“Fuck. Fuck.“
Then he pulls out slowly while I hiss through the gag. He unbuckles the belt from my wrists, and I let my arms fall to the mattress, the blood rushing back into my fingers in a hot, tingling flood. Then he pulls the fabric from my mouth, and I spit the taste of cotton onto the pillow.
Rolling onto my back, I look up. I trace the crack with my eyes and let my breath come back to me.
From my periphery, I know Kai is standing beside the bed. Pants down, looking at me. But I don’t look at him because his hands, which were so steady on my hips a few seconds ago, are trembling at his sides.
I smile in my head. “Finish packing.”
5
Kai
DIANA JENSEN LIVES in the sky, and every minute I spend with her, I’m reminded that she is not one of us mere mortals.
She has an elevator that opens directly into her penthouse. Not into a hallway of a shared floor. Not into a vestibule with someone else’s door across from hers. The brass panels part, and you are standing in her living room. She owns the entire forty-second floor of a building that faces the harbor, and there is nothing tall enough in front of it to interrupt her view of the water.
This woman has the wealth that buys altitude. Forty-two floors between her and the rest of Halo City. The ground, she only visits when she feels generous enough to grace it.
I let all of that sink in every minute I am here.
Last night, when I arrived for the first time, I stood in her foyer with my duffel bag and thought about her lying in my bed. In my studio apartment. The sheets I bought from IKEA. She hadn’t said a single word about any of it, and that silence is its own kind of charity. But being in a penthouse where the shower alone is bigger than that entire studio, I’m embarrassed she set foot in my apartment at all.
I’m staying in one of the guest rooms. King-sized bed, blackout curtains. The closet was already open when arrived, and inside it, seven suits hang in a neat row. Tags still on. The fabric is dense; the stitching invisible.
I don’t recognize the brand, but the tags tell me everything I need to know.
I brought two suits with me. Bought them with money I’d saved. They are decent suits from a decent department store. The color is fine. The fit is fine. Everything about them is fine until you hang them next to what she gave me, and then fine stops being a word and starts being an insult.
She told me not to worry about it. It’s a uniform. My employer providing work attire. That was the explanation, and it was a reasonable explanation.
The problem is not the suits. The problem is my brain. My brain, which has decided to make this personal when it has no business being personal.
I don’t want things from her. I don’t want her buying me clothes because I cannot return the gesture. I can’t walk into a store and buy Diana Jensen a single thing she doesn’t already own ten of, in a better version.
There. I said it.
And I know how it sounds. It sounds stupid. There is no reason for me to buy her anything. There is no reason for me to even think about buying her anything. She is a job. She is a target. I am supposed to seduce her and make her walk away from Jack Rutherford. That is the plan.
I don’t want this heaviness in my chest. I don’t want to feel this.
This morning, I put on one of her suits. It fits perfectly. I look at myself in the mirror and see a stranger. A well-dressed stranger.
Then, by nine-thirty, the penthouse is a law office.
Two men arrive together. Both are well-dressed and older than Diana. They set up at the dining table, laptops out, files spread across the glass top in a system I’m sure makes sense to them. The woman who follows them is Carol, Diana’s secretary.
The third man is a barrister. I know this because Carol calls him Mr. Jones, and because he carries himself with the particular gravity of someone who speaks for a living. Sixty, maybe older. Silver hair. A face carved by decades of courtrooms. A handshake he doesn’t offer me when he walks past. He goes straight to Diana’s office, and the door closes behind him.
I stand in the hallway and take inventory. The two solicitors and Carol are at the dining table, and they are discussing the case. The senator’s name comes up. I remember what Diana told me yesterday. I recognize him from the news.
Diana told me to stay in my room. That there is nothing to guard. And looking around, she is right. But I can’t sit in my room. Not with four strangers in her home. I’m her bodyguard. The word means something to me.
I walk to the far end of the penthouse, past the kitchen, along the long hallway, and I stop outside her office. If she doesn’t want me inside, fine. I can stand out here. I don’t need to hear them discuss what the senator has been doing. I already heard enough.
My mind is still chewing on that, on how I would prefer to spend my anger on my own revenge plan instead of some low-life senator, when I hear a moan through the door.
A moan through a heavy, solid wooden door.
