Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Alex
The door leads to a small bathroom. It’s smaller than I remember it being, but then again, right now the entire building feels all too small, like a prison cell I can’t escape.
Or maybe it just feels smaller because I have my hand clamped over my mouth, and the sound of my own heartbeat racing in my chest seems so deafening, I’m sure the men will hear it.
I pulled the door shut softly and slowly until I felt the latch catch, and then I stopped moving entirely, because moving makes sound, and sound is like a GPS beacon right now.
I don't breathe, I don’t move, I just listen. The footsteps scuff the floor outside, eventually stopping outside the door.
I count. Thirty seconds. Forty. Forty-five.
The seconds stretch out long and elastic the way they do when your body has decided that time is a resource, and it's going to spend every unit of it registering every possible threat.
A voice, low and very obviously male, says something I can't make out through the muffling of the door.
Another voice answers, shorter, more clipped.
Then silence for a moment, and then the footsteps move on. I stand in the dark and count to sixty, and then count to sixty again because I am not stupid, and I am not going out there prematurely just to die in a dirty club at three in the morning over two minutes of lack of patience.
When I finally crack the door open, it's barely an inch.
The corridor is empty in both directions, and I slip out, easing the door back to where I found it, and start moving toward the east exit with my back against the wall, my footsteps as quiet as years of hard floors in unstable places have taught me to make them.
I'm almost to the turn in the corridor when I see the light from the main floor, and I stop. I spot two men standing near the bar.
And between them, on the floor, there is a body, a very dead body.
The breath leaves my chest in a soft gasp.
I’ve seen a body before. More than one, honestly.
I grew up inside a world where bodies were sometimes the punctuation at the end of certain kinds of sentences, where you learned early not to look too long, not to make a sound, not to let your face process what your eyes were seeing in any way that could be observed and used against you.
I was good at it. I got very good at it.
And then I left that world, and I spent three years building enough distance between myself and it that I thought — I genuinely believed — that I had gotten far enough away that this particular thing would never find me again.
But here I stand, in a dirty club, eyes locked on that body, with my hands shaking with fear.
In an attempt to make it stop, I press them flat against the wall and tell myself to move. Back up. Slowly. Find another route to the exit. Do anything except stand here in the mouth of this corridor, processing a sight I have no business processing in a place I have no business being.
I almost make it when one of the men turns around, his eyes falling on me instantly.
He's tall, broad, muscular, judging by the width of his shoulders, dressed in a fitted shirt the way that fine clothes fit men who have them made rather than bought.
He has a gun in his hand, and he raises it before I've finished registering that I've been spotted.
His voice when he speaks is completely conversational, the voice of a man who has done this so many times that the gun is just to make a point.
"Come here," he says.
I don't move.
"I said come here." The gun adjusts slightly, clarifying the instruction. "Now."
My legs move before my brain finishes understanding the sentence, operating on the survival logic that has kept me alive through things that should have gone differently.
Comply. Assess. Wait for the opening. I walk out of the corridor, stopping ten feet from him with my hands visible at my sides, my face as empty as I can make it, and I look at him, then I look at the other man.
The other man is the one who frightens me.
Not because of what he's doing, which is nothing — he's standing with his hands loose at his sides and his weight balanced and his expression entirely, completely still.
He's frightening because of the quality of that stillness.
The one has a gun and is using it to conduct a conversation, which means I understand what the gun is for and what he intends it to accomplish.
The other man has nothing visible and needs nothing visible.
I understand this the moment I look at him, in the same bone-deep wordless way I understood what was on the floor.
He's taller than the blond one by an inch or two, darker, built like something that was specifically designed for its purpose.
Dark brown hair, pale blue eyes that register wrong at first, too pale, too still, like someone who belongs in a very cold place.
Tattoos at his throat running beneath his shirt all the way down to his hands.
A scar down the left side of his face that is old enough to have settled into the skin like it was always there.
He isn't looking at the blond man or the body or the door or anything in the room except me.
"Who are you?" the blond one asks pointedly.
"Cleaning crew." My voice comes out with a steadiness I don’t feel. I’m proud of the way my voice doesn’t quiver despite the fear in my chest. "I work for the service that contracts with the club.
I have a badge, I can show you—" I reach slowly toward my pocket.
"I was covering a shift tonight, I heard something, I hid thinking someone had broken in, I was just trying to find the exit. "
"Name."
"Alex. Alex Riggs."
He looks at me the way you look at something you're deciding what to do with. "What did you see exactly, Alex?"
"Nothing. I heard a sound and I found the nearest door and I stayed there.
I didn't come out until the corridor was quiet.
" All of it is true. None of it is sufficient.
I can see that it isn't sufficient in the way he's looking at me and in the way the other man is still scrutinizing me in silence. "I wasn't trying to—"
"She's seen the body," the blond one says. Not to me. To the other man, like I've already been reclassified from person to situation.
"Yes," the other man says. One word, low and accented, Russian maybe, underneath the English.
"Then you know what that means."
"I know what you think it means," the other man says, and something in his tone shifts, something so subtle I almost miss it — not warmth, not reassurance, just a correction, the kind a person makes when they've already made a decision and are simply informing the rest of the room of it.
The blond looks at him quizzically. Something unspoken passes between them that I can't read, and I don't try to because I’m too busy calculating the distance to every exit, against the position of the gun.
Then the blond one turns back to me with a smile that doesn't reach anything above his mouth.
"You are very unlucky tonight," he says, pleasantly, like he's commenting on the weather. "Wrong place. Wrong time. Very bad combination." He tilts his head. "I think I'm going to have to—"
"She'll clean it up." The brown-haired one says.
His words shock me; he's looking at me with total attention, like I'm a problem he's already solved and is now simply implementing.
"She's here to clean," he says. "She has the equipment. She knows how to be quiet." A pause, short and precise. "It's the practical solution."
"I—"
"It wasn't a question," he says.
The blond one — Pavel, the other man calls him, short and flat — looks between us.
He doesn't like this. I can see him not liking it in the set of his jaw, and the way his eyes cut sideways, and then pull back.
Then he steps back, gesturing toward the body on the floor with the gun, the casual gesture of a man indicating a spill he expects someone else to clean up, because that is exactly what this is to him.
"Fine," he says. "Clean it up."
I go back to the corridor for my bucket and my supplies because the alternative is finding out what Pavel was about to say before he was interrupted, and I have Evie at home. And a promise I made to her that I intend to keep.
My hands are shaking when I come back.
I make them work. I have cleaned up things I didn't want to clean up before.
I have done it the same way I do everything that needs doing, regardless of whether I want to do it — mechanically, without looking at it too directly, without letting my brain fully name what my hands are touching.
But the shaking won't stop, and the memories won't stay where I've put them, and the floor of this nightclub keeps trying to become other floors I've kneeled on in other rooms. But I keep pulling myself back, back to this room, this bucket, this task, the specific physical reality of now.
I've seen too many bodies in my life. I was supposed to be done with this. I promised myself I was done with this.
"Your hands," the other man says from somewhere behind and to my left.
"Are fine," I say. "Don't talk to me."
He doesn't say anything else. The silence from his direction is worse than if he'd argued. I'm halfway through when the sirens start.
Distant at first, just a soft whirling sound.
Then closer. Then close enough to make the matter urgent.
Pavel says something in Russian, and the other man answers.
There's a brief exchange I can only partially follow — my Russian has never been particularly good, and three years of not using it hasn't helped.
— A quick exchange, and Pavel turns to leave.
“Ukhodi. Ya razberus,” Victor says. Low. Final. Non-negotiable.
Pavel turns to leave.