Chapter 20
RAVEN
Ididn't recognize who he was when he walked into The Silver Table that night, because his footsteps were different.
I was at the piano, mid-set, my fingers moving through Debussy's "Clair de Lune"—the second movement, where the left hand opens into arpeggios that shimmer like my memories of light on water.
Memories that fade more every day. The room was half-full.
Glasses clinked. A woman laughed near the bar.
Geoffrey's loafers squeaked as he crossed the dining room to greet a table.
Normal sounds. Normal night.
Except for Milo's footsteps, which were telling me absolutely nothing, and that alone told me everything.
He stopped at the edge of the platform. Close enough that I could smell him—dark ocean and clean soap, the same scent I'd pressed my face into last night when he held me and whispered things against my throat that I'd been replaying on a loop for the last fourteen hours.
But underneath the familiar, something was missing.
The warmth. That raw, unguarded layer that surfaced when his defenses dropped, when he was close enough for me to taste the truth of him on my tongue.
It was gone. Replaced by something sealed and airless, like a room that had been vacuumed shut.
"Time to go," he said.
The words were flat. Toneless. The verbal equivalent of a blank wall.
My fingers stilled on the keys. Something was wrong.
"My set isn't finished."
"It is now." His hand closed around my upper arm. Not gently. Not the way he usually touched me, letting me know he was there with a sound, a breath, a word. Something to give me time to map him into my space before his hands arrived.
Not tonight.
Tonight he grabbed me like I was a thing to be moved.
"Milo—"
"Don't." The word landed like a door slamming. "Get up. Don't make a scene. Leave the cane," he ordered when I grabbed for it.
"What?" My cane was my eyes. My compass. My independence reduced to a collapsible stick of aluminum and rubber, and he knew that. He knew exactly what asking me to leave it meant.
Without it, I was truly blind.
I stood. Not because I was obedient. Because the grip on my arm gave me no choice. He was already pulling me off the bench, and my hip caught the edge of the piano as he did, a flare of pain blooming through my side.
"You're hurting me."
He didn't respond.
I was walked through the restaurant at a fast pace.
My shoulder clipped a wall. My shin cracked against something metal—a table leg, maybe a stand—and I stumbled, and his hand tightened but he didn't slow down.
Didn't adjust his pace. Didn't murmur watch your step or chair to the left or any of the small navigational corrections that had become second nature between us.
He was stripping my world down. Piece by piece. Taking my dignity.
I wanted to believe this was something else. A fight we'd have later, something I'd said or hadn't said, some new pressure from Viktor that had turned him cold and mechanical.
But my body knew. The animal part of me—the part that lived closer to the surface since the accident, the part that tracked danger by scent and sound and the weight of attention on my skin—that part was already screaming a warning in my head.
Something had broken between us.
The night air hit my face and I smelled asphalt and exhaust. A car door opened and I was shoved inside.
My skull bounced off the frame as he pushed me in, and for a second the darkness behind my eyes went white with pain, sparks firing across the void like a faulty circuit board.
I reached for the opposite door handle on instinct—escape, orientation, something to hold—and found it locked.
Child locks. The back doors didn't open from the inside.
Milo got in the passenger seat, which meant someone else was driving, but I didn't recognize anything about them. There were no distinct sounds or smells. It was eerie.
The car started, and we pulled out of the parking lot.
I tried to track the turns. Left turn. Acceleration.
Highway on-ramp maybe? The texture of the road changed beneath the tires, becoming smoother, the ambient noise opening up as the city fell away.
We merged into traffic. Yes, we were on the highway.
The hum of other vehicles surrounded us, then thinned as we moved further from downtown.
"Where are we going?"
Silence.
"Milo. Talk to me."
Nothing. Just the road and the engine and his breathing, which was controlled in a way that frightened me more than the silence.
"Who's driving this car?"
More silence.
We drove for probably close to an hour before the highway ended and we turned onto a smaller road. It was rough and poorly maintained, the car bouncing over patches and potholes. Then gravel. The crunch of it under the tires was loud and uneven, and the car slowed to a crawl.
Then we stopped.
The driver killed the engine.
Silence rushed in. Not city silence, which was never truly silent.
There was always a siren somewhere, always a bass line thumping from a passing car, always the low-frequency hum of so many people existing within earshot.
This was different. This was empty. Open-air silence broken only by wind and insects and, somewhere distant, the wooden groan of a structure shifting in a breeze.
He opened my door and pulled me out.
The ground was uneven and my heels sank and twisted. I reached for his arm to steady myself, and he let me hold on just long enough to get my footing before pulling away.
He led me forward. Fifteen steps across the uneven ground, then a threshold metal, from the sound my shoes made crossing it—and the acoustics changed instantly.
Sounds now bounced off distant walls and a low ceiling.
An empty barn or warehouse, maybe? But where the hell would a warehouse be in the middle of nowhere?
But not entirely empty.
I heard him before I placed him. A shift of weight and the creak of a metal chair.
Then came the smell.
Cigarette smoke, vanilla and mint. The specific blend that had been embedded in Viktor's clothes for as long as I could remember.
The fear finally hit me then, and my blood turned to ice.
Viktor was here.
Viktor was sitting in a chair in this place in the middle of nowhere and Milo had brought me to him and—
The hand on my arm shoved me forward. I stumbled, caught myself, and then my knees hit something hard. Another chair. Metal and cold.
"Sit," Milo said.
I sat. Not because I chose to. Because my legs had stopped working.
My hands gripped the edges of the seat, and I shivered, the velvet material of my dress not nearly thick enough to keep me warm.
The metal was freezing and slightly rusted, the texture rough under my palms. I focused on the dimensions of the chair.
About eighteen inches wide, flat seat, no armrests.
The geometry of a thing I could understand in a world that had just become incomprehensible.
Milo's footsteps moved away from me, then stopped. Eight feet, maybe ten. I heard him exhale, low and controlled, and then—
A click. Something small and electronic.
A camera. He'd turned on a camera.
Oh god.
Video. Audio. Her voice on the recording, screaming. Begging.
I didn't know those words. Couldn't have known them. But something in the click of that device, the deliberate positioning, the way the room had been arranged—chair in the center, witness against the wall, camera rolling—told my body what my mind hadn't caught up to yet.
This was a stage.
And I was the performance.
"Raven Oakley." Viktor's voice came from somewhere in front of me to the righ of the camera. Calm. Conversational. The same measured tone he used when discussing wine shipments or reassigning shifts. "Do you know why you're here?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Swallowed against the thickness in my throat.
"No," I said. And hated how small it sounded.
"You've been listening to things that don't involve you," Viktor said. "For a long time, I think. Maybe since the beginning. Sitting at that piano, playing your music, but listening. You know what we really do at that restaurant, yes? And you've been telling someone else."
"I don't—"
"The question," Viktor continued, as if I hadn't spoken, "is who. Who do you give it to? Who is your contact?"
The air changed and shifted. Milo was moving toward me.
His hand closed around the back of my neck and tilted my face up. I could feel his breath on my face, warm and even, and for a fractured second I searched it for something—a tremor, a hesitation, some whisper of the man who'd held me last night and told me he loved me.
But there was nothing.
"You heard him."
His voice…I didn't know who this man was.
"Who's your contact?"
"I don't have a contact." My voice came out steady. It had no right to, given that my heart was hammering so hard I could hear my own pulse in my ears, a frantic drumbeat drowning out the subtler sounds I needed. "I don't know what you're talking about."
I tried to get up, and his hand tightened on my neck.
"The information you heard at the restaurant about the Freeport shipment.
The warehouse off FM 523. That information showed up in a DEA briefing.
" His voice was flat. Like he was reading from a script someone else had written.
"The conversation you overheard was a test. You were the only person who heard it. And you passed it to someone."
The test.
I'd known it was a test. I'd figured it out the night I heard it, standing in my kitchen with my hip throbbing from cracking against the drawer handle and my hands shaking so hard I'd had to press them flat against the counter. I'd known.
"I play the piano," I said. "That's all I do. I sit at the piano and I play, and if people choose to have conversations within earshot, that's not something I can control. But I'm not passing information to anyone. There's other people there all the time. It could be anyone."