I was good at it. I got very good at it. And then I left that world, and I spent three years building enough distance between myself and it that I thought — I genuinely believed — that I had gotten far enough away that this particular thing would never find me again. But here I stand, in a dirty club, eyes locked on that body, with my hands shaking with fear.
In an attempt to make it stop, I press them flat against the wall and tell myself to move. Back up. Slowly. Find another route to the exit. Do anything except stand here in the mouth of this corridor, processing a sight I have no business processing in a place I have no business being.
I almost make it when one of the men turns around, his eyes falling on me instantly.
He's tall, broad, muscular, judging by the width of his shoulders, dressed in a fitted shirt the way that fine clothes fit men who have them made rather than bought. He has a gun in his hand, and he raises it before I've finished registering that I've been spotted. His voice when he speaks is completely conversational, the voice of a man who has done this so many times that the gun is just to make a point.
"Come here," he says.
I don't move.
"I said come here." The gun adjusts slightly, clarifying the instruction. "Now."
My legs move before my brain finishes understanding the sentence, operating on the survival logic that has kept me alive through things that should have gone differently. Comply. Assess. Wait for the opening. I walk out of the corridor, stopping ten feet from him with my hands visible at my sides, my face as empty as I can make it, and I look at him, then I look at the other man.
The other man is the one who frightens me.
Not because of what he's doing, which is nothing — he's standing with his hands loose at his sides and his weight balanced and his expression entirely, completely still. He's frightening because of the quality of that stillness. The one has a gun and is using it to conduct a conversation, which means I understand what the gun is for and what he intends it to accomplish. The other man has nothing visible and needs nothing visible. I understand this the moment I look at him, in the same bone-deep wordless way I understood what was on the floor.
He's taller than the blond one by an inch or two, darker, built like something that was specifically designed for its purpose. Dark brown hair, pale blue eyes that register wrong at first, too pale, too still, like someone who belongs in a very cold place. Tattoos at his throat running beneath his shirt all the way down to his hands. A scar down the left side of his face that is old enough to have settled into the skin like it was always there. He isn't looking at the blond man or the body or the door or anything in the room except me.
"Who are you?" the blond one asks pointedly.
"Cleaning crew." My voice comes out with a steadiness I don’t feel. I’m proud of the way my voice doesn’t quiver despite the fear in my chest. "I work for the service that contracts with the club. I have a badge, I can show you—" I reach slowly toward my pocket. "I was covering a shift tonight, I heard something, I hid thinking someone had broken in, I was just trying to find the exit."
"Name."
"Alex. Alex Riggs."
He looks at me the way you look at something you're deciding what to do with. "What did you see exactly, Alex?"
"Nothing. I heard a sound and I found the nearest door and I stayed there. I didn't come out until the corridor was quiet." All of it is true. None of it is sufficient. I can see that it isn't sufficient in the way he's looking at me and in the way the other man is still scrutinizing me in silence. "I wasn't trying to?—"
"She's seen the body," the blond one says. Not to me. To the other man, like I've already been reclassified from person to situation.
"Yes," the other man says. One word, low and accented, Russian maybe, underneath the English.
"Then you know what that means."
"I know what you think it means," the other man says, and something in his tone shifts, something so subtle I almost miss it — not warmth, not reassurance, just a correction, the kind a person makes when they've already made a decision and are simply informing the rest of the room of it.
The blond looks at him quizzically. Something unspoken passes between them that I can't read, and I don't try to because I’m toobusy calculating the distance to every exit, against the position of the gun. Then the blond one turns back to me with a smile that doesn't reach anything above his mouth.
"You are very unlucky tonight," he says, pleasantly, like he's commenting on the weather. "Wrong place. Wrong time. Very bad combination." He tilts his head. "I think I'm going to have to?—"
"She'll clean it up." The brown-haired one says.
His words shock me; he's looking at me with total attention, like I'm a problem he's already solved and is now simply implementing.
"She's here to clean," he says. "She has the equipment. She knows how to be quiet." A pause, short and precise. "It's the practical solution."
"I—"
"It wasn't a question," he says.
The blond one — Pavel, the other man calls him, short and flat — looks between us. He doesn't like this. I can see him not liking it in the set of his jaw, and the way his eyes cut sideways, and then pull back. Then he steps back, gesturing toward the body on the floor with the gun, the casual gesture of a man indicating a spill he expects someone else to clean up, because that is exactly what this is to him.
"Fine," he says. "Clean it up."
