12. Leah
TWELVE
LEAH
It took three seconds for the room to register.
The vinyl shelf against the far wall. The sketch on the nightstand — the bridge over a river he had never been to, the pencil corners curling in the morning light. The sheets that smelled like him. The arm across my waist.
I was in Julian Cross's bed.
I was naked under his sheet. He was beside me, still asleep, his face pressed into the pillow, his sandy hair flat on one side from where it had been against his palm all night. His breathing was slow and deep and warm against my shoulder.
He looked younger when he slept. The grin was off.
The charm was off. He was a man breathing next to me, and I was lying in his bed, wearing nothing.
I could still feel his hands on my body, his mouth on my neck, and over and over, he had said the wrong name, "Claire, Claire…
" He had been inside me saying a name that did not exist, and I had buried the flinch and let him.
I had slept with my target.
The sentence sat in me. My stomach twisted around it.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I reached for it carefully, slow, so the arm across my waist would not move.
The screen lit up.
Torres. A missed call from last night at 11:12 p.m. A text from this morning.
Torres
Leah, please talk to me. I'm not asking for anything. I just need to know you're okay.
I stared at it.
I turned the phone face down on the nightstand.
Julian stirred. His arm tightened around my waist. He pulled me a quarter-inch closer in his sleep before his eyes opened, slowly. The hazel of them darker in the morning light than I had ever seen them.
He smiled.
"You're still here."
"I'm still here."
He pulled me closer. He pressed his mouth to my shoulder. To the inside of my wrist where the watch had been last night and was on the nightstand now. To the spot below my ear that he had found at 1:00 a.m. and had not stopped finding since.
I closed my eyes.
I let him.
I hated myself. I wanted him. I could not reconcile any of it.
He got up at 7:20 a.m. I heard him in the kitchen — water running, the espresso machine, a cabinet, a mug on the counter. I lay on my back in his bed for a long minute with my hands flat on my stomach, the morning light moving across the ceiling and the sentence sitting in me where it had been.
I had slept with my target.
I had slept with the man I was supposed to be monitoring. I didn’t know how to feel about that.
I got up.
His shirt was on the floor at the foot of the bed where I had pulled it off him. I pulled it on. The sleeves came down past my hands. I rolled them once. I crossed the hallway barefoot.
He was at the espresso machine in sweats and nothing else. The line of his shoulders was the line I had been tracing with my fingertips at 2:00 a.m. He turned when he heard me. The grin came up at the corner of his mouth and stayed.
"Coffee's coming."
"Thank you."
I crossed to the kitchen counter. The sketches were on the corner where I had set them down last night. The twelve-story one with the windows. The bridge. The doorway that led nowhere.
He came up behind me with the coffee in one hand. He set it on the counter. His other hand found my waist through the cotton of his shirt. He set his chin on my shoulder.
"What are you thinking?"
"That you should frame these, Julian."
"They're not finished."
"Nothing ever is."
He turned me around.
I was between him and the counter. His hands moved to my hips. Mine came up flat against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat against my palm.
He kissed me.
Slow. Coffee-warm. The kiss was nothing like the kisses from last night — the hungry ones, the ones with my hands in his hair and his hands on the bare skin of my back.
I kissed him back.
My brain was telling me to stop. My body was not listening.
He pulled back. His forehead came to rest against mine.
"Come to work late with me. Breakfast first."
"I need to go to my apartment to change, Julian."
"We'll get you something on the way. There's a place I know."
"Julian — "
"There's a place I know."
I closed my eyes.
"Okay."
We got dressed. I pulled on last night's jeans and the gray sweater. He stood in the bedroom doorway in dark trousers and a clean white shirt with the sleeves not yet rolled and watched me sit on the edge of his bed and pull on my boots.
"I like you in my apartment."
"Don't get used to it."
"Too late."
He was smiling. The small private one. The one for me.
I laced the second boot.
The files I had photographed. The judge.
The map. The theory document in his handwriting.
The time I had spent on a frame the Bureau had given me — Julian Cross is Conrad Weiss's inside man at the Vanguard, and his job is to keep the original architecture available for Conrad's continuing operation.
Last night he said, "I'm in trouble. I'm not who you think I am, and I'm not sure I'm who I think I am either."
He had not said it like a man managing a conspiracy. He had said it like a man drowning.
What if I had been wrong?
The thought went through me cold.
I had built a frame for five months. The frame had photographs in it. The frame had a man kissing me in a hallway and lying to me at a gala and walking Conrad Weiss into an elevator alone. The frame had every reason to be the right frame.
The frame did not have last night.
The frame did not have a man on a couch telling me about his mother. It did not have a man saying he was in trouble and asking me to stay. It did not have a five-page theory document protecting partners he loved.
I straightened. I shrugged my coat on. He was at the door waiting with his keys in his hand.
"Ready, Claire?"
"Ready."
We left the apartment. The hallway was quiet. He hit the elevator button and pulled me in against his side while we waited and kissed the top of my head.
"What."
"Nothing."
"You went somewhere."
"I'm here."
The doors opened. We stepped in.
The morning was bright for late June. The doorman lifted his hand at us as we came through the lobby.
Julian lifted his back. Outside, trees on Eleventh Street had thickened to full leaf, throwing soft shadows on the sidewalk.
A delivery truck was double-parked at the corner.
A woman with a gray terrier passed us going the other way.
His hand was at the small of my back.
"Two blocks over. Their French toast will change your life."
"I don't like French toast."
"That is because you have not had theirs."
"That is what people who like French toast always say."
"Yes. Because we are right."
I almost laughed. The laugh did not come out, because the part of me that was a federal agent was scanning the sidewalk behind us at a low constant pace and the part of me that was the woman in his shirt twenty minutes ago was holding both at once.
He cut left at the corner of his building.
"Through the garage. Faster."
"Through the — "
"Garage. Two minutes saved. Trust me, this French toast is worth two minutes."
He had already pushed open the side door at the bottom of the lobby stairs. The garage was the residential garage under his building — low concrete ceiling, fluorescent overheads, four rows of parked cars, the smell of gasoline and cool damp concrete that all garages had at nine in the morning.
We came down the short ramp.
His voice bounced off the low ceiling. He was still talking — something about the pastry chef, who was forty-six and Algerian and had walked out of a three-star kitchen in Paris because the head chef had refused to let him use his own bread. The voice carried.
I was scanning. I had been scanning since I had stepped onto the sidewalk this morning and probably for thirty-six hours before that and I had not let myself name what I was scanning for.
The crack came from the ramp behind us.
A flat sharp sound. Compressed. Suppressed. Concrete chipped off the pillar 3 ft. from Julian's head and dust came off it in a thin gray puff that drifted.
I moved.
Before Claire. Before protocol. Before any conscious decision.
I hit him with both hands at the chest. I drove him sideways into the gap between a black SUV and a silver sedan.
He went down hard against the wheel well of the SUV and I was on top of him before he had hit the concrete.
My right hand was flat against his chest, pushing him down.
My head was up. My eyes were on the ramp.
"Don't move."
"Claire — what — "
"Don't move, Julian. Don't move."
I scanned everywhere.
The garage entrance. The ramp. The shadows between the cars on the far side. The stairwell door at the south end. The supply closet. Every line of sight from the ramp down to where we were against the wheel well of the SUV.
His phone buzzed in his trouser pocket.
I reached down and pulled it out without taking my eyes off the ramp.
The screen was lit. A new message. An unknown number.
I never miss. That was just a preview.
I read it.
I looked down at him.
He was on his back on the concrete with his arm twisted under him and his face white and his hazel eyes wide on mine. His breathing came out of him fast and shallow against my palm where my hand was still flat on his chest.
"Stay down. Don't move."
"What — what was — "
"Julian. Stay down."
I pulled my own phone out of my coat pocket with my left hand. Eyes still on the ramp. I unlocked it with my thumbprint by feel. I dialed.
Harlow picked up on the second ring.
"Leah."
"Active shooter. West Eleventh, residential garage under the building.
Suppressed weapon. One shot fired, no casualty.
Shooter likely on the upper ramp or in the stairwell to the lobby.
I have the principal, he is unhurt. I need a unit and I need it now.
I need building security locked down and I need the lobby cleared. "
"On it."
"Five minutes, Harlow."
"Three."
She hung up.
I slid the phone back into my pocket. My right hand was still on his chest. My left hand came down to brace against the concrete beside his shoulder. My head was up. My eyes were on the ramp.
Julian was looking at me.
I could feel him looking.
I did not look back.
The garage was quiet. A car alarm went off in the far corner — a pre-set, somebody's morning, not the shot.
The fluorescents hummed. Somewhere above us, on the street, a horn went off and stopped.
The dust from the pillar had settled. The concrete chip was at the base of it, a small gray wedge no bigger than my thumbnail.
His breathing was ragged against my palm.
I could feel his heartbeat. Fast. Going faster.
I stayed where I was. I was thinking about the text.
I never miss.
The Bureau's frame was that Julian Cross was helping Conrad Weiss's operation from the inside.
You did not shoot your inside man.
You protected your inside man. You paid him. You kept him close. You let him kiss women in hallways and walk you out of galas and lie to your face about old business acquaintances.
You shot your problems.
You shot the people who had found something they were not supposed to find.
Conrad was not running Julian.
Conrad was trying to kill him.
I looked down.
Julian was on his back against the wheel well of the SUV with his white shirt streaked gray from the concrete and a small cut on the back of his left hand from where it had hit the ground. His hazel eyes were on mine.
He did not say anything.
Julian Cross was not guilty.