Chapter 1 #2
The compound at four a.m. runs on a different frequency than the compound at noon.
At noon, it's soldiers and strategy and Leone holding the operation together with the stubbornness of a man who refuses to let the Don down. Aurelio's presence fills the upper floors, and the guards stand taller, and the hallways are always busy.
Now, it's corridors and the hum of lights nobody ever replaces and the occasional guard who straightens when he sees me coming and then relaxes when he realizes it's the twin who doesn't inspect their posture.
The place seems colder. The kitchen carries last night's garlic and the coffee someone left on too long.
The compound breathes at this hour, generators and ventilation and the low murmur of men who can't sleep properly after years of seeing death.
I got Savannah through the east entrance.
Carmelo peeled off toward his quarters without a word.
The man communicates primarily through the absence of communication.
Leone had arranged a room on the second floor.
Private bathroom, clean sheets, lock on the door that worked from the inside because we weren't animals.
Not entirely animals, that is.
I walked her up the stairs. She counted them. I saw her lips move. Fourteen steps to the second floor, a left turn, six doors down on the right. She was memorizing the route before I'd finished leading it.
Good girl.
"This one." I swiped the keycard and pushed the door open.
She walked in and stopped. She took in the window first, then door, then bathroom, then bed.
Four seconds. She'd know this room in the dark by the end of the night, and the fact that she was already building that knowledge told me more about what the Delaware apartment had done to her than anything she'd said at the diner.
Then she looked at me, standing in the doorway, and something in her face opened for half a second. Not softness, that's the wrong word. But the hard front dropped, and underneath was exhaustion so deep it pulled at her whole body. The kind of tired that isn't about sleep.
"Thank you," she sighed.
"There's water in the fridge, towels in the bathroom. If you need anything, I'm down the hall. Room seven."
"Room seven."
"Yeah."
"And the lock works?"
"From the inside. You're not a prisoner, Savannah. You're a guest."
"A guest." She tasted the word and didn't like it. "Guests can leave."
"You can leave whenever you want. But the men who locked you in that apartment are still out there, and they know you heard what you heard, and this compound is the safest place you're going to find until we deal with that."
"Deal with it how?"
"The way we deal with everything."
She waited for more. I didn't give her more. She nodded, and the opening in her face closed again, and the woman from the Delaware apartment was back. Guarded, contained, watching me even now, even exhausted, even standing in a room she didn't choose.
She tested the lock, turned it, heard it click, and turned it back.
"Right, okay. Bye bye now."
"Goodnight, vixen."
Her eyes narrowed. "Don't call me that."
"Don't throw lamps at people and they won't."
I pulled the door shut before she could respond and stood in the corridor listening until the lock clicked. Good. She was smart enough to use it.
I walked to my room. Three doors down, Claudio and Charlotte's light was off.
I could feel my brother through the wall anyway, the twin frequency pinging, the way it always does when one of us has picked up something the other needs to know about.
He'd been asleep for hours, Charlotte tucked against him, his arm over her waist. I'd walked in on it once.
Claudio had looked at me with an expression that could curdle milk and I'd backed out so fast I'd hit the doorframe.
My room was the mess it always was. Clothes on the chair, a gun on the nightstand, two empty coffee cups I kept meaning to bring to the kitchen, a punching bag in the corner I'd hung myself because the compound gym was too far when the energy hit at three a.m. and I needed to put it somewhere.
I sat on the bed and pulled off my boots. The thud was louder than it should have been in a concrete building at this hour. I waited to see if I'd woken anyone. Nothing. The compound kept breathing.
I should call Leone. Check in. Report that the extraction went clean, that Savannah was secured, that we hadn't drawn attention on the drive back.
But Leone was asleep with Alexandra, and the man had slept approximately nine hours in the last month since Aurelio's decline, and I wasn't going to wake him for information that could wait until morning.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The paint was cracking along the north wall. I'd been meaning to fix it for six months.
Savannah Cole, bartender hailing from Baltimore.
Two weeks in a locked apartment. Threw a lamp at a stranger and then ate four plates of food without flinching and carried a bottle cap in her pocket the way other people carry photographs.
She'd dropped intel about a marina and delivery schedules in a diner booth with the casual ease of a woman who'd been holding those cards for two weeks and had decided, right then, that I was worth showing one corner of her hand.
Not the whole hand. She was too smart for that. She'd given me enough to prove she had value and not enough to make herself disposable.
Leone wanted her intel. I was supposed to make her comfortable, earn her trust, get the information about whatever she'd overheard at the waterfront club.
Except nothing about the woman down the hall was going to be simple. She was profane and guarded and she looked at me with disdain in her eyes.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.
Counted to ten. I do that when I'm trying to turn my brain off.
It never works. Claudio can shut his mind down in seconds, one moment he's running seventeen problems, the next he's asleep, and the ability of it has made me want to scream since we were kids.
My brain doesn't shut down. It grabs hold of something and runs laps until the thing is worn out or I am, and right now the thing was a few rooms over.
I closed my eyes.
Behind my eyelids I could see the diner and the bad lighting and the coffee mug in her hands, the way her thumb worked against the ceramic the same way it worked against the bottle cap. The bitten nails. The way she'd said my name and hadn't smiled.
Fucking hell.