Chapter 6 #3
"Mr. Dane. We've been expecting you." Sasha, her tag said.
She slid a folio across the marble like we'd done this a hundred times.
She knew exactly who I was. Whatever my brothers were running in this town, the Palmetto Rose was wired into it, and Sasha was part of the wiring.
She was good—warm, smooth, not one question in her.
I was signing my name, the same name I almost never get to use, when I remembered my phone.
I'd shut it off leaving Germany. Habit. A dark phone can't be a leash and can't be a beacon.
I like to fly the way I like to do everything, off the grid, accountable to nobody but the man I'm carrying.
I pulled it out and thumbed it on and watched it wake, expecting nothing.
Or expecting Ken—a one-line follow-up, maybe.
The only man above me with anything to say.
It wasn't Ken.
It was a name out of another season. A quieter one. From before the worst of anything, before federal trouble and silent brothers and cars that cost more than houses. A softer stretch of a hard life—the kind you never know was the good part until you're standing a long way past it.
Magnolia.
Mags, to me. Only ever Mags.
And the message under her name, sitting there since I'd been somewhere over the ocean dreaming about a dead man, said she was in Charleston.
Charleston.
Fucking Charleston.
I looked up at the ceiling and shook my head, slow, at a universe I'd quit expecting to make sense a long time ago, and that still, every so often, found a way to surprise even me.
Sasha glanced up, too, following my eyes like she expected to find a stain spreading across the plaster.
"Everything all right, Mr. Dane?"
"Fine." I brought my eyes back down. "The universe just has a funny sense of humor."
She gave me the look. I know the look. It isn't rude—Sasha was too well-trained for rude—it's just the look people give me when whatever I've said lands a quarter-inch outside the world they live in. A small recalibration behind the eyes. They don't get me. They never do.
That's all right. No one gets me. Not really.
Except her.
That was the whole problem, standing there with a key folio in my hand and rain on my collar.
Mags got me. From the first, in a way no living soul in my life ever has—she looked at me and didn't take the step back.
Didn't go careful. Didn't file me under the things that frighten the comfortable.
She looked at me like a man. Like the strangeness was just weather, and she'd brought a coat.
And that was the one thing I couldn't be anywhere near.
Because a woman who can see you all the way down is the one woman who can cost you something.
Everyone else nods from the edge of the light and keeps their distance and lets me go on being what I am—alone, clean, free to do the work.
Mags wouldn't keep her distance. Mags would walk all the way in.
And I'd spent my whole life making sure there was nobody on this side of the door whose loss could reach me, because the day one of them can reach me is the day I'm no good to the dead.
I gave her a coin once. In a parking lot. Instead of the thing we both knew I wanted to give her. I closed her fingers over it and stepped back. It was the hardest decent thing I ever did. I did it for her, whether she ever understood it or not.
I wasn't going to answer the text. Not now.
Maybe not ever. Best for her if the name on her phone stayed exactly what it had always been—a man who didn't write back.
A closed door she could lean on a while and then, finally, walk away from, toward some life that made sense.
A life I'd never be able to give her, and would never drag her into.
She had no idea what my days were made of. God willing, she never would.
I put the phone in my pocket, the screen gone dark.
"Your key, Mr. Dane." Sasha set it on the marble. "Anything at all, any hour—you call down."
I took it and thanked her. I rode up alone, and let myself into a room that probably cost more for the night than I spent on myself in a season.
Good linens. A window full of wet rooftops.
The rain still going. I set my pack in the corner, the same corner I set it in every room in every country.
I settled on the one thing I was sure of: a long, hot shower was exactly what the doctor ordered.
Wash off the flight and the tarmac and Aleppo and the whole drowned week of it.
I stood under the water a long time.
And the whole while, I couldn't get her out of my head.
Mags in this city. Mags somewhere out past the wet window, close enough to drive to. Mags, who'd texted a man she had every reason to write off, and signed it I hope you're well, like I'd ever once given her cause to wish me anything.
Dammit.
Twenty-four hours ago, I'd been kneeling on a floor in Aleppo, putting a hero in a bag, and my life had been the simplest thing in the world. One job. One door. One man to carry home. Clean.
Now, there were brothers in trouble I couldn't yet see the shape of, a woman in a van counting my steps, a car worth a fortune I could have for the asking, and a name on my phone I'd spent a long time trying not to think about—sitting minutes away, in the rain.
Damn.