I went behind the rail and started pulling bottles for the well. He stayed on the other side, one elbow on the wood, watching me and the room at the same time. It should have felt intrusive. Mostly it felt like having a large, armed piece of furniture that hadn’t been there yesterday.
“You always come in this early?” he said.
“During Carnival, yes.”
“Good. That’s my shift too.”
I looked at him across the rail and caught it — not the charm this time. A quick, quiet focus. He was deciding how to keep me alive for a week, and he’d already started.
I turned back to the bottles and didn’t say anything. The thing sitting in my chest right then wasn’t irritation and wasn’t relief, and I didn’t trust it.
HUCK SHOWED UP AT FOUR. The servers trickled in after. I prepped, briefed the staff, and tried to run a normal Thursday like there wasn’t a man with a shoulder holster sitting at the end of the rail watching everyone who walked in.
The Thursday crowd filled Proof wall to wall by eight. Five days before Fat Tuesday and the whole Quarter was electric, the crowd noise rising with every opened door. I poured, I smiled, I kept the register moving. Dane sat in his corner and didn’t get in the way. He didn’t try to help. He didn’t make conversation. He just watched: the entrances, the crowd, the alley hall, and when he thought I wasn’t looking, me.
We closed at two. I sent the staff home and locked up while Dane waited at the entrance, and we walked the two blocks back in the dark. The streets were still loud, stragglers weaving home through the Carnival debris, a trumpet playing something slow and sad from a balcony somewhere above us. Neither of us talked.
At the apartment, I pulled sheets and a pillow from the hall closet and dropped them on the couch.
He looked at the couch, ran his hand along the arm, and raised an eyebrow. “This thing’s an antique.”
“That belonged to my grandmother. Nineteen-fifties, original velvet. You put your boots on it, I’ll put you through the window.”
His grin came back. Slower this time. “Yes ma’am.”
“I work until two or three most nights and I sleep until nine. Stay out of the bathroom between nine and nine-thirty. Don’t touch the thermostat. And don’t rearrange my furniture.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“And Dane?”
He’d been reaching for the sheets. He stopped.
“I didn’t ask for you. I don’t need you. You’re here because Sloane is a force of nature and I pick my battles. So you’re in my space, on my schedule, and in my way. Stay out of my way.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said again, smooth as breathing, and that grin — warm and slow and infuriating — didn’t move.
I closed my bedroom door and turned the lock.
I pressed my back against the wood and listened. The duffel zipper. A boot hitting the floor, then the other. The couch frame settling under his weight. Then the apartment went quiet except for the muffled noise of Bourbon Street filtering through the walls, and the fact of him, ten feet away, breathing on the other side of my door.
I’d survived a murder in my alley and the Dixie Mafia knowing my face. I could survive a week of Dane Gatlin in my apartment.
My apartment had never felt this small.
Chapter Two
Dane
I'D RUN EVERY SAFEhouse and client residence for the last ten years — nine of them government-issue, the last on my own terms. Front door to kitchen: eight steps. Kitchen to hallway: four. Hallway to her bedroom: six. Two deadbolts on the front door, solid chain, good frame. Bathroom window small, frosted, stuck. But the window above the kitchen sink sat over a fire escape accessible from the street, and the latch was old enough to pop with a flathead screwdriver.
That was the problem. The rest of the apartment I could work with. That window I'd have to fix, and she wasn't going to like it.
Her bedroom door was hollow-core interior, the kind you could put a fist through, and she'd locked it behind her like the lock meant something. It didn't -—not against what was out there. But she'd made the terms clear enough:I didn't ask for you. I don't need you.I wasn't going to be the one to tell her that door wouldn't stop anything worse than a draft.
I heard her move. Water running. A drawer opening. Footsteps padding from the bathroom to the bed, the mattress,then quiet. The apartment settled into the dark around the two of us, and I stared at the ceiling and waited for morning.
I WAS UP AT FIVE. OLDhabit. The Marshals trained it in and nothing since had trained it out. I checked the kitchen window first, barefoot because boots on hardwood at dawn would earn me that look -—the one that said she was measuring my coffin.
