CHAPTER 18
Sloane
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The glass office had a lock, which was the first thing I checked, and the second thing I disliked about it.
I disliked it because a lock implied a man who needed to be able to keep the world out, and a man who needed that was a man who had decided, somewhere in his expensive past, that the world was a creditor.
I'd spent six weeks reading what the coven had done to the packs and to my mentor and to the careful architecture of my own life, and I'd learned to read a room the way I read a contract: for the clause nobody wanted me to find.
Julian Cross was a room full of clauses.
He stood behind the desk with the morning on him.
The storm had finally broken sometime before dawn, and the light coming through the glass walls was a cold clean thing, scrubbed, almost surgical.
It fell across the steel desktop and pooled there, and in the middle of that pool sat his father's watch, off his wrist, face up, ticking.
He'd looked as though he meant to do something with it the moment before the door opened, and then he'd let his hand stop halfway and simply left it lying there.
The whole hangar beyond the glass was a smear of gray morning and dead work-lights, the generator still empty, the chrome on the bike floor cold and unlit.
But the office had its own light, that scrubbed clean spill across the desk, and inside the glass walls it was like standing in a lit box hung over a dark theater, where anyone awake could have watched the whole performance.
The trouble for any audience was that no one was awake, which happened to be the entire point, and which I had verified before I ever turned the handle.
"You said with me," I told him. "So here I am. With you."
"I assigned myself the dull half of the plan," he said. "Papers. Routes. The marshal at the southern strip who owes me a favor he doesn't yet know he's paying. You don't need to supervise."
"I'm not supervising. " I turned the deadbolt. It made a small, definite sound, like a verdict.
His pale eyes moved to it, then back to me, and the line of his mouth did the thing it did when he was deciding whether to be amused or alarmed and settling on neither.
Two fingers found the edge of his cuff and pressed the seam smooth against his wrist. There it is, I thought.
The tell I'd filed away days ago: he tidies that cuff in the half-second before a lie.
The lie hadn't come yet, but I could watch him assembling it behind his teeth.
"Counselor," he said. "If this is about Day Twelve, the legal strategy is sound, and I told you so in front of the others."
"It's not about Day Twelve."
"Then it's about the other night."
"It's about a contract," I said. "I want to renegotiate one."
He went still. It was its own kind of stillness, a held quiet a world away from the lethal animal quiet of Grant that emptied a room of air. "We don't have a contract," he said.
"We have three of them, Cross, and they're all garbage. " I crossed the small bright box of his office, past the gun safe and the real desk and the single good chair, until the steel was at my back and there was nowhere for either of us to retreat to that wasn't through the other one.
"Term one. You keep me alive because you don't lose cargo.
Term two. The pack-bond settled on me, so there's an obligation, a sacred one, very moving, very binding.
Term three, the one you actually live by.
" I pressed my palms flat together at the fingertips, the way I square a closing argument before I deliver the line that ends it, and felt myself drop into the cold settled quiet I keep for those moments.
"You think being wanted is a debt. You think if you let me have you, somewhere down the line the note comes due, and you'll be standing in a room while someone you trusted reads you back your own price."
The light in the glass walls held steady and he held with it, both of them stopped dead while on the desk the watch went on ticking into the quiet, three soft sounds and three soft sounds, counting something he hadn't asked it to count.
"You've been talking to Omar," he said.
"I've been reading you. It's what I do. " I let my hands drop.
"Here's my counteroffer. I want this. You.
With nothing owed, none of it counting against either of us, not the bond, not the rescue, not the storm that threw us together in a cold building with one blanket and three days to fill.
Nothing on your side of the ledger and nothing on mine.
No debt. No price. No note that comes due in a paneled room at the worst possible moment. " My voice didn't shake.
I was proud of that, later. "I refuse to be a thing you owe. And I refuse to let you be a thing I bought. Those are my terms. They're not negotiable, and I'm aware of the irony."
For a long moment he said nothing. The cold clean light lay on the watch and on his hands, which had gone flat on the steel, fingers spread, like a man bracing on a railing over a long fall.
"You don't know what you're asking," he said, very low.
His voice dropped when he was furious; it had dropped now into the same register, except what rode under it this time was the closest thing to fear I'd ever heard out of him.
"I have priced everything I have ever touched.
My father's name. My freedom, once, when they held me and made Dane pay for it in installments.
I am very, very good at knowing what a thing costs and who's going to be left holding the invoice.
If I let go of that, darling, I don't have anything else to hold. "
"You'll have me," I said. "And I don't issue invoices. Ask Holloway. He tried to pay me hourly. I told him I'd bill him. I never sent the bill."
I thought of Ruth, the way I always did when I was about to do something that needed nerve instead of sense.
She'd trusted a signature to keep her safe and been proven wrong about that in the worst, most expensive way a person could be proven wrong, and the lesson she'd left me amounted to a single line scored into the hull: let yourself need anyone and they will be the thing that sinks you.
And here I was in a glass box, asking a man to need me and to let me need him with no security, no collateral, nothing held back to soften the fall. The most reckless clause I had ever drafted, and I drafted it anyway.
Something cracked across his face then, quick, like ice deciding.
He came around the corner of the desk and stopped a careful foot away, near enough that I got the scent of him, bergamot and old leather, the cold smell of money and the warm smell of the man under it, and near enough that I could feel the furnace of him radiating into the scrubbed air, that low constant warmth their kind carried like a banked fire, warmer than any human had a right to run.
"Say it again," he said. "The whole clause. I want it on the record. " A breath. "I want it more than I have wanted anything in thirty years, and I need to hear you say there's no price, because I will not survive learning later that there was."
So I said it again. I put my hand flat on his chest, over the cut, over the hammer of a heart going faster than a controlled man would ever admit, and I said it slowly, the way you read a term to a client who has to understand exactly what they're signing.
"Nothing owed, by you or by me. I want you because I want you.
That's the entire consideration. There's no hidden term, no balloon payment, no clause on page nine.
You don't owe me your life for taking mine.
I don't owe you my body for the protection.
We're even, Julian. We start at even, and we stay there. "
"Say you want this with nothing owed," he said. "Say it as the answer to the only question I've ever been afraid to ask."
"I want this," I said. "With nothing owed."
The sound he made arrived as one syllable instead of a word, broken clean in half, an obscenity I'd never heard him use, dragged up out of a man who almost never swore because a single one from him was a thunderclap, and it was the thunderclap, it was the whole wall coming down at once.
He kissed me like a man signing something with his own blood, and his control didn't slip so much as he set it down, deliberately, the way he'd set the watch on the desk, where I could see he'd let it go.
"The door's locked," he said against my mouth. "You did that."
"I did."
"You with me?" His hands had found my jacket, were getting me out of it with a precision that should have been clinical and instead made my knees do something undignified. "Tell me where you are."
"Here. With you. " I got his coat off his shoulders, the good coat, and let it fall on the floor of his immaculate office, and watched him not care. "Red means stop," I said. "I know the word. I'm not going to need it. But I know it."
"You'll never need it with me. But it's yours. " He pulled back two inches to look at me, and his eyes were wrecked and clear at once. "Everything in this room is yours, including the man in it. So. What do you want first, darling? You're running this. I find I want, very badly, to be told."
That undid something in me. The man who booked the hangars and bribed the marshals and held the whole logistics of three other lives in his clean hands, handing me the wheel like it cost him nothing, like it was the one thing he'd ever been able to give without an invoice attached.
"Sit," I said. "In the good chair."
He sat.
I got the rest of my own clothes off because I wanted to, because it was mine to do, and his gaze tracked me with a hunger so controlled it was almost reverent, his hands open on the chair arms, waiting.
I got his belt, his fly, freed his cock, already hard, and looked up the length of him to where he was watching me with the cold light on his face and his jaw tight against making a sound.
"You can make noise," I said. "I want it on the record."