Protected by Her Shifter Mates

CHAPTER ONE

?

VICTORIA

Hot for September, and my hand was flat on the bag before the light changed. Six years does that to a person. Gym bag on the left shoulder, a black case inside it in packing foam, a courier tag on the strap. My board had it under Russo, V. A nothing run.

The tower threw the afternoon back off its glass, too bright to look at straight. The lobby air went through my damp shirt like cold water.

The desk had the manifest out of my hand and read my name before I could say it.

“Russo. Victoria. Sixty-third, and the bag goes through the scanner.”

“The bag goes through. I go with it.” I did not take it off my shoulder to say it.

She looked up then. Young, bored, a lanyard, a little pity in it.

“Everybody says that.”

“Then everybody’s right.”

She printed a badge and slid it over with the manifest on top of it, like a claim ticket at a coat check.

“Sixty-three doesn’t take walk-ups. You’ve got an appointment?”

“Four twenty.”

“Then you’re early.” She was already back on her screen. “They don’t like early.”

“Nobody likes early. Everybody takes early.”

“Not them. And the badge comes back to me on the way out.” She pointed with two fingers, not looking. “Elevator’s on your right. Not that bank. The express car for the upper floors. Your badge opens sixty-three.”

“Wait, there’s a whole dedicated—”

“There’s a dedicated everything.”

“How many people go up there?”

“Depends on the day.” She looked at me then, for the first time. “Today it’s you.”

I walked the bag through the belt with my hand on the lip of the machine and took it off the far side before the guard could be helpful. Nobody in that lobby was offended by anything.

The manifest said archival transfer, low value, single courier. Three lines, and two of them were lies.

Marchetti and Ward sells the idea that a woman with a gym bag draws less attention on a hot sidewalk than an armored van does, and I have never minded being the trick. But low value goes in a padded envelope. Low value does not get a case with a gasket and a pressure valve.

And nobody came with me. No second courier, no driver, no number to call from the lobby. One woman, fourth job of the day, with the word archival on the paper so the whole thing would sound like nothing.

The car came down the shaft with a low mechanical growl behind the wall.

There was a man in it.

Lean, in a good coat the gray of a wolf, three gold rings on his left hand. He read the tag on my strap before he read my face, which is a thing nobody does.

“That tag says Marchetti and Ward. You’re the whole detail?”

“I’m the whole detail.” My voice came out level, and that was luck.

“Marcus Iyer. You don’t owe me yours.”

My pulse went up into my throat while the rest of me was still making up its mind. I set my shoulder against the rail and counted the rings. Three. Then I counted them again, and the second look was the one I minded.

He had put the name down between us like an object on a table. No trade attached to it. Mine to pick up or leave lying there.

He was still reading me. A person knows when a hand is near the back of her neck without the hand arriving. My thumb worked the strap webbing.

“So what’s in the bag, little courier?”

Nobody had ever called me that. It went in under my ribs and sat down.

A stranger had read my whole day off my collar in about four seconds, and what came up in me was not alarm. Six years of being the woman nobody looks at twice, and I wanted him to keep going.

“Archival transfer. Low value.” I gave him the line straight off the paper.

“Then somebody lied to you, and it wasn’t me.”

The floor numbers climbed. He made some small shift of weight and the whole car rearranged itself around him.

“Fourth job today?”

“Fourth. How would you know that?”

“Collar’s dry, the rest of the shirt isn’t.” He tipped his chin at me. “That’s a day of walking in and out of air conditioning. And you’re standing like the bag weighs more than the paperwork says.”

“It weighs what it—”

“It weighs wrong.”

He said it with no particular weight on it, the way a man reads a number off a gauge.

“You do this a lot? Read what people are carrying?”

“I read what people carry and what they leave behind.” He lifted one shoulder. “Bags are the easy half.”

I have delivered into a hundred buildings full of men who get called the alpha of something in a meeting.

Not one of them had ever made a room smaller by standing at the back of it.

Whatever he was doing was what the big cats do when the crowd thins at the end of the day, a panther with too much room and no particular reason to use it.

I took a half step toward him. I did not authorize it. My foot did it, and the rest of me arrived a second later with an excuse ready about the rail.

“You looked at my hands twice. I’m not complaining. I’m counting.”

“Do you say that to everybody in an elevator?”

“Only the ones carrying something they haven’t opened.”

“I don’t open what I carry.” I heard how flat it came out and did not soften it. “Six years. Not once.”

“That’s not a rule.” He almost smiled. “That’s a lock, and somebody else is holding the key. Put the bag down.”

“No.”

“Good.” He said it the way a man signs off on something. “That was a test, and you passed it, and I’m sorry about it, and I’d do it again.”

“You’re not sorry.”

“No. But I liked saying it to you.”

He let a floor go by.

“You’re not going to ask my name.”

“You already gave me your name.”

“I meant yours.” He did not turn his head. “I said you don’t owe it to me. I never said I didn’t want it.”

I did not give it to him. The doors were going to open in a minute and I was never going to see the man again, and I stood there wanting to hand a stranger my name like change for a machine.

He reached past my shoulder for the panel and the sleeve came close enough to move the air on my arm. He did not step back after. Neither did I.

The car kept climbing. Nothing in his face had moved the entire time and my heartbeat was doing all the work for both of us.

“You’re going to tell me what’s wrong with this, or you’re going to keep doing whatever this is?”

“I don’t know what’s in the bag. I know what a case like that costs, and nobody buys one for paper that doesn’t matter.” He watched the panel. “And I know that if it mattered, there’d be three of you.”

“There’s one of me.” The bag was suddenly a stupid thing to be holding.

“Yeah. There’s one of you.” The car began to slow. “Ask me why I’m telling you.”

“Why are you telling me?” My throat was dry and it made the words short.

“Because you’re going to ride back down, and I’d rather you remembered me being useful.”

The doors opened on a floor that was not mine. He stepped out, turned, and put one finger against the edge of the door, and the door stayed.

A man was waiting in the corridor with a folder and a Crane Meridian visitor-services badge. KERR, it said. Marcus knew him; the man’s shoulders told me that before either of them spoke.

“She’s coming back down through here inside the hour. You’ll let her through, you won’t slow her down, you won’t ask her a thing, and you don’t put a hand near that bag. Yeah?”

“That’s not my call, is it. I don’t run the lobby.” The folder came down off his chest.

“It’s mine, and I’ve just made it. Let’s hear you say it back.”

“Nobody’s touching her bag. Wasn’t going to.”

My face went hot, and not all of it was temper.

“Sixty-third floor. Go on up. Keep your copy of whatever you sign.”

He took his finger off the door. For the first time since I had stepped into the car, he did not look amused.

“One of us is going to think about this all the way down sixty-three floors, little courier, and it isn’t going to be you.”

The doors took him out of the frame an inch at a time. I rode the rest of the way up holding the bag against my hip and a man in the car who was not in the car.

Sixty-three had no smell.

Every building has one. Toner, carpet glue, somebody’s lunch, a man’s cologne going stale by four o’clock. That floor had been filtered until the air had no taste in it, and I stood there noticing that I was noticing.

Nobody behind the desk. White ceiling with the light off the water crawling around on it. On the credenza against the glass, orchids.

I counted them without deciding to. Twelve. Watered — the bark on top of the pots was dark and wet, somebody had done it that morning — and every one of them dead. Dry at the stem, brown at the throat, the blooms holding on out of habit.

Twelve dead things in a room where somebody was still doing the watering.

“These are dead,” I said.

“They are replaced on Fridays.” The woman had come up behind me without any sound at all. “Ms. Russo. This way, please.”

She said it the way other people say the trash goes out on Tuesdays. Around forty, French in the vowels, put together the way a room gets staged. Her eyes did not do anything while she talked.

“Mr. Elias Crane,” Mireille said. He was already standing when I came in. Mid-sixties, silver, a suit that had been built rather than bought. He was two feet back from the table and stayed there.

“Do not set the case on the floor,” she said. “On the table. The clasps, please. I will open it. He does not.”

So I set it down with the clasps turned toward her and took my hands off it.

She did all of it herself. Unclasped it, lifted the lid, moved the foam aside. The gray hide-bound book was the size of a hardback dictionary, its corners soft from handling, no title on the cover or spine. Her left hand hovered over it until I came level with the table. Then the covers parted.

A white scar crossed her palm. I looked down at my own left hand before I knew why.

“Ms. Russo. You have carried something remarkable for an entire afternoon and you did not open it. That is rarer than you would believe.”

His voice was courteous the whole way through, like a hand held out at exactly the right height.

“It’s the job.” My hands wanted somewhere to be and I put them in my pockets.