Her Off-Limits Bodyguards

Chapter 1 Maren

The junket panel ran long, and by the time the valet brought my car around, the lot behind the hotel had gone still.

The attendant met me at the booth and put my key in my hand with both of his.

"Right where you left it, Ms. Calloway," he said. "Locked the whole time. I had eyes on it."

"Thank you, Marco." I had read his name off the little brass tag on his vest.

"Long night?" he asked.

"They're all long nights lately."

He smiled like he didn't quite believe me, and went back to his booth. I crossed the lot alone. The car chirped, friendly, when I unlocked it.

I opened the driver's door, and the smell reached me before my eyes did. Something sweet and green and wrong.

There was a white orchid lying across my seat. A single stem, pale as a held breath. And under it, a small square card.

I stood with my hand on the top of the door, and I did not get in.

I knew the handwriting. That was the part that turned my stomach.

I had been getting notes from this exact hand for months.

They started as emails, polite and a little strange.

Then they got less polite. Then they stopped coming through screens at all and started arriving on paper, which felt like a door opening in a house I thought I had locked.

Each one had grown more sure of itself. More certain that I belonged to whoever was writing them.

When my mother was dying, my father sent her orchids every single week. They were white ones, exactly like this. He carried them into the hospital room himself because he didn't trust the delivery people to angle the stems the right way.

I had never told a single soul that, not even my friend Polly.

So whoever left that flower on my seat had either made the worst, luckiest guess in the world, or he had been close enough to me, for long enough, to know.

My hands started to shake. I noticed it the way you notice rain starting. Small, and then all at once.

I didn't touch the orchid. I drove home with it on the passenger seat, because I could not make myself pick it up, and I could not make myself leave it for someone else to find.

Keith met me at the door. He was a rescue labrador with the emotional control of a much smaller dog. He threw his whole body against my shins and groaned like I had been gone a year.

"Hi," I told him. My voice came out wrong. "Hi, buddy. I'm okay. We're okay."

He didn't believe me either. He followed me from room to room while I checked the locks I had already checked that morning.

I did not sleep much.

The studio meeting was at the production office the next morning. My publicist Jackson was already inside when I came in.

"You look like you didn't sleep," he said.

"Good morning to you too."

"I mean it kindly."

"You always do."

There was a woman at the conference table I didn't recognize. Gray suit. Good posture. A folder squared off in front of her like it had been measured with a ruler.

"Maren, this is Sandra," Jackson said. "She's with the bond company. For Vanishing Acts."

I sat down. A completion bond was the insurance that promises the people with the money that the movie will actually get finished and delivered. It was the least romantic part of making art, but it was the part that lets art exist at all.

"I'll get right to it," Sandra said. "We've reviewed the threat materials your team submitted. The emails and the escalation. The item left in your vehicle last night."

"Word travels fast."

"It's our business to make it travel fast." She looked at me, and her face was not unkind, which somehow made it worse. "Ms. Calloway, the carrier is not prepared to bond the post-production and press cycle of this film under current conditions."

"So what would the carrier be prepared to do?" I asked.

"Bond it," she said, "with close personal protection. Embedded. Not a car that follows you. Not a man in your lobby. Someone with you through the rest of filming, through the premiere and awards. Eyes on, the entire way."

"In my house," I said. "And if I say no?"

"Then the carrier won't bond it, and a film a lot of people worked very hard on does not get delivered." She closed the folder.

"I need to make a call," I said.

I called Polly from the hallway.

"Tell me it's good news," she said. Polly always answered like that. She’d decided that if she demanded good news often enough, the universe will eventually give in.

"They want a bodyguard," I said. "Living in the house. Through the premiere."

"Oh." A pause. "Okay, listen to me. Do not take whoever the studio hands you.

The studio will give you a guy in a suit who calls you 'principal' and treats your home like a checkpoint.

There's a firm. Aegis. Three friends started it.

A woman I know used them after her divorce got loud, and she told me two things about them. "

"What two things?"

"One, they have never once lost a person they were protecting. Not one. Ever."

"And the second thing?"

Polly's voice softened in a way I wasn't expecting. "Two, she said they made her feel like a person again. Not a job. A person. She cried when they left, in a good way."

I leaned my head against the wall.

"I’ll set it up on my terms," I said. "My house. My rules. My lawyer reads every page before I sign a thing."

The next morning, the three men came to my house together.

I watched them get out of one truck from my front window, which I'm not proud of, but I had earned a little paranoia. They moved like men who had done this many times, but not like men in a hurry.

Then the doorbell rang, and Keith lost his entire mind.

I opened the door with one hand on his collar.

"Ms. Calloway." The first man put out his hand. He was tall, with a face that gave away nothing on purpose. "Thomas Crane. We spoke on the phone."

"We did. Come in. Ignore the dog, he thinks he's terrifying."

Thomas stepped inside and looked at my entryway the way other people look at a painting they're deciding whether they like. Then he took a small notebook out of his jacket. A real one, leather, soft at the corners. And a fountain pen. He wrote something in it.

A man who carries a pen and a notebook into a security job has a personality buried somewhere under all that procedure, and I have built a whole career out of finding the thing hidden under the thing.

"Don't worry about him," said the second man, already crouching down. "He writes everything down. He's been like that since the Marines. Hey, handsome."

This one was talking to Keith.

He was muscular and easy in his body, with a face that had clearly spent its whole life telling jokes and getting away with it. Keith took one look at him and climbed directly into his lap, all sixty pounds of him, like he had been waiting his entire life for this exact man to sit down on my floor.

"Oh, we're doing this," the man said, taking the dog's full weight without a word of complaint. "Okay. We're committed now." He looked up at me and grinned. "I’m Brady McKenna. And before you ask, yes, I'm holding a box, and no, it is not a bomb."

"That's a relief."

"It's scones." He said it like that explained everything in the world. "I couldn't show up to a lady's house empty-handed. My mother would feel it in her bones all the way from Boston."

I laughed.

It came out of me before I could decide whether to allow it. A real one, the kind that uses your whole chest. It was the first laugh I'd had since I opened my car door and smelled that flower, and how suddenly it arrived almost embarrassed me.

"There it is," Brady said, pleased with himself. "I read somewhere you got your start in that little movie. The one you shot for nothing in like eleven days. The one nobody saw."

I blinked. "I haven't talked about that movie in an interview in years."

"I don't read interviews. I watched the movie." He shifted Keith into a more sustainable position. "You were really good in it. That monologue at the kitchen sink? Come on!"

"He does this," said the third man, stepping past us with a laptop bag over his shoulder. "He charms the dog, charms the client, and then I do all the actual work. I’m Damian Vaughn."

He had a different energy than the other two. He had sharp eyes and a face that wanted very badly to stay professional but kept losing the fight at the corners of the mouth.

"You're the technical one," I said.

"I'm the one who reads," Damian said. "Brady's the one who talks. Thomas is the one who decides."

"Hey, that's not fair," Brady said. "I also read!"

"You read cookbooks."

"Cookbooks are books, Damian. And recipes are just stories with stakes."

"Gentlemen," Thomas said. One word, even and quiet. They both stopped at once, the way you stop when the person in charge has spoken.

"Mind if we walk the place?" Brady asked, finally setting Keith back down. "We promise to judge your décor in total silence."

"It's fine," I said. "It's mostly beige. I'm aware."

They walked my house like it was a problem they were solving together. Thomas went room to room slowly. He stopped at the laundry room and stood in front of the small window over the machines for a long moment.

"This is your way in," he said.

"That window? It's tiny."

"It's a bypass." He made a note and then glanced at me, and there was something careful in it. "By the way. The monologue at the kitchen sink. In that little movie." He paused. "It's the best thing you've done."

He went back to his notebook before I could answer. I stood in my own laundry room with my heart doing something complicated. He had seen the movie too. They had all seen the movie. None of it was in any threat file.

Damian set his laptop on my dining table and turned it toward me. There was a diagram on the screen, all lines and little dots, like a subway map for a city I had never visited.

"This is everything he's sent you," Damian said. "Every email. Every header. Every route it took to reach your inbox."

"That's a lot of lines."

"He's careful. But careful people leave patterns, and a pattern is just a different kind of fingerprint." He pointed. "Right now I've got him narrowed to one forum and one private channel. I don't have his name yet. I will."

"You sound very sure."

"I'm always sure," Damian said. "Ask anyone. It's my least likable quality."

"It's top three," Brady called from the kitchen, where he had somehow already located my plates.

When they were done, the three of them stood together in my living room, and they arranged themselves without thinking about it.

I don't know how else to describe it. Thomas at the center.

Brady loose and easy off to one side. Damian half a step back with the laptop against his hip.

It was the body language of people who had stood in a lot of rooms together.

People who had picked each other, on purpose, a long time ago, and kept on picking each other since.

"The firmware on her cameras is two versions back," Damian said, to no one.

"Oh no," Brady said. "Not the firmware."

"It's a real vulnerability."

"It's always the firmware with you. You bring up firmware at parties. You would put firmware on a tombstone."

"If it kept you quiet, I'd consider it," Damian said, without looking up.

"Operational tempo," Thomas said. Just that. And the two of them folded back into focus like he had flipped a switch.

Keith, who had been watching all of this from the rug like a man at a tennis match, got up, crossed the room, and lay down directly on Brady's feet.

I tried not to smile. I failed.

"So here's where we are," Thomas said, closing his notebook. "Papers get signed later this week. Your lawyer reads every line first. But the three of us start tonight. The threat doesn't wait for paperwork."

"Tonight," I said.

"One of us will be on the house. You won't even know we're here." He looked at me, and the careful thing was back in his face. "You can sleep, Ms. Calloway. That's the whole point of us."

Brady held up the bakery box. "And there are scones for the morning. Don't let Damian near them. He has opinions about almond flour."

"Almond flour is a scam," Damian said.

"See? Unhinged."

I walked them to the door. Keith tried to leave with them and was deeply offended when I held his collar.

I thought something I didn't say out loud, something that surprised me with how true it was. For the first time in months, the idea of falling asleep tonight did not frighten me more than it had the night before.