“Yes. I’ve been for three years.” I paused. “You can check if you want. I’m not hiding anything.”
“I wasn’t asking if you were.”
The events of the alley were already acquiring the slightly unreal quality of things that happened to other people—the arms around me, the car door, the sound of someone hitting the ground —and underneath all of it was the knowledge that nothing had actually been solved.
“Tonight,” he said, “you sleep. Tomorrow, we talk about options.”
We.
That word landed somewhere in my chest and sat there.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked.
He held my gaze. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he uttered in a level tone, “I was there.”
Not quite knowing what to say in response, I swallowed.
I sat in a stranger’s suite in the small hours of the morning with a bruised wrist and half my stage makeup still on, and somewhere beneath the fear and the exhaustion, something else was moving. Something warm and dangerous and entirely inconvenient.
I didn’t understand it yet. I only knew that when I finally looked away from the window and back at him, he was still watching me with those quiet, unreadable eyes.
Okay, I’m drawn to him.
Somewhere between his unreadable expression and his fierce aura, I found myself wanting to be closer to him. His presence was both comforting and unsettling, I didn’t know how to explain it. While I didn’t fully understand the tension between us, I knew I couldn’t ignore it. I should keep my distance, yes. But it seemed like fear and exhaustion seemed to be responsible for lowering my defenses.
I don’t know this man.
But, regardless of what I did(or didn’t do) something was sure: This night was the beginning of a change that might be irreversible—I just didn’t know if that would be to my salvation or devastation yet. I just didn’t want to leave.
Chapter Two — Mikhail
I had not intended to be on that street.
Of all the routes between the Golovin Casino’s private exit and the Meridian—the hotel I kept off the books, the one that didn’t appear on any ledger connected to my name—that particular alley was a deviation of approximately four minutes. It was a detour I had made on instinct, or maybe something bigger masquerading as instinct.
I had saved her life by accident.
That was what I told myself, standing in the elevator with the girl, her jaw set with the particular determination of someone refusing to let themselves fall apart in front of a stranger.
I watched as he moved carefully like she was wary of leaving marks.
I noticed the way she didn’t touch anything she didn’t have to, as though she had done years of careful calculation about what she was and was not entitled to occupy. She stood in the center of the living room with her bag held against her body and looked at the city through the windows, and I watched her take the measure of it the way people took the measure of beautiful things they expected to be temporary.
I poured the drinks because she needed something to do with her hands and because I needed the few seconds of distance to collect myself.
In thirty years of operating in a world built almost entirely of calculation and concealment, I had become very good at reading people. Not the broad strokes—anyone with functional instincts could read broad strokes—but the details. The microexpressions. The tells that people didn’t know they had. The particular way someone’s eyes moved when they were constructing a story versus retrieving a true one. You learned these things when your survival, and the survival of the people who depended on you, rested on your ability to know within seconds whether the person across from you was lying.
She is not lying.
I knew it before she’d spoken three sentences. There was no architecture to her story, no rehearsed phrasing, no careful sequencing designed to guide me toward a particular conclusion. She told it the way people told true things: haltingly, with the small embarrassments intact, doubling back to clarify details that didn’t help her case. She told me she’d been naïveabout the interest rates without attempting to soften it or reframe it as victimhood. She just said it.
“I didn’t understand what compounding meant. Not the way it works when the people you’re borrowing from aren’t a bank.”
In my world, innocence was not merely uncommon. It was functionally extinct.
I had not encountered it in so long that I had stopped expecting it. And there it was, sitting across from me in the remnants of stage makeup, holding a glass of whiskey she hadn’t touched, telling me the truth about her life with the weary honesty of someone who had nothing left to protect by lying.
It made her the most dangerous person I had dealt with in years. Not that I had any reason to tell her that.
