Three exits he could confirm. The windows on the second floor were old enough to open, and the fire escape was visible from the alley-side rooms. He could be out in under a minute if he needed to be.
Should have made him feel better. Didn't.
Because the truth, the ugly, inconvenient truth that Seth didn't want to look at, was that he had nowhere to go. His apartment had been sublet or abandoned months ago. His phone was gone, his ID was gone, his bank account had maybe forty dollars in it if the overdraft fees hadn't eaten that too. His mother was dead. His father might as well be. The handful of people he'd called friends before were friends who would sell your location for a fix.
One of them had. That was how Mercer's people had found him in the first place.
Seth sat on the edge of the bed and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw stars. He would not cry. He hadn't cried in the warehouse. He hadn't cried when they chained him to a workstation for sixteen hours. He hadn't cried when the guards hit him for being too slow, too mouthy, too much of a problem.
He was not going to cry now because a stranger had given him a bed with sheets on it
Lunch: refused.
Nate brought it up, a plate of something with rice and chicken that smelled like actual food, and Seth said he wasn't hungry. A lie. His stomach was eating itself. But taking food meant accepting something, and accepting things was how you built debts, and debts were how you lost control.
"Suit yourself," Nate said. He left the plate on the nightstand. "It'll be here when you change your mind."
Seth didn't touch it for two hours. Then he ate it so fast he nearly choked, standing over the plate like someone was going totake it away. When it was gone, he felt sick with the fullness and angry at himself for the weakness.
The empty plate went outside the door and he went back to sitting on the bed, watching the window, counting his options.
There were none
By evening, the house had a rhythm that Seth was beginning to learn against his will.
Marcus came and went, he seemed to live somewhere else, arriving for meetings and leaving when they were done. Ghost surfaced from the basement once, a slight man with dark circles under his eyes who looked at Seth the way you'd look at a variable in an equation, with interest but not warmth. He took a protein bar from the kitchen, exchanged three words with Zain ("Feeds are clean"), and vanished again.
Elijah materialized at dinner like a ghost himself. Seth hadn't heard him come in and couldn't figure out where he'd been. He was quieter than the others, not Ghost's wire-tense silence but something calmer, watchful, a man who kept his own counsel. He sat at the kitchen island cleaning a rifle with meditative focus, like rosary beads, and he didn't try to talk to Seth.
Seth appreciated that more than he could say.
Jack cooked again. Pasta this time, with a sauce that smelled like garlic and red wine and effort that didn't make sense in a safehouse full of criminals.
"You're staring," Jack said without looking up from the stove.
"You're a hitman who cooks."
"I'm a man who eats. There's a difference between being good at violence and being bad at everything else." He plated the pasta with more care than Seth expected. "My grandmother would rise from her grave and beat me with a wooden spoon if I served shit food."
"Your grandmother knew what you do?"
"My grandmother knew everything. She just didn't talk about it." Jack handed him a plate. "Eat. You look like a strong wind would snap you."
Seth took the plate. Sat at the island. Ate, this time, without the frantic desperation of the afternoon. The pasta was good, better than good. The kind of food that was made by someone who understood that feeding people was its own form of language.
Elijah finished with the rifle and started eating, still silent. Ghost's portion sat untouched on the counter. Jack shook his head at it, wrapped it in foil, and carried it to the basement door.
"He'll forget to eat for three days if you let him," Nate said, appearing from wherever he'd been. He dropped into a chair with boneless grace, tired but not showing it. "I keep a tally. My current record is convincing him to eat four meals in a row."
"That's... not a lot," Seth said.
"Welcome to Lakefront." Nate grinned. "We're all a little broken. Some of us just hide it better."
That night, Seth tried the window.
It opened. The fire escape was right there, rusted but solid, a straight shot down to the alley. Freedom. Thirty seconds.
He stood at the window for a long time. Cold air poured in, sharp with December, carrying the smell of exhaust and frozen earth and the distant chemical tang of the refinery. Somewhere a dog barked. A car alarm went off and was silenced. The city breathed its shallow, fitful breath.
