I sit.
The skyline is wide open from this angle. A sprawl of glass towers and harbor lights. Stars are out tonight, more than usual for Halo City; the sky is clear enough that the coastline is visible even in the dark. A quiet night. But quiet nights are the worst kind. Quiet is when the noise inside my head gets loud.
I sip the whiskey. It burns clean going down. I hold the glass on my knee and stare at the lights, and I can feel her watching me the same way you feel a hand near your skin before it touches.
“I heard you,” I say. “Earlier. In the office.”
Momentarily I’m stunned by what I just said.
I wasn’t planning to say it. My brain has been circling the thing for hours, dragging it around the inside of my skull since the moment I heard her. But I didn’t expect it to be the first thing out of my mouth. I expected small talk first. Not this grenade.
But there it is, pin pulled in the open.
I turn to her, and there is nothing in her eyes except attention. Full, undivided, unhurried attention.
“Did you have sex with that man?” Ballsy of me. I bet that’s what she’s thinking. That I have the nerve to ask her that, sitting in her home, drinking her whiskey.
Her smile doesn’t rush itself.
“Are you jealous, Kai?”
The question lands square in my chest. Not because it is unexpected, but because the honest answer is yes, and the honest answer is a problem. A bodyguard doesn’t get jealous. A man running a con doesn’t get jealous. A twenty-five-year-old with a revenge plot doesn’t sit across from a woman fifteen years his senior and feel his blood go hot because she fucked someone else.
But I do. I feel all of it. Every stupid, useless degree of it.
I take a sip of whiskey.
She is watching me over the rim of her glass, and there is no mercy in it.
“I’m your bodyguard.”
Even that statement doesn’t make sense in this context, but I keep my face still. She isn’t going to answer me directly. I know that already. She is going to make me work for every inch of it, and even then, she’s only going to give me what she decided I could have.
“Is he forcing you?” The words rush out on their own. “Is there something going on? Is this some kind of—”
“Forcing me?”
“Is this… are you trying to climb some kind of corporate ladder? Is that what this is?”
“Kai.” She sets her glass down on the side table. “I am the top of the ladder. There is no ladder that I’m trying to climb. You clearly don’t know who I am.”
“Then tell me.”
She picks the glass back up. “Mr. Jones is a barrister. One of many on retainer. There are half a dozen at his caliber I can call on. He is not irreplaceable. He is not special.” She pauses. “He is a consultant.”
I hold the whiskey glass and say nothing.
“Does that answer your question?”
It doesn’t. It answers the question about the professional arrangement, and it answers nothing else.
“Then why?” I ask.
She raises an eyebrow.
“If he’s disposable.” I rub my jaw with my hand. “If there are six others just like him, why?”
“Why what, exactly?”
