One nod. Brief. Silent. A man who communicates in silences using them to say:I see it.Not a warning. Not a question. Just witness. He's known me for nine years, has seen me manage crises and absorb losses and hold everything together through force of will. He's never seen me unable to look away from a woman for more than thirty seconds at a stretch.
He nods and moves on. The door swings closed behind him.
I watch her set her glass down on the railing and pull the cheap spiral-bound notebook from her jacket pocket. The pencil stub appears from somewhere — the same one, worn almost to the wood, the one she leans into when the graphite won't cooperate. She opens to a page and begins to draw, completely absorbed, while two hundred people have the best night of their week below her. I can almost hear the scratch of pencil on paper from here.
She doesn't turn when I reach her.
"You've been watching me for an hour," she says.
"Twenty minutes."
"An hour."
I don't argue. She's right.
"My office," I say.
Not a command — I hear the difference in my own voice as I say it. The arrangement voice has a specific quality, flat and total, no room for anything other than compliance. This isn't that. This is a request, the kind that can be declined, and the fact that I'm capable of making one tonight surprises me slightly.
She comes anyway.
My office at La Sirena is glass-walled on one side, overlooking the mezzanine, but I keep the blinds drawn when Iwant privacy and I draw them now. The door closes behind her and the noise of the club drops to a murmur — two hundred people, the stage, the bar, all of it reduced to a low hum through the walls. The air in here is cooler, quieter.
She looks around.
"You have more files than furniture," she says.
"Furniture doesn't earn."
She crosses to the desk and looks at the monitors. The accounting files. The vendor spreadsheets. Then her eyes move along the walls. No photographs. No personal effects. The room could belong to anyone.
"Nothing of yours in here," she says.
"No."
"Is this what Logan Cruz looks like when nobody's watching?"
"You're watching."
"I'm always watching." She says it plainly. Then she looks up from the monitors and at me directly, those gray eyes doing their patient work, giving nothing back. "I saw you in the pool again this morning."
Her voice is easy. Conversational.
"I used to swim at the ocean," I say. "Before."
I swim in her pool now, every morning before dawn, in the dark before the city wakes up. I let myself in with the access code and I get into her water.
She looks straight at me. "The ocean's closer."
"Yes."
She doesn't push. Doesn't have to.
"You also came to the penthouse the other night," she says.
A few nights ago I pressed a fixed blade flat against her throat — cold steel against her pulse, her back against the glass, the knife a boundary and a threat and a promise simultaneously.I used the knife handle to make her come while she was still scared of me.
"Yes."
