“Let her go.” The voice comes from directly ahead.
Rolan is standing twelve feet away. His voice is low, and his expression is one of a complete lack of concern.
Landon laughs. The sound goes through me. It’s the same laugh from four years of evenings in his apartment. Mocking. I feel my stomach pull tight with the old, familiar disgust.
“You don’t know who you’re talking to,” Landon says.
Rolan’s eyes move from Landon to me and back again.
“I know who I’m talking to.”
His voice is low and absolutely flat.
Landon goes still. I feel it through the proximity.
He recovers quickly. He always does.
“Then you know she owes me,” Landon says. Easy again, conversational. The hand behind my back doesn’t move. “She came here to see me. Didn’t you, Ellie?” He doesn’t wait for my answer. “This is a private matter between her and me. Whatever she does in her off hours is her business.”
Rolan doesn’t respond to this. He doesn’t blink.
“If you’re expecting the two men that were with you,” Rolan says, “they’re otherwise occupied.”
The silence that follows is pointed. I feel Landon register it, the slight shift of his weight.
“You’re making a mistake,” Landon warns.
“Release her.”
“She owes?—”
“I won’t say it again.”
Landon’s chest expands. The hand at my back presses slightly harder.
Rolan steps forward.
I feel it in Landon before I see it. The body against my back goes rigid first, then — and I have never, in four years of knowing this man, felt this — he shifts backward. A half-step. Small, involuntary. The knife comes up.
The blade presses against the side of my throat. I feel the cold metal, my breath goes shallow, and Landon’s arm tightens across my collarbone, pulling me closer, using me as a shield between himself and the beast stalking toward him.
“Stop,” Landon says. His voice has changed. “Stop or I’ll?—”
Rolan doesn’t stop.
The pressure of the blade increases. I feel the edge of it. I don’t breathe while Rolan covers the last few feet between us, and then everything happens at once.
He surges forward.
Landon’s grip jerks. Rolan’s hands are on me. He passes me backward behind him in a single motion, and I stumble, catching myself against the concrete barrier, and turn in time to watch his hand close around Landon’s wrist.
The sound Landon makes is not a word.
Rolan twists, one controlled rotation, precise as a key in a lock, and the knife comes free. It transfers between them so smoothly that it takes me a moment to register which hand it ended up in.
Landon’s arm is wrenched up behind him at an angle thatdoesn’t look comfortable, and the knife is now pressed flat against his throat.
His face is contorted with an emotion I’ve never seen on him before. Fear. “What the hell?—”
