"No."
"Are you certain?"
"I'm good at my job." No arrogance in it, just fact. "No one sees what I don't want them to see."
I believed him. There was something about the way he moved, the way he occupied space, that suggested years of practice in going unnoticed.
"Thank you," I said again. "I know I keep saying that. I just don't know what else to say."
He studied me for a moment, his expression unreadable.
"Get some rest," he said. "I'll be back when it's safe to move."
By the time he returned, the hotel had gone quiet.
"They're gone." He stood in the doorway, keys in hand. "Your family left. The police handed it off to detectives. Nobody's actively searching anymore."
I pushed myself to my feet, my legs stiff from hours on the concrete floor. "What now?"
"Now you need somewhere to go."
"I don't have anywhere." The reality settled over me like a weight. "My family controls everything. My apartment, my accounts, my credit cards. I walked out of that suite with nothing."
He was quiet for a moment. Then:
"I have a place. Small apartment, about fifteen minutes from here. You can stay until you figure out your next move."
I stared at him. This man who barely knew me—who had no reason to help, every reason to turn me in—was offering me shelter.
"Why?"
He shrugged. "You need a place to stay. I have one."
Simple. Practical. No sentiment, no expectation.
I didn't have words, just a strange tightness in my chest.
"Okay," I managed.
He nodded. "Let's go."
I followed him out of the storage room, through the empty security office, into the dark corridors of a hotel that had witnessed the worst day of my life.
And somehow, impossibly, I felt like I could breathe again.
Chapter 4
Vance
The drive took fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes of dark roads and silence, the truck's headlights cutting through a world that had gone quiet. Tobias sat in the passenger seat with his eyes fixed on the window, watching nothing pass by.
I didn't try to fill the silence. I'd learned long ago that some people needed space to process. You couldn't rush it. You couldn't talk them through trauma before they were ready. You just had to be there and wait.
My apartment was on the second floor of a building that had seen better decades. Nothing fancy—a one-bedroom unit in acomplex where nobody asked questions and the rent was cheap enough to pay in cash. I'd picked it for anonymity, for the kind of forgettability that was useful when you needed a place that didn't officially exist.
I parked in my usual spot, killed the engine, and sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel.
