Daniel’s gaze softens. Slowly, he lowers his hands.
“No, I neverletyou win. You’re far too well trained to not notice.” Daniel takes a strategic step out of arm’s reach. “Whenever we spar, I pick a set of skills and limit myself to those. That way, I get to practice techniques I don’t always get to use, you get practice figuring out an opponent’s tics, and it hardly matters that I’m over twice your size. It’s no fun for either of us if all I have to do is sit on you.”
Ellie decides that this conversation can wait until the next time they spar. She has more important questions.
“Never mind.” She grunts in frustration. “Disarming him. I can’t even tell what you did.”
“I can show you. All you had to do was ask.” Gentle is Daniel’s go-to move and, right now, he’s practically beatific. “You didn’t need to haul out the fireworks.”
“You are so exhausting.” Ellie turns off her flames. “Fine. Let’s try it this way. Why does everyone think of you as some sort of invincible verifying assassin?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” His voice is the sort of quiet that gives Ellie the shivers before it returns to something more genial. “You sound like I want people to think that. I don’t want a reputation. I want to be the wind.”
“The wind?” Ellie has no idea what he means.
“You know, I breeze in unnoticed and I breeze out unnoticed.Something happens. Who did it? No one knows. Anyway, as Tom said, I’ve never killed anyone.”
Ellie stifles a laugh. Only Daniel could think he can go unnoticed. Of course, if he is at all successful at being the wind, Tom wouldn’t know of any of Daniel’s kills. And there may be some kills. Daniel is doing a stellar job of not directly answering any of Ellie’s questions.
“So you’re not Ahdi’s hit man?”
Daniel looks offended. Of course, Daniel also looked offended when she called theHamiltoncast album a soundtrack. It’s hard sometimes to gauge the level of Daniel’s reactions.
“No, Ahdi has absolutely never ordered me to kill anyone.” This is the closest to unequivocal Daniel has been all conversation, and he sounds relieved. “If you’re going to believe Tom, everyone thinks you’re an engineering genius.”
Ellie sighs. Daniel is too damn hard to stay angry at. It’s impossible to forget that he was also once the teenager who would both trip himself walking across the living room and catch himself with a Hail Mary punch front.
“Fair. But what about how Tom got here in the first place.” She puts her hands on her hips. “You went straight to him following my mom here.”
“One, apparently, I’m right.” Daniel looks slightly wounded anyway. “Two, it can’t be me. I hope it’s not you. My boyfriend can barely gethimselfhere. I don’t want it to be Aunt Vera, but there’s no one else.”
“When would she have done it, though?” The idea of her mom helping Tom at all leaves Ellie a little sick. “It’d have to have been before I dismantled their monstrosity. Are you enough of a threat that they wanted access to your apartment just in case?”
“Well, if you put it that way…” Daniel waggles his eyebrows.He opens his palms. “Or maybe Tom broke in the old-fashioned way.”
Ellie lets out a breath. Her gaze shifts over to the front door.
“Probably not.” She walks over and inspects the door. “You have an absurdly industrial-strength lock—”
“Ahdi made me get that installed.”
“—maybe if Tom is a builder—”
“No— Oh, hi, Ahdi.”
Ellie turns around. Ahdi is standing next to the coffee table. Normally, there’s at least a slight pop or breeze from the displaced air when someone shows up out of nowhere. Adhi looks a bit puzzled, which is exactly how she feels.
“Hi.” Ahdi looks around. “I expected someone to be here threatening you.”
“You missed him.” Ellie folds her arms across her chest. “Daniel threw him out the window.”
Ahdi’s face is a mixture of horror and pride. Ellie arms fall. She tries not to laugh and ends up coughing. Ahdi stares at Daniel with an expression that screams “What the fuck?”
“We’re, like, thirty feet up.” Daniel’s expression is just as disbelieving. “That’s plenty of time to arrange a safe landing, even for Tom.”
Ahdi takes a deep breath. The man is clearly choosing his words very carefully. Ellie interrupts before he has a chance to say anything.
“Have you been here before, Ahdi?”
