"Did you book that suite?"
Alina asked it before his office door had finished closing behind her. She didn't sit. She didn't take off her coat. She stood in the middle of the long gray rug with her arms folded and the emerald on her finger catching the light, and she looked at him the way she had looked at him in Suite 4401 the morning she'd said *I reject you.*
Avery set down his pen.
"No."
The word came out clean. Flat. Exactly the way he'd said a thousand other true things in this room.
And for the first time in his life, he heard how thin it sounded.
Because the note was still in his inside pocket. He could feel it against his ribs, small and folded and soft as old cloth. *PELL STREET. 4B.* In big, clumsy letters he had not written, in handwriting that was unmistakably his own.
