"Patterns." He pocketed his card, and for just a moment, our fingers brushed. His skin was warm, callused in ways that suggested violence as a profession. "Be careful with those. Sometimes when you look too hard for patterns, you start seeing things that aren't there."
"And sometimes," I met his eyes directly, letting a little truth leak through, "the patterns are the only real things in a world full of pretty lies."
He went very still, and I knew I'd shown too much. But instead of pressing, he just nodded like I'd confirmed something.
"See you tomorrow, Bunny."
"Looking forward to it, Nathan."
He paused at the door, glancing back with an expression I couldn't read. Then he was gone, leaving only the ghost of expensive scotch and the lingering sense that everything had just become much more complicated.
I served the rest of my shift on autopilot, but my mind kept circling back to green eyes and careful hands. To the way he'd noticed my scars but hadn't stared. To how he'd said my fake name like he was already wondering about the real one.
Gregory Marsh was still in the basement, probably bleeding through his gag. The trafficking phone had three new messages about available "products." My apartment waited with its wall of patterns and connections, all possibly pointing to a dead man.
But for the first time in six months, something had disrupted my careful routine. Nathan Cross with his calculated movements and knowing looks. Nathan Cross who recognized something in me that might recognize something in him.
"Shit," I muttered, then immediately corrected myself. Good girls didn't swear. Good girls also didn't feel warm flutters when dangerous men looked at them with eyes that saw too much.
But I wasn't really a good girl anymore, was I? I was whatever I needed to be.
And tomorrow, apparently, I needed to be someone who could handle Nathan Cross coming back to my bar.
The thought shouldn't have made me smile.
But it did.
5
Watching
Two weeks. Fourteen days of Nathan Cross walking through my door at 3:17 PM, taking the same seat at the end of the bar, ordering the same Macallan neat. Fourteen days of careful conversations that felt like defusing bombs, each word measured and weighed before release.
I'd started watching the clock at 3:10, pretending to organize bottles that were already perfect. My body knew his schedule before my mind admitted it—heart rate picking up, hands steadying on whatever task I'd manufactured, smile practicing itself in the mirror of the coffee machine.
"Your boyfriend's here," Matt said on day fifteen, and I nearly dropped the martini shaker.
"He's not my boyfriend." The protest came out too quick, too sharp. "He's just a regular."
"Uh-huh." Matt's knowing look made me want to throw something at him. "A regular who you light up for like aChristmas tree. Who only talks to you. Who watches you like he's memorizing your movements for later study."
"That's just—" I started to argue, then caught sight of Nathan entering. Right on time, as always. My pulse did that stupid skippy thing it had learned, and I hated how my body betrayed me. Gabriel had trained me better than this. No—I caught myself—Gabriel. When had I stopped thinking of him as Daddy?
Nathan's eyes found mine immediately, and that almost-smile touched his lips. He'd loosened up marginally over two weeks—still wore the expensive suits but had abandoned any pretense of keeping the jacket on. Today's was navy, paired with a grey shirt that made his green eyes darker, more forest than sea.
"Bunny." He settled into his seat with that controlled grace I'd catalogued and re-catalogued. "How's the pattern hunting?"
It had become our thing, these careful references to my "hobby." He never pushed for details, and I never offered them, but we danced around the edges of truth like it was a cliff we might fall off.
"Found some interesting connections last night," I said, already pouring his scotch. My hands knew the motion by muscle memory now. "You know how sometimes one thread pulls and suddenly the whole fabric starts to unravel?"
"Dangerous business, pulling threads." He accepted the glass, fingers brushing mine. Always that brief contact, never quite accidental. "Never know what might come loose."
I leaned on the bar, closer than strictly professional but not quite personal. We existed in that liminal space, I'd realized. The boundary between customer and something else, between hunter and hunted, though I still wasn't sure which of us was which.
"Maybe I like danger." The words came out lower than intended, weighted with more truth than smart. "Maybe safe is just another word for boring."
"Says the girl tending bar in the safest part of the city." But his eyes said he knew better. Had known since that first day when he'd catalogued my scars and secrets. "Speaking of danger, you heard about the body they found?"
