I notice that. Even now, even with my heart trying to escape through my ribs, I notice it.
I get the door open. I don't know how.
Inside. Lock it. Both locks, the deadbolt and the chain, my fingers fumbling on the chain because they won't stop shaking. I put my back against the door.
Then I slide down it, very slowly, until I'm sitting on the floor.
The room is dark. The parking lot light comes through the curtain gap in a thin orange strip across the carpet. I sit in it and shake.
My hands. My breath. My heart, hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth, in my ears, in the fingertips pressing into my knees. Everything is shaking, every part of me, running too fast, too loud, alive.
I'm terrified.
I'm smiling.
I notice it because my face does something I don't instruct it to do — the corners of my mouth lifting, an involuntary expression of something I can't quite name. Not happiness. Too large for happiness. Not relief. Something more like a light on in a house I was sure was empty.
Five years.
Five years of static. Five years of walking through cities that don't land, feeling nothing that lasts, going through the motions of a life I keep expecting to re-enter and never do. The emptiness is absolute. I know this the way I know a fact — can state it plainly — but the knowing doesn't change it. Numb people know they're numb. They just can't feel their way out.
The static is gone.
Right now, in this moment, sitting on the floor of a budget motel room in a city I don't know, I can feel everything. Every nerve. Every inch of my body, shaking, racing, cresting somewhere near tears. My eyes are stinging. Not from sadness. Like someone turned all the lights on at once after a very long dark.
4 - Logan
Ican’t get the image of those blue-gray eyes out of my head. Blue-gray, bleak as a winter pond. Looking at me across the table at the Setai, asking me if she could run from me.
I have to tolerate your behavior. But can I run?
The question hit me low and stayed there. A woman openly contemplating escape from me, and what I could not stop thinking about was the chase. About what her voice would sound like, ragged and breathless. About the heat I would find when I caught her. How she’d taste with her dignity stripped away. It took everything I had to keep my voice level, my pulse hammering, my hands twitching under the table where she couldn't see. Yes, victim. You can run. That's how I'd said it. Like a joke, but we both knew it wasn't.
I can still feel the ghost of her fingers on my wrist, the barest brush as she'd reached for her glass. I can still smell her perfume, something sharp that put every nerve on edge. I catch myself clenching my jaw just thinking about it. The memory has edged out everything else—reports, calls, even the mounting irritation of the dockland situation. I'm half a second away from calling in a hit just to burn off the distraction.
Worse, I know I should be angry. The whole point of the meeting had been to intimidate her, to make her compliant, and instead she'd left me feeling like a kid outplayed by his babysitter. The humiliation should have made me want to tear the hotel bar apart. But I didn't. I wanted her to do it again. To look at me like that. To test the boundary of what I could take.
I made the mistake of picturing her mouth, and the rest of my body answered before I could file it. The worst part was that I knew she'd seen the reaction. She'd clocked my arousal and filed it away, the way I would have filed it. Just another piece of evidence. I wanted to see how she'd react. I wanted to see what she'd do if I called her bluff. Would she really run? Or would she stay, just to see what happened next?
My phone buzzes, an incoming text from Marisol. I ignore it. The only thing that matters right now is getting her out of my head before she starts affecting my judgment. I've watched men lose everything because they let a woman compromise their thinking. I've made a career out of not making that mistake.
But here I am, fully hard at my desk, two seconds from putting my fist through the glass wall just to feel something sharp enough to drown out the memory.
I've been at this desk since five-thirty. The ocean didn't help this morning. It usually does, the one hour of the day that doesn't belong to anyone else. This morning my mind wouldn't go quiet. I gave up at five-fifteen and came here instead.
I shake the image of those blue-gray eyes from my brain and open the financial files I've been meaning to properly audit for six weeks. I monitor the operating accounts weekly, but the miscellanea took a back-burner while Jorge's health deteriorated and the prodigal son, Gabriel, returned. Gabriel hadn't come empty-handed. He'd brought a doe-eyed woman from New York with a whole bunch of powerful enemies.
Now that those enemies are neutralized and Gabriel is back on board, officially out of the seminary, I have time to get all the records up to date.
The financial records are meticulous, which is how I've always kept them, which means the anomaly stands out like damage under good lighting. I find it at six-thirty: a vendor payment, correctly formatted, correctly categorized, routingthrough a shell that shouldn't exist. I trace it. It terminates at an account I recognize from the Zayas dossier I compiled eight months ago when they first started making noise about Lucia.
I sit back.
That can't be a coincidence. Money leaving one of our subsidiary accounts, traveling through a complicated route, then ending up in our rival's account.
Could this be Jorge's doing? Too late to ask now, but it's unlikely. He hasn't been actively involved in the club for at least twelve months, and certainly not within the past six weeks. Gabriel, maybe? Perhaps this is some scheme he and Seraphina cooked up, some method of funneling money to a church charity.
Again, unlikely. He wouldn't need a shell company for that.
