Chapter 15
KINCAID
Priest doesn't call at this hour unless the information can't wait. I pick up on the first ring. The loft is dark, the south-facing windows giving me nothing but city light and the distant rumble of the El.
I haven't slept. Sleep requires the ability to stop running a scenario that has no operational solution.
The scenario of Meagan Keating operating alone against a conspiracy that now knows her name has been running behind my eyes since she closed her door.
The deadbolt engaged with the sound of hardware I installed.
"The surveillance team from the leaked sourcing?
" Priest says. "They've expanded scope. Your analyst isn't just a name in a file anymore.
Someone's been watching her building. Foot traffic patterns outside the Printer's Row address, consistent with a two-person rotation.
Started within hours of the article going live. "
The stillness that comes over me is the one I don't use for work.
The work stillness is professional and controlled, the stillness of a fixer calculating angles and leverage points. Arthur Harrow trained me to solve problems that don't leave records.
This stillness is older. It comes from the part of me that grew up watching systems grind people down, the South Side kid who swore he'd never stand still while someone he cared about was being measured for the same treatment.
"How long have they been on her?"
"At least since the article dropped. Possibly longer. The rotation is professional. Whoever's running them has budget and patience."
Budget and patience. Arthur's signature on everything he touches.
"Can you identify the team?"
"I've got partial plates on a vehicle and a physical description of one operative. Consistent presence near the entrance in a pattern that doesn't match the foot traffic."
I'm already pulling on my boots. The truck keys are on the counter. The loft is large enough that crossing it takes steps I use to think. What I think is that she's sitting in an apartment with a deadbolt I installed and a conspiracy watching her front door. She doesn't know.
She told me to earn it. She told me to stop showing up during crises. She told me to figure out how to be honest without the honesty being forced out of me.
I'm about to do the opposite of everything she asked.
The drive to Printer's Row takes less time than it should.
November traffic is thin past midnight, the city opening up the way it does for people who move through it at hours reserved for emergencies and bad decisions.
I park the truck on a side street and scan the block.
The vehicle Priest described is gone, which means the rotation shifted or the team is inside a building with a sightline to her entrance.
I take the stairs. The hallway is quiet. The deadbolt on the other side of her door is the one I chose because it holds against a forced entry. Right now the knowledge that the hardware is solid is the only thing keeping the kid from kicking the door in and pulling her out by force.
I knock. The knock is controlled. I am not controlled.
The door opens. She's in the same sweatshirt from when I was here before, barefoot, and her expression when she sees me cycles through recognition and anger before settling on something she locks down before I can read it.
"No." The word is flat. The word is the same one she used when I showed up after the article. "I told you what I need from you, Kincaid. A crisis doesn't change the terms."
"Someone is watching your building. A two-person surveillance team with professional rotation patterns, operating since the article went live. They've been tracking your movement in and out of the entrance."
The information lands the way intelligence always lands on Meagan Keating. Her eyes narrow. Her weight shifts. The fury recalibrates from me to the new target without releasing me entirely.
"Come in," she says. The cost of the invitation is audible.
I step through the door. The apartment is warm and still, the air of a room where someone has been awake too long. The soap on her skin reaches me, the scent I only know because I've had my mouth on the places she doesn't show anyone.
The laptop is closed on the counter. The legal pad is beside it.
"How long?" she asks.
"At least since the article. The rotation suggests budget and coordination. This isn't freelance."
"Arthur."
"Arthur or someone he authorized. The distinction stopped mattering the moment they set up outside your door."
She stands in the kitchen with her arms crossed and her jaw set.
The anger in her is layered: the surveillance outside her door and me standing in her kitchen delivering information she should have found herself.
She needs the man she threw out because the alternative isn’t knowing that someone is tracking her movements from the sidewalk, and the necessity is its own kind of wound.
I watch the anger settle into her the way a blade settles. It doesn't soften. It sharpens. She is the most dangerous version of Meagan Keating I've encountered.
"You could have called," she says. "You could have sent a text. You didn't have to show up in my hallway past midnight like a man who thinks proximity is the same as protection."
"A text doesn't tell me whether the team is still outside when you open the door."
"That's operational logic. Not honesty."
"The terms changed when someone put a team on your building."
The distance between us is the width of her kitchen. The counter is to her left. The hallway is behind me. The space is charged with the same voltage that turned the last visit into something neither of us finished.
"Stop managing me." Her voice drops into the register I've been hearing in my sleep since the night she threw me out. Low, precise, aimed. "Stop deciding what I need. Stop showing up and standing in my space and making my decisions for me."
"I'm not making your decisions."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"I already answered that question. The answer hasn't changed."
'I’m here because I can't be anywhere else.'
The sentence sits between us the way it sat when I said it in this kitchen. She heard it then. She hears it now. The difference is that she stopped what was happening with a hand on my chest and a single word that dropped me like a round.
She doesn't stop it this time.
Her hand grabs the front of my shirt and pulls, and the collision is harder than the last one because neither of us is pretending anymore.
Her mouth hits mine and the anger is in it, all of it, the isolation and the professional destruction and the surveillance and my presence in her kitchen again doing the thing she told me not to do.
The kiss is a fight. She bites my lip in the same place she bit it before and the copper taste registers alongside the heat of her mouth and the grip of her hand twisting in my shirt. I grab her hips hard enough that she'll wear the marks tomorrow.
She shoves me backward. My shoulders hit the hallway wall and she's against me before the impact finishes registering.
Her body presses the full length of mine with a force that has nothing to do with tenderness.
This is the war we've been fighting since she laid out my operational files on this counter and dismantled me with a precision that left nothing standing.
I reverse the position. Her back hits the wall and the sound she makes is rage and want in equal measure. My hands pin her wrists above her head. Her eyes meet mine and the challenge in them is the most honest thing either of us has offered.
"Let go of my wrists."
I let go. She grabs my belt.
The undressing is violent. Her hands strip my shirt over my head with a roughness that scrapes the fabric across the bite mark on my lip.
I pull the sweatshirt off her and find bare skin underneath for the second time, and the discovery hits the same way it hit before except this time I don't stop at the discovery.
My mouth finds her neck, the curve of her breast. I bite down where her shoulder meets her throat and her fingers dig into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks that will match the ones I left on her hips.
My hand closes over her breast and the nipple hardens against my palm before I've finished the stroke.
I roll it between my fingers and her spine arches off the wall, pressing her hips forward into mine with an urgency that has nothing to do with invitation and everything to do with demand.
I drop my hand between her legs. Through the thin fabric, the heat is startling and the dampness tells me what her mouth won't admit.
My thumb presses against her through the cotton and her breath catches, her hips rolling into the pressure with a responsiveness that guts every pretense I have left about who is in control of this encounter.
"This doesn't change anything," she says against my ear. Her teeth find my earlobe and the bite sends a jolt straight through me.
"I know."
"It doesn't mean I trust you."
"I know."
"It means I'm tired of fighting what my body already decided."
I strip the last barrier off her, get rid of the rest of my clothes and lift her against the wall.
Her legs wrap around me and the slick heat of her presses against the length of me.
She rolls her hips and the friction drags a sound from me that has no tactical application whatsoever.
Her hand reaches between us, and the efficiency of her fingers tells me she's been thinking about this with the same tactical precision she brings to everything else.
She finds me and wraps her hand around me.
The grip is firm and deliberate, stroking once with a pressure that makes my forehead drop against the wall beside her head.
She positions me at her entrance and the wet heat against the tip is enough to fracture whatever was left of the professional distance I've been maintaining since she threw me out.