He leans down and his mouth presses against mine. It's over before I have fully registered it has happened.
"Oh," he says, against my lips, "you are useful."
He is pulling back and straightening and I reach up and my hand finds the lapel of his robe and holds it and I look up at him from the water and I say, "Please."
He looks at me.
"Please make love to me."
The bathroom is very quiet.
He looks at me for long enough that the drumming in my chest begins to lift and then he reaches down and takes my hand from his lapel and holds it for a moment and sets it back in the water.
"Sorry," he says. He straightens fully. "This afternoon got away from me a little. I apologize for that." He adjusts the robe. "I prefer my women experienced. It's nothing personal."
I stare at him.
"Please," I say again, which I immediately know is a mistake.
He smiles. "Pathetic," he says pleasantly, and walks out.
The door doesn't slam. It closes with a quiet click that is somehow worse. I sit in the cooling water and look at the door and at the pile of ruined clothes on the floor and at my own hands under the surface.
Chapter Twelve
Luca
"Keller's ignoring us," Renzo says, dropping into the chair across from me and tossing his phone onto the desk.
"Three days and nothing. Not a word."
I draw my cigarette and look at the window.
"He's not ignoring us," I reply. "He's buying time."
"Same thing."
"No." I tap ash. "Ignoring us means he doesn't take it seriously. Buying time means he has a plan."
Renzo's phone beeps and he looks down at it and he mumbles a curse. "Our man inside the procurement office confirmed it hits now. Keller has been moving funds to a private SWATcontractor. They plan to attack at the dinner we are attending tonight."
Keller is attempting a rescue in a place where they could take me in for more than just abduction if they succeeded. The dinner Renzo and I were attending tonight was a cover-up for an ammunition trade.
I say nothing. Keller was a man who stopped at nothing to get what he wanted, I knew that because before I agreed to work for him, my father had worked for him.
I was seventeen when my father made the arrangement. Keller was an upcoming politician then, ambitious and hungry for public sympathy that couldn't be manufactured. My father had seen the utility in him and had offered a service. They planned to stage an accident, a close call, to generate headlines, goodwill, and the tenderness that the public reserves for men who have suffered visibly.
I watched my father and his men set up the plan and later I would hear about how a truck that wasn't a part of the plan had l come from nowhere, a blind corner. Keller had jumped. He had been. After all, jump, because he had known it was coming, and his wife had not jumped because she was not part of the arrangement.
Keller had stood at the roadside and looked at the wreckage and must have understood immediately that what had just happened to him was worth considerably more politically than what had originally been planned.
He cried at the funeral so hard that it made trending news for a week.
Was that what he wanted to do again? With his daughter this time? Sending in a SWAT team and a private one at that was him begging for violence, violence that could harm his daughter directly.
I stub the cigarette out.
"He wants a show," I say. "Then we give him one."
