“Nothing, because you won’t be here to answer their questions.” He holds my gaze. “I’m not threatening you. That’s just what has to happen next.”
I want to argue. I want to tell him I’ve survived six years in a building full of dangerous men without his help, and I can survive whatever comes after Dominic. I don’t need another man deciding what’s safe for me and what isn’t, because I’ve heard that speech before, and it always ends with me losing ground I never agreed to give up. I want to say all of that, and I don’t, because Eric’s name just lit up my phone.
My phone vibrates in my hand. I look down at the screen, and Eric’s name is glowing against the dark display.
The timing chills me. Eric, calling at two in the morning, while I’m standing in a room with a dead body and Adrian Bugrov, who just explained why my life is about to get very complicated. I don’t answer. I stare at the name until the vibration stops, and then I look up at Adrian.
He noticed the phone. His expression doesn’t change, but something sharpens behind his eyes. “Who is that?”
“Eric Hayes.” I hold up the phone so he can see the screen, then lower it. “My ex-boyfriend, the homicide detective. You already know who he is.”
Adrian nods once. “I do.”
“He’s going to be assigned to this case.” The realization arrives as I’m saying it, and the force of it almost buckles my knees. Eric works homicide, and Dominic is dead. Once the disappearance is reported and the investigation begins, Eric will volunteer because it connects to me and to Echelon.
He won’t be able to resist it. He’ll frame every visit, every interview request, and every late-night phone call as professional obligation, and nobody in the department will question him because they never questioned him before. “He’s going to use this to get close to me again.”
“Yes, he will.” Adrian’s voice is level. “That’s one of several reasons you can’t go home tonight.”
I stiffen, and the woozy feeling starts to dissipate. “You don’t get to tell me where I can go.”
“I’m not telling you anything. I’m explaining what happens next.” He crosses his arms and leans against the desk. “Eric will use your employee status to justify contact. Karpov will use it to decide you’re worth collecting. If you go home tonight, one of them will reach you by the end of the week. Either way, you’ll be at the mercy of a man who wants to control you, or a man who will kill you after a painful interrogation, whether or not you have useful information.”
I shake my head again, but my neck feels wobbly and less certain this time, like a bobblehead. “I don’t know anything worth collecting.”
“They don’t know that, and they won’t take your word for it.” He holds my stare. “You have two options. Go home, wait for Eric to show up with a badge, and hope Karpov’s people decide a nightclub hostess isn’t worth the trouble, or they find you before he can protect you. Or come with me, and I keep you alive while my people handle the rest.”
The offer is insane. The man who just killed my boss in front of me is offering to protect me from the consequences of his own actions. Every rational thought in my head says run. Call the police. Call Marisol. Call anyone who isn’t standing in a room with blood on the floor and a suppressed pistol inside his jacket.
The rational thoughts don’t account for Eric. They don’t account for going home meaning a life where a homicide detective with a badge and a grudge now has a legitimate reason to knock on my door at any hour. They don’t cover the last time I trusted the system to protect me from Eric, and the system told me to work it out between us.
Adrian extends his hand. It’s the same hand that held my face thirty minutes ago and pulled the trigger just minutes later. I look at it, him, and Dominic’s body on the floor behind the desk.
Viktor is watching from the wall. He hasn’t moved, but his posture has shifted from threat assessment to patience, as if Adrian’s decision to extend his hand instead of issuing an order has told Viktor everything he needs to know about what happens next.
Marisol’s face when she said “do it because you chose it” suddenly comes to mind, the first in a collage of disjointed images, including my mother packing boxes after boyfriend number five, Eric’s smirk when I flinched from his hand, and Adrian stopping six inches from my face in the service corridor, waiting for me to close the distance myself.
I look at his hand, remember the gun in it, and take it anyway.
His grip is firm and warm, and the contact sends a current through me that I’d be ashamed of if shame were something I could afford right now. Adrian Bugrov just killed my boss, and I’m holding his hand, but the pressure of his fingers around mine doesn’t feel like a cage. It feels like an anchor, and I don’t know what that says about me or about him, but I don’t have the luxury of figuring it out tonight.
What I know is Eric will come and use Dominic’s death to justify every visit, every phone call, and every concerned look he’s been weaponizing for months. The badge gives him access I can’t block, and the investigation gives him a reason with which I can’t argue. Going home means going back to that, and I’ve wasted enough of my life on him and trying to escape him.
Adrian isn’t safe. I know that. Dominic’s blood and body on the floor proves that. He’s offering me protection from consequences he created, and the offer is as calculated as anything Eric has ever done, except Adrian isn’t pretending it’s something else. He’s telling me exactly what this is, and the honesty of the exchange is what makes me trust it more than I probably should.
I exhale raggedly before surrendering. “I need clothes from my apartment and to call Marisol.”
“Viktor will arrange the clothes. The call to Marisol happens from a secure line, not your personal phone.” He releases my hand and turns to Viktor, who is already moving toward the door with the laptop hard drive in one pocket and the USB drives in the other. “Get her out through the rear exit. I’ll follow in ten minutes.”
Viktor nods at me once. It isn’t friendly, but it isn’t hostile either. He’s accepted the complication and is already planning around it.
I follow him down the corridor without looking back at the office. I don’t look at Dominic or the blood. I walk past the private room where an hour ago I was making a choice I thought would be the most reckless of my night, and the irony is so sharp it almost makes me laugh. That choice is only the second most reckless thing I’ve done tonight, and the night isn’t over.
The rear exit opens onto a service alley that smells like kitchen grease and cigarettes. The bass from the club is a dull pulse through the wall, and I can hear the muffled sound of a DJ transition between songs. Two hundred people are still in there, drinking and spending money at a club whose owner is dead onhis office floor. They’ll go home tonight thinking they had a good time. They’ll never know what happened thirty feet from the bar.
A car is idling at the curb, dark and armored with tinted windows, with a man I don’t know behind the wheel. When Viktor opens the back door, I climb into the back seat, and the door closes behind me with a heavy thud that sounds permanent.
I sit in the dark and wait for Adrian. My hands are shaking again, and I press them flat against my thighs until the trembling slows. My phone screen still shows Eric’s missed call. I stare at it for ten seconds, then turn the phone face down on the seat beside me.
