Page 45 of Velvet Vaughn

He glanced over again, and this time the look held a second longer than the road strictly allowed. She let him have it.

“Anja.”

“Yeah?”

“How many calls are you going to have to make tonight?”

She considered being vague but decided against it. He’d been straight with her all evening. It was the least she owed him. “A few. I need to loop in my bosses first, then secure safe houses.”

Leo turned onto his street, pulled into the garage entrance, and waited for the gate. The concrete and low lighting folded around them as he followed the ramp down to his level.

“I told Devonte I’d get him the full answer tomorrow.”

“I’ll have more of it by then.” She unclipped her seatbelt as he pulled into his designated space. “You did the right thing tonight. He needed to hear that it was being handled before he could hear how.”

Leo cut the engine and sat with his hands on the wheel, staring at the wall in front of them. In the dim garage light, he appeared less like the man who’d worked a room full of colleagues for four hours and more like the version of him she’d found in his kitchen last night. The one with the weight of it sitting on his shoulders and nowhere good to put it down.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

He turned to look at her, and she could see him deciding whether to give her the functional answer or the real one. She waited him out.

“I shook hands with dozens of people tonight,” he answered, “and I spent the whole time doing math on which one of them might have built a file on Devonte’s kid.” He exhaled through his nose. “That’s a hard room to be in.”

“I know.”

“You handled it better than I did.”

“I wasn’t looking at people I know. That’s not a flaw, Leo. That’s what six years of trust looks like when someone takes a hammer to it.”

He absorbed that without trying to walk away from it. She’d noticed early on that Leo took difficult stuff straight on instead of approaching them from the side, and it was one of the things she respected most about him. And one of the most inconvenient.

“Okay.” He reached for the door. “Let’s go make your calls.”

She got out, and they crossed the garage to the elevator together. The heels Larisa had chosen were, in fact, practical enough to run in. Thankfully, she didn’t need to put them to the test tonight.

Leo pressed the call button, and the elevator arrived.

In the close quarters of the cab, with the gala behind them and the rest of the night ahead, she was acutely aware of how little distance there was between them. He was cognizant of it too, laser-focused on the floor indicator as a substitute for looking at something else.

She understood the feeling.

The elevator opened on his floor, and she stepped out first. Neither of them mentioned it, which was, in its own way, a conversation.

Leo unlocked the door. “For the record, that’s a very good dress.”

Her mouth twitched. “I’ll tell Larisa you approve.”

#

“That woman frightens me . . .” Leo’s voice trailed off as he opened the door.

Lying flat on the hardwood where the hallway met the threshold was a manila envelope. It looked brand new with no folds or wrinkles. His name was printed on the front, but there was no return address or postage.

Hand-delivered.

He didn’t reach for it. “Anja.”

“I see it.”