“I’ll tell you what I can,” he said. “When I can.”
Six words. Most he’d offered since he’d walked through my door.
The city fell away behind us — downtown going small, the hills opening up, the sky getting bigger than LA ever let it be. I was heading north in a thrift store sweatshirt with a man my father had hired to babysit me, no heels, no Bree, and no leverage of any kind.
Something was going to crack eventually. It always did.
I just needed to make sure it was him and not me.
Chapter Two
RAFE
SHE TALKED FOR SIXhours and twenty minutes before she ran out of jury.
That was my working theory. London Grant didn't run out of things to say. She ran out of an audience willing to rule in her favor, and somewhere past the Ridgecrest turnoff she'd apparently decided I wasn't worth the effort and gone to sleep with the abruptness of someone who controlled even that.
I drove.
The 395 was mine at this hour — two lanes, high desert, clear in both directions. The threat picture hadn't moved. The job had exactly one variable I hadn't fully accounted for.
She was turned toward the window, one knee up, the ponytail mostly come loose where her head had pressed against the glass. The flannel had shifted open at the collar. Underneath it was a white tank top, and underneath that was the pale curve of her shoulder and the edge of something thin and lacy that I had no business registering and had now registered twice.
The line of her neck where her head was tipped. The line of her jaw. Her mouth slightly open, her lips—
A horn hit like a gunshot.
The other driver blew past in the left lane, hand out the window, message clear.
I had the truck corrected before the horn finished. Both hands on the wheel, eyes forward, speed exactly where it needed to be.
Fuck. Three years clean of exactly this kind of pull, and I'd burned through the whole record since West Hollywood. This assignment was going to be a problem.
I put my eyes back on the road.
The Harrington Group had been building this play for six months — rival hotel dynasty, threatened by the Grant deal, everything to lose if it closed. The operative came in three months ago: no digital history before February, building proximity from the outside in, patient, peripheral, never the obvious angle. The gap stood out in the background pull. Then the building breach three weeks ago: a contracted cleaner through her floor, one question too many about her morning schedule, a name that traced to nothing when I ran it back. Cutout. Organized resources, and a very specific idea of how they wanted this to go.
Force wasn't the play. Access was. Long enough and close enough to manufacture the right moment — something a camera could catch, something that made merger partners reassess their risk tolerance without anyone asking them. She was the instrument for a play she didn't know was running.
The fix was straightforward: get her out. Off-grid and unreachable, there was nothing for them to attach to.
The complication was asleep six inches to my right, her head against the glass, and the cab was considerably smaller than the outside had suggested.
She woke up the way she did everything, without a runway. One second unconscious, the next upright and assessing, ponytail at an angle that had given up on geometry. I watchedher orient herself in what turned out to be the longest consecutive silence of the day. Forty-three seconds.
"How long was I asleep?"
"Four hours, give or take."
"That is not a time." She pulled her hair back into a knot that worked. "And my neck is filing a formal complaint."
"There's a rolled shirt behind the seat."
She reached back, came up with my gray thermal, turned it over once in her hands, and rolled it without being told how. Tucked it against the glass. Resettled herself with the specific air of someone who'd decided to be comfortable on principle rather than by accident.
I almost smiled at that. She had her back to me.
The gas station came up at 2:07 in the morning.
