby into something pale and gold.
White flowers crowded tall vases. Coffee scented the air from the restaurant entrance beyond the marble columns.
A few guests moved through with garment bags and rolling luggage, low voices, soft shoes, the little rituals of people whose lives hadn’t caught fire yesterday.
I touched Noa’s lower back with two fingers.
She went still for half a second, then moved with me toward the restaurant.
“Handsy before coffee,” she murmured. “Bold.”
“If I were handsy, you’d know.”
“I’ve got several concerns about how true that sounded.”
“You should.”
The restaurant host glanced up as we approached. “Good morning. Breakfast for two?”
“Yes,” I said.
Noa’s eyes cut past the host before mine did.
That was when I saw him.
A man sat near the far window with untouched coffee and a newspaper open too high.
His jacket was good enough for the hotel, but his shoes were wrong.
The sole was cheap. His right hand rested low near his thigh where the tablecloth hid too much.
He wasn’t looking at us. He was watching the mirrored panel behind the host stand, where he could track the restaurant entrance without turning his head.
Outside, through the glass beyond him, a dark sedan rolled past the valet drive.