“The job is simple, Hendrick. Keep her alive until we can eliminate the threat to her life, or you do. But at no point is she to be used as bait.” Cold eyes piece me. “I don’t care about her rules. Her life matters more.”
“Yes, sir.” I won’t argue with any of that. “I’ll take her off the grid for a few weeks. Less, if I can get away with it. And I'll check in regularly.”
“Good. Do that.” Calhoun fixes his eyes on her and then me, a heavy gaze that promises me pain if I screw up.
I nod back. “Yes, sir.”
“What are you still doing here? Get moving. Ma’am.” He nods to Adora without looking directly at her, breaking part of a rule while sticking to her others. I swear she gives him the faintest smile.
Well, whaddaya know.
Calhoun shoos us out of his office and back into the limo that’s as spotless as it was the moment it pulled up outside the building Adora performed in. “Good luck, Hendrick. Drake?” He pokes his head out of the building doorway. “Keep me in the loop with your next job. And get that man a shirt.”
CHAPTER TWO
ADORA
Mortality is a strange concept. I’m supposed to care if my next breath is my last, if the man who hunts me comes back again and again, seeking his glory. But today, I don’t.
Watching the man opposite me bleed, his eyes fixed on me as his friend stitched him back together was…grounding.
Everyone in my world treats me like a piece of glass to be wrapped away from reality, a crafted piece of art only to be brought out for show, put on display for a limited time. This man stares at me as though I am a puzzle he intends to pull apart. Examine every piece intimately, find the broken parts, and put me back together.
I don’t doubt that he will achieve his goal. He never once flinched when the needle pierced with flesh, never accepted medicine or the alcohol that his friend offered to dull the pain. As though the pain itself was what drove him on. Or perhaps that taking it away leaves him unable to function.
Hendrick.
His name, said once in the car.
Mine tumbled from his lips as he broke all the rules my agent put into place. Protection, she said, years ago when we first teamed up. A barrier between me and the world.
Then, it seemed like a wonderful idea. Now? That protection has become a cage.
I wonder what his version of protection will be like in the next hours, or days. How long it will last beforehecomes for me again.
Now, Hendrick sits across from me, buttoning a shirt that strains too tightly across his chest, borrowed from the house we left.
Where are we going? What will you do?There are more questions that bank up, but I’m so out of practice in asking them that I can’t push the words past my lips.
And so I simply don’t.
For the first time in years, however, I don't have the media and management entourage clamoring around me. My brain is silent, and I have time to think. The brightness of the gunshot. The flare of the screams, the cacophony and mess that followed as this man plunged me into darkness as he took pain meant for me.
And I ask yet again —How has my music damaged you?
“You don’t know who it is.”
The question isn’t a question at all. It's a statement.
I blink at him. After a moment, I nod. It’s an answer that I can give. But I want something in return. My unused voice feels broken, and I cough, trying to force the words out. “M– my-”
He watches me, with those dark gray eyes the hue of an overcast sky. Of slate carved from an unyielding rock face. Of hard rain bouncing off a cement surface. Industrial. Bleak.
Useful.
This man has a purpose. I narrow down his meaning in a spate of color derived from sound that ricochets inside my noisy/silent mind.
“My harp.” I finally finish the short sentence that takes me a full minute to complete. He never rushes me, waiting me out.
