So we negotiated. She haggled over her own protection like it was a used car. I let her win every part that didn't matter and none that did. She would keep her shifts; I would put men on the hospital. The apartment stayed hers; my people would turn it into something a locksmith would weep over. She wanted no one stationed inside her home; I agreed, and saw no reason to mention the small camera that would watch her hallway, because some victories travel better in silence. She insisted on driving her own car; I informed her the car was now mine and she was welcome to drive it, which she chose to hear as a yes.
"My turn," she said, and raised one finger, and I understood that every rule so far had been mine. "One. You don't lie to me. Not even the kind of lie people dress up as protecting me. Ifthere's a camera on my hallway, you say so. To my face. Before I find it myself."
I considered the camera I had just declined to mention. "Agreed," I said, and resolved to mention it.
"Two. Nobody touches my patients. Your people stay out of my hospital's business. Whatever is happening to me, those beds are off the board."
"Done."
"Three." Her voice thinned, the bravado wearing through at last. "When it's over, you go. Whatever this turns into. I get my life back, the boring one, with the bad locks and the worse sleep, and you don't get to decide you like it here."
I looked at her a moment. It was the simplest promise anyone had ever asked of me, and the first I suspected I would not keep.
"Agreed."
"And who, exactly, is going to trail me around like an enormous duckling?"
On cue, because the boy has either no sense of timing or a perfect one, Petya rapped on the open door and came in beaming, all shoulders and good intentions, and put his hand out to her as though they were meeting at a wedding.
"Petya. I'm your detail. I already know you take the stairs even after a double because you don't trust that elevator, you tip the cart man on Lafayette even the mornings he forgets your napkins, and you apologize to the vending machine when you bump it. Which I personally find very classy."
She looked at him, then at me. "He's been watching me too."
"He has been getting to know your habits, so that no one worse can. It is not the same thing, whatever your face is doing."
"It really isn't." But something in her shoulders dropped half an inch, because Petya has that effect on the frightened. He isimpossible to fear, which is the entire reason I keep him close to the people I need to stop being afraid.
"He can't follow me onto the floor," she said. "A man this size in my trauma bay, and every patient on it decides they're the emergency."
"He will not wear the suit. He will wear scrubs, push a supply cart, and be the most useless orderly your hospital has ever carried on its payroll. The rest of my men you will not see at all. That is the part you are paying for, and since you are paying nothing, you may as well take the good version."
"The good version." She turned it over, and almost smiled. "You really have done this before."
"More times than I would like. Fewer than I have needed to."
Her phone rang while we were still litigating whether a man could stand in her kitchen or only her hall. She looked at the screen and her whole face rearranged itself, every spike folding down into something years younger.
"It's my abuela. Don't say a word. Don't even breathe loudly near the phone."
She answered in Spanish, warm and quick, and I followed enough to track the shape of it, the reassurances, the small mercies a granddaughter hands a grandmother so the old woman can sleep. Then a silence. Then her eyes slid to me, narrow and deeply betrayed, and she said a sentence with my name buried somewhere in it.
"She wants to talk to you." She held the phone out like it had turned on her. "I don't know how she knows about you. I didn't say anything."
I took it. I have sat across tables from men who keep blades in their sleeves. I was not braced for Marisol Castillo.
"You are the one keeping my granddaughter alive," she said, in careful English. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Good. She forgets to eat when she is afraid. You will see that she eats." A pause, unhurried. "And you will not break her heart, because I will know if you do, and I am very old. That means I have nothing left to lose and a great deal of free time in which to plan."
"Understood," I said, and meant it more than I had meant anything in a year.
When I gave the phone back, Ruby was glaring at a text with the face of a woman being sold out by her own life. She turned the screen to me. The contact was saved as DEYSI, with three small sirens after the name.
so is he hot in person or hot in a way that gets you killed?? both right?? it's obviously both
"My best friend," she said. "She is not a serious person. Ignore her."
