He didn’t ask questions. “I’m coming. Don’t touch anything. Stay by the door with your gun. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He was there in eleven.
I heard him take the stairs two at a time. He came through the open door with his own gun drawn and swept the apartment the same way I had; room by room, closet by closet, checking windows and exits. When he was satisfied nobody was inside, he holstered the gun and looked at the damage.
His jaw tightened when he saw the slashed sofa. Tightened more when he saw the portraits with their faces cut through. And when he saw the plants ripped from their pots with dirt ground into the carpet, something behind his eyes went from concern to cold fury.
“Pack a bag,” he said. “You’re not staying here.”
“I know.”
“You can stay at the hotel with me.”
“My own room. Not yours.”
He looked at me for a second and I could see him wanting to argue, wanting to say you’re staying with me where I can see you and protect you and make sure nobody touches you again. But he read my face and understood what I was saying without me having to explain it. I needed help, but I needed it on my terms. Proximity without dependence. Close enough to feel safe, far enough to still feel like myself.
“Your own room,” he said. “Across the hall from mine.”
“That works.”
I packed what I could salvage, a few outfits that hadn’t been cut up, my toiletries from the destroyed bathroom, my laptop, and the one journal that had survived because it had fallen behind the bookshelf and whoever did this hadn’t found it. Everything else was gone.
We drove to the hotel in his Maybach. I stared out the window and felt the emptiness settling into my chest—not sadness exactly, more like the hollow feeling of having something taken that you built with your own hands. My apartment wasn’t fancy. It was small and cheap and the elevator never worked. But it was mine. The first space I’d ever had that no man controlled and no man paid for. And now it was destroyed.
“Who do you think did this?” Quest asked as we pulled into the hotel parking garage.
“I don’t know.” But I had an idea. Timothy Baker had been sending me money from new phone numbers despite being blocked on every platform I had. He’d shown up at my school begging. He’d screamed that he loved me across a parking lot. And his wife Allison had already confronted me once. She walked into my dungeon uninvited and begged me to stop seeing her husband. A woman who’d lost her college fund and her home equity to her husband’s obsession might be angry enough to destroy the woman she blamed for it. Or Timothy himself, unhinged enough to think that wrecking my space would somehow bring me back to his.
“You don’t have any idea? Nobody you’ve had problems with? Nobody who might have a reason to come at you like this?”
“No.”
He looked at me for a long second. Quest could smell a lie the way a shark smells blood in the water, and I could see him processing, turning it over, weighing whether to push. His jaw was doing that thing it does when he’s deciding between patience and eruption.
“If I find out somebody is after you and you knew about it and didn’t tell me, Mehar, I swear to God?—”
“I don’t know who did this, Quest. I came home and my apartment was destroyed. That’s all I know.”
He didn’t believe me. I could see it in his eyes. But he let it go for now because there were more immediate things to deal with than interrogating a woman who’d just lost her home.
We checked in. Two rooms, same floor, directly across the hall from each other. He carried my bag to my door and I unlocked it and stood in the doorway of a hotel room that was clean and anonymous and nothing like the home I’d built and lost.
“Come sit with me for a minute,” he said, nodding toward his room.
I followed him across the hall. His room was lived-in by now. There were clothes in the closet, a bottle of Banks Reserve cognac on the desk, his laptop open on the bed. He poured me a glass without asking and I took it because I needed it.
We sat on the edge of the bed, side by side, both of us holding glasses of cognac and staring at the wall like the wall had answers.
“I told you that apartment wasn’t safe,” he said. Not gloating. Just stating a fact that had proven itself true in the worst way.
“I know you did.”
“I told you to let me get you a condo with real security.”
“I know.”
“And you told me you didn’t need me to buy you anything.”
