Come. Right now.
I stared at the screen, my blood turning to fucking ice. And for what felt like a long time but was probably only seconds, I didn't move.
Viktor’s threat echoed in my skull, and my stomach twisted in knots. I looked at the woman waking up beside me and felt a terror so sharp it nearly crippled me.
What the hell was this new game? Why was he calling me?
I didn't want to find out. I just wanted to lay back down, pull Raven into my arms, and fuck her until the sun came up. Or throw her over my shoulder and run for our lives, which I would've done already if my contact had gotten me the things I needed to make us disappear.
But what if he'd found the real leak?
I forced myself to sit up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
She reached for me in the dark, her fingers finding my wrist and closing around it, and for one second—one fucking second—I let myself feel it. The warmth of her hand. The way her thumb found my pulse like she was checking to make sure I was still real.
"Milo—"
"Stay here and lock the door. Don't open it for anyone until I come back for you."
I pulled on my jeans and shirt without turning on a light as she jumped out of bed and pulled on her robe, but I didn't need one. I'd learned her apartment the way she lived in it. By feel. By memory. By the geography of objects I could navigate with my eyes closed. I always left my boots next to her shoes. My keys next to the bowl that held hers. My jacket on the other hook.
Her apartment had become more familiar to me than my own.
"Anyone, Raven."
The door closed behind me and I stood in the hallway and listened for the deadbolt. It took her four seconds. Four seconds of silence where I could hear her breathing on the other side of the door, shallow and fast, the rhythm of a woman trying not to ask questions she already knew the answers to.
The bolt slid home, and I silently thanked her for listening to me. I couldn't do what I needed to do if I was worried about her.
I took the stairs two at a time and I was on the street at 3:51 a.m.
February in central Texas wasn't real winter. Not the way people in Chicago or Boston would define it. But at four in the morning, with the wind cutting through the buildings and no sun to soften it, the cold almost made me wish for the god awful heat of summer. I zipped my jacket and walked to my car. It was parked two blocks south because I didn't want to risk leaving it right in front of her building where I wouldn't have had time to scan the area before I went inside.
Viktor had eyes. Viktor always had eyes.
The drive to the restaurant was done on muscle memory alone. Luckily, the city was pretty empty at this hour. Just the occasional cab and the pulse of traffic lights cycling through their patterns for absolutely nobody. My phone sat on the passenger seat, and I kept glancing at it even though the screen remained dark, Viktor's words still rattling around my skull like bullets in a trash can.
Come. Right now.
Not "we need to talk." Not "I found the rat." But why else would he call me unless something had changed? Right?
Right?
I pulled into the lot behind The Silver Table at 4:07 a.m. The restaurant was dark, but the light in the back office bled through the blinds in a thin yellow line, and there were two cars parked near the kitchen entrance. Viktor's black Mercedes and a Bentley I'd never seen before. Dark blue, almost black in the predawn light. The plates weren't Texas plates.
I sat in my car for ten seconds. Staring at that Bentley.
Konstantin. It had to be.
I killed the engine, got out, and crossed the lot with my hands in my jacket pockets and my face arranged in the same expression I'd been wearing since I was nineteen years old. Easy and relaxed. The kind of face that made people think you didn't have a care in the world, that you were just a laid-back guy who happened to clean up dead bodies for a living.
The surfer-boy mask.
It had gotten me through a decade of crime scenes, interrogations, and conversations with men who could order my death over dessert without blinking an eye. It would get me through this.
The kitchen entrance was unlocked. I walked through the dark restaurant, past the empty tables with their white tablecloths—ghostly in the security lighting—past the bar with its bottles gleaming like a row of sentinels, past the Steinway sitting on its raised platform.
I didn't look at the piano.
