Chapter 21
NORA
The estate has a sauna, naturally, a cedar box off the pool house that I avoided for two months because using it felt like admitting I live here. Then it got cold, the real Calabasas cold that nobody back home believes is real. I gave in, and now it's mine.
Tonight I'm in it after a long day at Halo, the heat working the ache out of my shoulders, the cedar smell thick enough to chew, the low light coming off the one amber bulb in the corner.
I've got a towel and not much under it, a glass of water sweating on the bench.
I'm almost asleep sitting up when the door opens, letting in a knife of cold air, and my husband.
"This is occupied," I tell him, not opening my eyes.
"It's my sauna."
"It's our sauna, and right now it's mine. You're letting the cold in. Close the door or leave."
He closes the door. He doesn't leave. I crack one eye and he's already stripped to a towel of his own, settling onto the bench across from me.
The amber light slides slow down all of him, the broad of his shoulders, the dark hair on his chest going damp already, the old scar low on his ribs, the heavy muscle of his thighs where the towel gives up.
He sits back against the cedar and lets the heat take him, his head tipped, his throat working on a slow breath. I forget I was almost asleep.
"You're staring," he says, eyes shut.
"It's my sauna. I can stare at whatever's in it."
"You said it was our sauna."
"I've reconsidered." The heat is doing something to my voice, dropping it.
Sweat's tracking down between my breasts, down the dip of my spine.
Across the cedar he's gone shining with it, a bead sliding from his collarbone down the center of his chest, and my eyes ride it the whole way down, past his stomach, to the towel riding his hipbones and what it isn't quite covering, before I can be bothered to stop them. "You came in here on purpose."
"You've been in here forty minutes. I came to see if you'd died." He opens his eyes. They find me through the low light, dark and unhurried. "You haven't. You look extremely alive."
"It's the heat."
"Mm." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, close enough now that the air between us is its own furnace, his eyes dropping to my mouth and back up. "You've been staring at my cock for ten minutes. The room's not doing that to you."
"Maybe it's the light."
"It's the cedar getting to your head. There's no good light in here at all."
"It's never the light." He reaches across the gap and hooks one finger in the top of my towel, his knuckle warm against my sternum, holding me there without a single tug. My whole body goes to liquid in a way the heat can't account for. "Say it's not the light."
I lean into the finger instead of answering. He makes a low sound, his other hand sliding up to cradle the side of my face. We're a breath apart in a cedar box at a hundred and ninety degrees, both of us slick, both of us done pretending. His mouth is almost on mine.
His phone goes off on the bench outside the door.
We both freeze. He's got a hand on my face and a finger in my towel. His eyes squeeze shut, his whole body going still while he holds onto the last of the want before he has to put it down.
"Leave it," I breathe.
"It's the Lev ringtone." He's already pulling back, the soldier coming up over the man like a shade drawn down, because the Lev ringtone at this hour means something's wrong. "Lev doesn't call at night to chat. He doesn't chat."
He's out the door and into the cold with the towel barely hanging on. I sit in the hot ruin of the almost, swearing at a metals dealer in Glendale who will never know how close I came. Through the cracked door I hear my husband's voice go flat, quiet, dangerous, and the night turns.
He comes back in but he doesn't sit. He stands in the doorway with the cold pouring past him and his face has changed, the want scrubbed off it, replaced by the other thing, the work face.
"What?" I say, sitting up, the heat suddenly wrong on my skin.
"Two things." He says it level, the voice he uses to make a bad thing small enough to hold.
"The first is your rescue. Halo. The grant that fixed the roof, the anonymous one Maggie's been thanking God for.
It's been pulled. The foundation that gave it dissolved last week, no warning, and they want it back, all of it.
Maggie's been on the phone with Marisol for an hour trying not to come apart. "
The bottom drops out of my stomach. Maggie kept that shelter's roof over a hundred animals for seven years on nothing. That grant was the first easy breath she's had in a decade.
I call Marisol before he's even finished, and she picks up on half a ring, which tells me how bad it is.
"You heard," she says. No hello.
"Isaak just told me. How's Maggie?"
"Bad, Nora. Real bad. She's in the office with the lights off, telling everyone she's fine, adding the same column of numbers over and over like this time it'll come out different.
" Marisol's voice is doing its own pretending.
"They want sixty grand back by the end of the month.
She already spent it. It's a roof. You can't give a roof back. "
"What do the lawyers say?" I don't wait for the answer. "The foundation can't just claw it back, there are rules."
"There are always rules until somebody with money decides there aren't." A breath. "She asked me not to tell you. She said you've got enough on your plate, married into all that. She doesn't want you fixing it. You know how she is."
"I know how she is." I'm already pacing the bedroom in a half-buttoned shirt, the cold of the bad news worse than the cold of the sauna door.
"Mari. Don't let her sign anything tonight.
Don't let her decide anything at midnight in the dark.
Tell her I'm coming in tomorrow and we're going to look at it with clear eyes. "
"She's going to say no."
"Let her say no. I'll be there at eight anyway."
Marisol is quiet a second. "You can't pour money on this. She'll never take it, and even if she did, it'd break something between you."
"I know. I'm not going to throw money at her.
" It's the truth. It's also the first time it's occurred to me that the man down the hall could make sixty thousand dollars disappear before breakfast without noticing, and that I won't ask him to.
Maggie's pride is the only thing she's got left, and I'd sooner lose the roof than take it.
"I'm going to help her fight it. There's a difference. "
"There's a difference," Marisol agrees, like she's not sure there is, and we hang up.
"That's not a coincidence," I say. "Grants don't just evaporate."
"No. They don't." He's watching my face.
"The second thing. Lev had a man on your car this week, light, just watching, since the thing with the fence.
Tonight that man watched somebody else watch you.
A gray sedan, no plates that come back to anyone, sitting outside Halo for both your shifts, then following you to the property line and peeling off before the gate. "
He lays it out flat and even, the way he reads me anything he's already decided how to handle. "Somebody's on you, Nora. Has been for a while. And now somebody's reached into your rescue to pull the floor out from under it in the same week."
I pull the towel tighter, the heat gone clammy. "You think they're connected."
"I think it's the same hand. I don't know whose.
" He crouches in the doorway so we're level, the cold and the heat warring across the threshold between us.
"I need you to do something you're going to hate.
I need you to not go anywhere alone. Not Halo, not the feed store, not the end of the driveway.
Until I know who's driving the gray car, you take Grigor or you take me. "
"I run toward burning barns. You said it yourself."
"I know what you do." His hand finds my knee, and for once there's no game in it, just a man trying to keep the one thing he can't replace inside a wall he's not sure is high enough.
"I spent my whole life being told where the fence was, Isaak. My dad, then Brandon, then a debt with my name on it. I married you partly so nobody got to draw that line for me again." I'm not yelling. I want him to hear it. "Now you want to draw one."
"I know. I heard you say it on a porch in the dark, the night you signed the contract.
Nobody decides for you again." He doesn't look away.
"I'm not deciding. I'm telling you what I see, the car, the foundation, your father's name surfacing in the same week, and I'm asking you to decide differently than you would on instinct.
That's not a fence. That's me handing you the map and asking you to read it with me. "
"And if I say no."
"Then you say no, and I lose my mind quietly.
I put four more men where you can't see them and pray.
" A muscle in his hand tightens against my knee.
"I'd rather you choose the safe thing than make me choose it for you behind your back.
Which I'll do. I'm telling you that too, because you taught me not to lie to you.
If you won't watch your own back, I'll watch it for you in ways you won't like. "
It should make me furious, the threat folded into the honesty. Instead it does the opposite, because he told me the truth about the part where he'd go behind my back, when the easy thing was to swear he wouldn't.
"That's why I'm asking instead of ordering," he says, quieter. "You taught me to ask. So I'm asking. Please."
The please ends me, the way it always does. He hands that word out about twice a year, and never to win an argument.
"Okay," I say. "Okay. Grigor or you. For now. But the second you put a man on me without telling me, the deal's off, and I will find a way out of this house that would scare you. We clear?"
"Clear." Something in his shoulders comes down. "Thank you."
He exhales like he was braced for a fight and lost the will for it.
He gets me up off the bench, wraps me in the robe off the door, and we go inside.
I'm still flushed from more than the heat, wet in a way the cedar steam isn't responsible for, and I'm having a very specific conversation with my own body about what just didn't happen.
The sauna sits behind us with the almost still hanging in the cedar steam, unfinished, the first thing all night that was going right and the first thing the dark interrupted.
Tessa calls while I'm getting dressed.
I almost don't pick up, because it's late and I'm rattled. She's my oldest friend, she's been off lately, and I keep meaning to fix it, so I answer.
"Hey, you," she says, bright, too bright, the warmth arriving a half-beat after the words instead of inside them, the way it's been doing for weeks now. "I heard about Halo. Mari told me. God, that's awful, your poor Maggie. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. Maggie's the one I'm worried about."
"Of course, of course." A pause. "Listen, random question, totally random.
I was thinking about your dad the other day, about the ranch, all his stuff.
Did he keep his old trophies? The cutting-horse ones, the silver.
He was so proud of those. Do you still have them, or did they go in the estate sale? "
The question sits wrong in my ear, and I don't know why. I've learned not to ignore that feeling. Tessa's known me since we were twelve. She's been to the ranch a hundred times. She'd know my father never put a single thing of his up for sale, that I'd sooner sell a kidney.
"Why are you asking about my dad's trophies?" I say.
"No reason. I just, I don't know, I saw something silver in a shop and it made me think of him.
" There it's again, that fraction of a beat where she reaches for the fond tone and has to find it instead of just having it, the same off-rhythm I keep catching from her lately.
"I'm being weird. Long week. I miss you, that's all.
We never see each other anymore now that you're a fancy Calabasas wife. "
"Yeah," I say. "We should fix that."
We say the things you say and we hang up.
I stand in my bedroom in a billionaire's house holding a phone gone quiet, and I tell myself it's nothing.
My oldest friend asked a sad nostalgic question about my dead father, and I'm seeing ghosts because somebody's been following my car.
That's the reasonable version. I put it down where I put things.
It doesn't stay down. Tessa asked about the trophies. The silver ones. The ones in the box I keep in the tack room and won't open, the box I haven't been able to make myself go through since the day I packed it. And her voice did the thing again, the affection arriving a step behind the words.
For the first time I let myself notice that I've stopped quite trusting the sound of my oldest friend, and I have no idea why.
Not knowing why is worse than any reason would be.
I go to bed with two cold facts I can't connect, a gray car and a silver question.
I lie awake a long time deciding I'm imagining the line between them. In the end I don't.