She waited for more. I didn't give her more. She nodded, and the opening in her face closed again, and the woman from the Delaware apartment was back. Guarded, contained, watching me even now, even exhausted, even standing in a room she didn't choose.
She tested the lock, turned it, heard it click, and turned it back.
"Right, okay. Bye bye now."
"Goodnight, vixen."
Her eyes narrowed. "Don't call me that."
"Don't throw lamps at people and they won't."
I pulled the door shut before she could respond and stood in the corridor listening until the lock clicked. Good. She was smart enough to use it.
I walked to my room. Three doors down, Claudio and Charlotte's light was off. I could feel my brother through the wall anyway, the twin frequency pinging, the way it always does when one of us has picked up something the other needs to know about. He'd been asleep for hours, Charlotte tucked against him, his arm over her waist. I'd walked in on it once. Claudio had looked at me with an expression that could curdle milk and I'd backed out so fast I'd hit the doorframe.
My room was the mess it always was. Clothes on the chair, a gun on the nightstand, two empty coffee cups I kept meaning to bring to the kitchen, a punching bag in the corner I'd hung myself because the compound gym was too far when the energy hit at three a.m. and I needed to put it somewhere.
I sat on the bed and pulled off my boots. The thud was louder than it should have been in a concrete building at this hour. I waited to see if I'd woken anyone. Nothing. The compound kept breathing.
I should call Leone. Check in. Report that the extraction went clean, that Savannah was secured, that we hadn't drawn attention on the drive back. But Leone was asleep with Alexandra, and the man had slept approximately nine hours in the last month since Aurelio's decline, and I wasn't going to wake him for information that could wait until morning.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The paint was cracking along the north wall. I'd been meaning to fix it for six months.
Savannah Cole, bartender hailing from Baltimore. Two weeks in a locked apartment. Threw a lamp at a stranger and then ate four plates of food without flinching and carried a bottle cap in her pocket the way other people carry photographs. She'd dropped intel about a marina and delivery schedules in a diner booth with the casual ease of a woman who'd been holding those cards for two weeks and had decided, right then, that I was worth showing one corner of her hand.
Not the whole hand. She was too smart for that. She'd given me enough to prove she had value and not enough to make herself disposable.
Leone wanted her intel. I was supposed to make her comfortable, earn her trust, get the information about whatever she'd overheard at the waterfront club.
Except nothing about the woman down the hall was going to be simple. She was profane and guarded and she looked at me with disdain in her eyes.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. Counted to ten. I do that when I'm trying to turn my brain off. It never works. Claudio can shut his mind down in seconds, one moment he's running seventeen problems, the next he's asleep, and the ability of it has made me want to scream since we were kids.
My brain doesn't shut down. It grabs hold of something and runs laps until the thing is worn out or I am, and right now the thing was a few rooms over.
I closed my eyes.
Behind my eyelids I could see the diner and the bad lighting and the coffee mug in her hands, the way her thumb worked against the ceramic the same way it worked against the bottle cap. The bitten nails. The way she'd said my name and hadn't smiled.
Fucking hell.
Chapter Two: Savannah
Idon'tsleep.
I lock the door, check it twice, check the window, and the bathroom, and then sit on the bed with my back against the headboard and my shoes on because if someone comes through that door I'm not fighting them barefoot.
The room is nicer than any apartment I've ever rented. That's not saying much. My apartment in Baltimore had a radiator that screamed every November and a shower that went cold after six minutes and a landlord who thought fixing things meant pretending they weren't broken. Before that, Gigi's house on South Ellwood. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, linoleum floors that peeled at the edges, and a kitchen window that faced the alley where Mr. Alex parked his Buick and swore at it every morning when it wouldn't start.
Gigi raised me in that house. Three jobs. Cleaned offices downtown from six to two, worked the register at the bodega on Pratt Street from three to seven, did alterations for the dry cleaner on weekends. She had hands that could crack walnuts, a mouth that made grown men cross the street, and an opinion about everything that she delivered whether you wanted it or not.
"Men," she told me once, standing at the stove frying catfish in a cast-iron pan older than both of us, "are useful or decorative. Rarely both. You find one that's both, you hold on. But you don't need one to survive. You hear me, baby? You don't need a goddamn one of them to breathe."
I heard her. I still hear her. Gigi's been dead for four years and her voice is the loudest thing in my head. Louder than the men who showed up at my apartment with zip ties. Louder than two weeks of nothing in a Delaware room. Louder than the grinning idiot who bought me pancakes at one in the morning and looked at me with that stupid fucking face of his.
I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the bottle cap. It's from the last bottle I opened on my last shift at Gigi's favorite bar, the one on Eastern Avenue where she used to drink Jameson on Fridays and tell the bartender he poured like a man with no wrists. The bar closed six months after she died. I kept the cap.
I press my thumb into the center of it and breathe.
