CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Nadia — Ten Days
We didn’t talk about the kiss right away, both of us too busy being alive to examine it properly, but it sat between us for the rest of that day like something warm we kept returning to without meaning to — his hand finding the small of my back as we left the club, my fingers curling into his sleeve on the drive back to Sable’s, small gravities neither of us fought very hard against.
Sable, to her credit, said nothing about it beyond a single raised eyebrow when we walked in still slightly too close together, and went straight back to the business of keeping us alive, which felt like the correct set of priorities given everything else happening around us.
“Renata’s not going to come at you directly again,” she said, spreading a set of notes across the table. “Not after today. A woman that controlled doesn’t repeat a failed approach. She’ll pivot to leverage — people you care about, people softer targets than either of you.”
“Priya,” I said immediately, the fear arriving before I’d fully finished the thought. “Ruth.”
“Both, possibly. I’ve already got someone watching Ruth’s place in Connecticut, discreetly. Priya’s trickier — she’s been visible in this from the start, which means she’s already a known variable to whoever’s running Renata’s operational side now that Vane’s compromised.”
“Vane’s compromised?” Kael asked, sharp.
“He didn’t show at the club today. That’s not like him — Renata doesn’t run meetings like that without her second in the room, and Vane’s always been the one standing quietly by the door in every account I’ve ever gotten of how she operates.
Either she cut him out deliberately, or something happened to him.
” Sable’s expression was grim. “Neither answer is good news for us.”
I thought about Elias Vane’s voice on the phone, unhurried, always performing a kind of detached amusement about the whole affair — and about the one moment that performance had cracked, the day he’d told me, almost gently, to ask Kael the question that would end all of this.
It had felt, even then, like something more complicated than a villain delivering a threat.
“I don’t think Vane’s fully on her side,” I said slowly. “I think he’s been managing this the way a man manages a job he doesn’t entirely believe in anymore.”
“That’s a generous read on a man who’s spent two weeks terrorizing you with anonymous cards,” Kael said, though there was no real heat in it — more the reflex of a man whose instinct was still to stand between me and every possible danger, even a hypothetical one.
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s the only person in this whole thing who’s actually told me the truth every time he’s had the chance to, even when the truth wasn’t flattering to himself.
” I looked between them both. “I think if things go badly for Renata, Vane’s the kind of man who cuts his losses and lands somewhere useful.
I think that might be worth understanding better before we assume he’s only ever going to be an enemy. ”
Sable considered that, weighing it the way she weighed everything.
“I’ll look into it. Carefully. In the meantime—” she slid a burner phone across the table toward me “—Priya needs to know she’s a target, and she needs to know it from you, not from me finding out too late that something’s already happened. ”
I called Priya that night, and told her everything, and listened to her go quiet in the way that told me she was doing the math on exactly how frightened to let herself be.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Tell me what to do.”
“Stay somewhere Sable’s people can watch. Just for ten days. I know it’s a lot to ask—”
“You didn’t ask me to sit at the bar at Solano’s either, and I did that without blinking,” she said, and I could hear, underneath the bravado, real fear held carefully in check. “I’m not going anywhere, Nadia. Not the apartment, not the city, not you. Just tell me where to be, and I’ll be there.”
I hung up feeling both safer and more afraid, the two feelings no longer opposites in a life that had stopped making that kind of clean distinction weeks ago.