He had passed by me earlier today, and then later, as I was about to leave the dining room, having had dinner alone. In both instances, he didn’t spare me more than a sentence. Not that I didn’t deserve it.
I folded the last item and looked at the suitcase.
Small. Portable. The life I had arrived with compressed back to its original size.
I’ll be out of the city by dawn.
I looked at my left hand.
The ring was still on my finger. It was not loyalty—I had forfeited whatever claim I had to that word. It was not sentiment, either. The ring was Golovin. The ring was still, in whatever remained of the structural sense, a signal.
So I left it on.
*****
The suitcase was by the door when my phone buzzed.
Not the secondary phone—that was still in the bathroom waste bin, its evidence erased, its usefulness spent. My regular phone, the one with Elena's messages, Isla's check-ins, and the ordinary communications of a life I had been conducting alongside the other one. Unknown number. The message was four lines.
“We know you're running. Meet us tonight, or all the actual proof reaches Viktor before sunrise. Closed lounge, Monarch Club, 9 PM. Come alone.”
They had been watching the penthouse. Or they had sources inside the building. Or the monitoring they had demonstrated during the shopping trip with Isla had simply continued without my awareness, which was the accurate interpretation. I had always been watched by these people. The freedom of movement I had believed I had was a permission they had been extending until it no longer served them.
We know you're running.
Of course they knew.
I sat down on the edge of the sofa with the phone in my hand and thought about it clearly, with the clarity that arrives in the early morning hours when you are too tired for anything but accuracy.
The lounge they had named was on the south end of the Strip—I knew of it. I had known of it as a location adjacent to operations that the casino floor staff had learned to note and notmention. A closed venue, technically under renovation, the kind of space that remained available for specific uses regardless of its official status. A closed venue, in the language of people like Cruz, meantpublic enough that killing you here would be an operational cost they've decided not to pay tonight.
It was not safety. It was a calculated margin.
I thought about running anyway. Standing up, taking the suitcase, getting out of the building before they decided for me. I was good at disappearing in a technical sense—I had been portable my whole life, I knew how to move without leaving significant traces, and I knew which directions were less visible than others. I could be out of Las Vegas by daybreak. And it was not like Viktor didn’t already see me as a betrayer.
But Cruz’s package, whatever it would be, would tell him what he didn't know. There were things he didn't know. There were things that, delivered by Cruz, would not land as the truth I had given him but as the extension of an operation against him.
And Cruz's network, which had people watching the penthouse, which had documented every communication I had sent them, which had framed this message with the information that they knew I was packing, would choose what to do with the documentation.
I sat with the suitcase by the door and felt the exit close.
They did not want me gone. Gone was not useful. They had invested in me as an asset, and assets did not get to retire, and the mechanism for preventing retirement was documentation and the willingness to use it.
I was going to have to go to the meeting.
I put the phone down and looked at the suitcase again, releasing a sigh. I had no words for my devastation in that moment.
*****
I left the penthouse early in the morning.
I left with my regular bag—not the suitcase, which I repacked and put in the closet, the departure postponed by the text message and the calculation that followed—because there were things I needed before 9 pm that required movement outside the building.
That, and the fact that I needed to just step out and be normal for a while. On my terms.
The security downstairs—two of Viktor's men at the lobby—noted me leaving. I was no longer under Viktor's protection, which was the fact stated plainly the previous night, but the fact had not yet propagated to every layer of the operation, which meant the men in the lobby were still operating on the previous configuration. The one where I was to be protected with their lives. I walked past them with a composed expression, and they let me go, which I had assessed they would.
I spent the morning doing ordinary things.
