I start the car.
The pharmacy on 4th is open twenty-four hours. I park directly outside and walk in with my dress zipped back up and my hair assmoothed as I can manage it and find gauze and antiseptic and tweezers in the medical aisle and bring them to the counter.
The woman behind the register looks at me. Then her eyes drop, just briefly, to the smear of dark red at my hip where the fabric had pressed against him. She looks back up and rings everything through.
I get back in the car, turn the overhead light on, and do what needs to be done. He makes almost no sound. That alone tells me a great deal about him. I work as quickly as I can, the tweezers finding the bullet — luckily closer to the surface than I feared. I pull it out and drop it onto the passenger seat.
I clean the wound as best I can.
"You need a hospital," I tell him. He is half-conscious, eyes at half-mast, watching me with an expression I can't quite read. "I know you can't go to a hospital. But you need to." I reach for my phone. "I'm going to call some of my father's people. They know how to handle things."
I step out of the car and press call and have just heard the first ring when the sirens cut through the street from two blocks away.
"Fuck."
I run back to the car, yank the door open ready to drive off quickly, and look at the back seat to find it empty.
I spin around. No one.
I look through the windshield in time to see a figure moving at the far end of the street, a limp carrying him toward the shadow of the bushes that edge the small strip of green between the pharmacy and the building beside it.
The police car screams past without slowing. They aren't coming here.
I sit there for a moment and let my heartbeat recover. Then I turn and look at the back seat properly. The only thing left is a small object on the leather, catching the thin orange light of the street lamp outside. I reach back and pick it up.
A crystal. Hexagonal, clear. It might have come off a watch or a ring or some piece of jewelry he wore.
I look at it for a long moment.
Then I look at the passenger seat. Then on the floor. My jaw tightens.
"My bra is gone," I say to no one.
I press my fingers against my forehead.
"Fucking pervert."
Chapter Two
Nathalie
"Ihave to say it, Nathalie, because someone has to. This is foolish. This is embarrassingly foolish and when Uncle Phillip finds out — and he will find out — you will have absolutely no one to blame but yourself. You deserve whatever he gives you. You are always getting in the way. Always embarrassing him and now this."
Alana's voice comes through the phone.
I hold the phone slightly away from my ear and take a sip of water from the bottle on the nightstand. The hotel room is clean and quiet and blessedly still, which is more than I can say for the last six hours of my life. The flight from New York to Las Vegas had been the kind of turbulent that makes you grip the armrest and quietly negotiate with whatever forces govern the universe.
I nearly missed it entirely — I was running through JFK with my carry-on bouncing off my hip and my boarding pass pulled up ona cracked phone screen and I had made it through the gate with four minutes to spare.
It was nearly midnight now. The Vegas skyline glittered through the gap in the curtains. I can't decide if it was beautiful or just loud. I have an interview tomorrow evening.
I need to sleep.
"You can still fix this," Alana continues, her voice shifting into something that wants to sound like concern but lands closer to satisfaction. "Get on a flight tomorrow morning and come home before anyone notices. I'll say you were with me the whole time. I'm doing you a favor here, Nathalie, I really am, and I just think?—"
"Alana."
"—that you don't think things through, you never think things through, and Uncle Phillip has enough to deal with without?—"
