* * *
We drive in through the gate and I get out and lean against the car and light a cigarette.
Renzo comes around the bonnet and stops beside me and looks at the house with his hands in his pockets.
"So," he says. "What's the plan?"
I draw on the cigarette. "Contact Keller. Let him know I have his daughter and that I need my favor called in." I exhale slowly.
"Finalmente," Renzo says.Finally.
I look at him sideways. The bruise has gone a shade darker and his lip has swollen further and he is standing at an angle that he probably doesn't realize is visible.
"Get some rest," I tell him. "You look terrible. I'll handle the cargo tonight."
He turns to look at me and then he turns and walks toward the house at a pace that suggests he is going to be upstairs and in bed before I have finished the cigarette, correctly calculating that the window of my generosity is narrow and should not be tested.
I smoke and look at the gate and think about Nathalie.
I think about how she will look when I tell her I have contacted her father.
I think about Kirill and his words.
She has you hooked already.
I drop the cigarette and go inside to my room and when I open the door, she is standing in the middle of my room.
Her hair is wet, and dripping at the ends, and her face is still damp and her legs are bare and she is wearing my blue t-shirt, which hits her mid-thigh, and it is wet from her hair and her skin, so it is doing very little in the way of its primary function. Her nipples poke out very prominently.
She is clutching her old clothes against her chest with both hands, balled up against her, and her eyes when they find mine are very wide.
I step inside and close the door.
She steps back.
"I—" she starts. "I—my—the shower—" She stops. "The water in my room, it ran out and I—the maids, I asked and no one—I just—" She looks at the shirt and then at me and then at the floor. "I just wanted to shower."
I look at her.
The shirt is from a tailor on Savile Row, a bespoke piece I got three years ago and have worn twice. I walk over to her.
I take the bundle of clothes from her hands and toss them onto the bed and I say, "Stand straight."
She does. Her body is still, I notice. It is only her hands that are trembling.
I look at her.
The shirt clings to everything the way wet fabric does when it has been put on over damp skin and she is not wearing anything under it.
"That shirt," I tell her, "is a thousand-pound designer piece. I bought it in London."
Her throat moves.
I lean in, close enough that she has to keep very still to maintain the distance between us, and I say, quietly, "You touched something you shouldn't have touched. That's not a small thing." I let the pause sit. "We aren't that close, last I checked."
I bring my mouth to her ear and bite.
She falls back.
