Page 28

“Agreed.” Adrianos has drifted to the window, looking down at the street forty floors below, his shoulders tighter than they were in the elevator. “It confirms the name was real. Petros gave us something they cared enough to erase inside a day. That’s worth having, even with an empty room to show for it.”

“It’s worth having, but I still hate it.” I straighten up, and the frustration of it lands heavier than I expected, because I came in braced to find the next thread and instead I’m standing in a room that’s been turned into evidence of nothing. “We’ve got a confirmed name and four bare walls to put it next to, and that’s the whole haul. I want the thing that’s still warm. Instead I get the dust outline of where the warm thing used to sit, and a dust outline doesn’t go on the wall.”

“We take what we get. It’s more than we had this morning.” He’s already moving for the door, and his stride has shifted, not urgency exactly, but more like a man checking exits in a room he stopped trusting. “Come on.”

“For the record, I touched nothing. Not the desk, not the bin, nothing. I want that acknowledged.”

“Acknowledged.”

“You said that without even looking at me.”

“I have range, koukla,” he reminds me. “Some of it doesn’t need eye contact.”

We’re back outside in under ten minutes, and the cold finds us the second the lobby doors close, that specific gray downtown cold that smells faintly of the river even three blocks away from it. Evander’s idling across the street with the car running, and Adrianos has a hand at the small of my back, steering me toward the curb. I’m halfway through telling him that the vacuum lines are going to bother me all day, that I want to get back to the wall and see if anything from this building cross-references with what we’ve already pinned, when I hear the engine.

It’s wrong before I can say why. Too close, too fast, the pitch climbing in a register traffic doesn’t reach on a one-way street lined with parked cars on both sides. Then there’s a sound like a string of gunshots that turns out to be a row of trash cans getting flattened, metal screaming against metal, and the car is on the sidewalk, coming straight down it at us with nothing behind the windshield but glare.

Adrianos doesn’t shout a warning. There isn’t time for one. His arm locks around me and the world tips sideways as he drives both of us into the recessed doorway behind us, his body between me and the street, his shoulder taking the door frame with a sound I feel more than hear, a flat crack into stone. The car clips the edge of the doorway exactly where we’d been standing a half second ago, the side mirror exploding against the brick close enough that I feel the spray of it. Then it’s gone, swerving back off the curb and into traffic, gone before the echo of the impact has finished bouncing off the buildings around us.

Neither of us moves for a second. I can hear my own breathing, fast and too loud in my own ears, and I can feel his against the side of my head, steady, the breathing of a man who stepped into a doorway to check a text and nothing more.

“You’re shaking.” He’s already pulling back enough to look at me, both hands coming up, running over my arms, my shoulders, down to my wrists, checking for an injury and clearly not finding one fast enough for his liking. “Tell me where it hurts.”

“Nowhere, I think, I’m…” My voice comes out thin, wrong, and my hands won’t stop shaking no matter how hard I press them flat against my thighs, the same useless trick from the trunk that didn’t work then either. “Your shoulder hit the wall, I heard it, are you—”

“I’m fine.”

But there’s a dark smear of brick dust across his jacket where his shoulder took the frame, and he hasn’t so much as glanced down at it. His hands keep moving, over my collarbone, down my ribs, like the first pass wasn’t enough to trust.

“Elena. Look at me. Are you hurt?”

“No. I’m not hurt, I’m just…” I force a breath, and the street swims back into focus, trash cans scattered across the sidewalk, the broken mirror glittering on the concrete, Evander already out of the car and crossing toward us with one hand inside his jacket, eyes moving both directions at once. “That car was aimed at us.”

“Yes.”

“That wasn’t traffic, or brakes, or some guy having a medical event behind the wheel, that was a car, on purpose, on a sidewalk, going for the two people who just walked out of an office that got cleaned out specifically because we were coming to look at it.” My voice is climbing, and I can’t get it to stop. “Someone just tried to kill us. Right here. In the middle of the day.”

“Yes,” he says again, and this time there’s a weight underneath the flatness of it that wasn’t there for the shoulder or the brick dust or any of the rest, and his hand comes up to the back of my neck and stays there, grounding, while his eyes go past me, down the street, to the gap in traffic where the car disappeared. “And now we know exactly how close we just got, for it to matter this much, this fast.”

17

Elena

My phone buzzes against the table while I’m still trying to decide between the eggs and the bread, and I almost let it sit, because I haven’t fully stopped flinching at sudden noises since yesterday, and a buzzing phone on a hard table is exactly the kind of sudden noise that’s been getting to me.

Then I see the name in the headline, and the eggs stop existing.

PROMINENT WEALTH MANAGER FOUND DEAD IN MIDTOWN APARTMENT. Underneath, in print small enough to soften the blow and failing to, Petros Andreadis, 52, found this morning by building staff.

I read it, then I look up, and Adrianos is across the table with his coffee, the little pot from his grandmother already drained beside him. He cocks his brow when he notices I’m watching him.

“Petros is dead,” I say, and it comes out wrong, slower than anything I usually say, like the sentence had to get past something on its way out.

“I know.”

Two words. That’s the whole response. He doesn’t reach for the coffee, doesn’t look away, doesn’t do any of the things a person does when news catches them off guard, because it hasn’t caught him off guard at all, and that hits me harder than the headline did, fast and from an angle I never saw coming.

“You know.” I set the phone down, because if I don’t set it down now, I’m going to throw it across the kitchen. “As in you already knew, before my phone told me. As in this isn’t news to you, it’s just a confirmation of something you’d already filed under done.”