Page 9

She delivers it like a threat, but it comes out as a résumé, and it’s the most attractive thing a person has said to me in longer than I’ll admit in this room. I keep it off my face, a thing I’m good at and have built a great deal on.

“You liked that,” she observes even though I could’ve sworn I buried it.

“I like a sharp instrument.”

“You like winning, and the part you’ve just understood is that I don’t lose at the things you’re used to winning.” She opens her mouth to keep building, the case assembling behind her eyes, the long, loaded sentence she’s stacking to walk me into a corner I haven’t seen the edge of, and I’m braced for the first clause of it when her eyes go past my shoulder and stop dead.

The photograph sits on the shelf behind the desk, the single personal thing in a room I keep bare on purpose. Kalliopi and me on the terrace at Glyfada, both of us squinting into a hard Aegean sun, her laughing at a thing I said that I’ve since mislaid, and me grinning. Evander took it the summer she pulled the first thread of all this loose, before either of us understood the thread had a hook on the end and the hook went into her.

She’s looking at it now, and the argument leaves her through a seam, all of it at once. The fight drains out of her face and takes the fear with it, and what comes into the empty space is a quiet I don’t understand, her eyes fixed on the frame.

“That’s Kalliopi,” I say, and her name comes out of me plainer than I meant it to. “She’s the best forensic accountant I’ve ever put on a problem. She found the first thread of the thing I’m bringing you into. Found it ahead of my entire network.”

Her eyes hold on the photograph.

“She’s not available anymore,” I continue. “Which is the reason you’re standing on my floor instead of lying in your bed, remembering the pleasure I’ve given you. I need someone to take the work the rest of the way. Apparently, you’re the best at what you do.”

I’m braced for the fight to come back. The contract again, the rate, the surcharge, the office hours, anything, everything really.

“Yes,” she says.

The one word. No argument behind it. She drags her eyes off the frame and brings them back to me. The fight is still in them, but its aim doesn’t feel pointed at me now, and she says it a second time, firmer.

“Yes. I’ll do it.”

I’ve moved men with money. I’ve moved them with fear, and a few with threats of what I’d take from them if they said no. I didn’t reach for any of those tonight. She walked herself to yes, looking at a photograph of a dead woman she’s never met, and the speed of it doesn’t make sense.

“Good,” I tell her. “Then we’re agreed on the part that matters. The rest you can fight me on after sunrise.”

“I assume you’ll have your thugs take me back. I’d appreciate if I could sit in the backseat instead.”

“You’re sleeping here.”

“Absolutely not.” It comes out of her fast. “I have an apartment. I have, in theory, a door. I have a profession that until tonight involved zero river crossings in the trunk of anything, and I have a powerful instinct that sleeping under the roof of the man who put me in that trunk is the single worst proposal anyone’s made me this week.”

“Knowing how my men work, your door must be in pieces. I’ll have it fixed for you, but tonight, you don’t have an apartment. It’s a space with the lock kicked off it.” I come around the desk. She holds her ground, chin up, bare feet planted on marble stone, the marks still pink on her wrists. I’d respect the spine of it in a man twice her weight, and I respect it more in her. “The people I’m hunting put the woman in that photograph in the ground for getting close to what you’ll have in front of you by lunch. You don’t get to walk back out of that into a place with no door on it.”

“So the fix for my safety problem is to install me in the one address in the city guaranteed to be a target. That’s not a fix. That’s relocating the problem and calling it solved.”

“The fix is keeping you where I can see you.”

It stops her for half a second because it came out nearer the truth than I’d planned, and she’s far too quick to miss the weight riding under the words. Her breath changes. I know that change. I had it against my mouth two hours ago, the small hitch in her chest.

“Don’t,” she says.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You were winding up to be unbearable again. Your pupils just blew wide. Your cock stays in your pants.”

“If that’s what you wish,” I say and wink. “There’s a room down the hall, made up. The lock works, and it works from your side just in case you were wondering.”

“As if that stopped you before.”

“Sleep, koukla.” Her eyes widen at the Greek, the second time tonight she’s heard it from me. “There’s a great deal of work in front of us, and we start early.”

6

Elena