DEVOUR ME, MR. KANE

The bullet hit the man beside Elara. He dropped. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She couldn’t. Her body just stood there, locked, while the sound of the shot still rang in her ears, and the man who had been breathing one second ago was now a collapsed, bleeding thing on the marble floor beside her heel. Damien Kane lowered the gun. Straightened his cufflink. Looked at her. “You were supposed to be in the elevator,” he said. She looked at the man on the floor—the hole in his chest, the blood spreading slow and permanent into the cracks of the marble. Then she looked up. “What did you just do?” “Something necessary.” He handed the gun to the large man who appeared from nowhere at his right and turned back toward his office. “Come.” She didn’t move. He stopped. Didn’t turn around. “Miss Voss.” Quieter now. Worse. “Come. Or the next conversation we have won’t be in private.” Her legs moved. She hated them for it. She followed Damien Kane over a dead man into the elevator and watched the doors close on a lobby his people were already silently, efficiently, terrifyingly beginning to erase. The elevator climbed. Neither of them spoke. She could hear her own pulse. Feel the stranger’s blood cooling against her ribs through her blouse. She had come here today with a speech. A confrontation. Forty minutes on the bus, rehearsing the exact words she would use when she finally stood in front of the man who had burned her family to the ground. She was afraid of him. The elevator opened. His office sat at the end of a corridor built to make people feel small. The assistant at the desk didn’t look up. Typing. Like she hadn’t heard a gunshot twenty floors below. Maybe she had. Maybe that was normal here. He walked to his desk and sat down. Opened a drawer. Placed a document on the surface and turned it to face her. Her name was already at the top. “Sit down, Miss Voss.” “You just killed someone.” “He was going to kill you.” A pause. “Messy.” She stared at him. He stared back. She sat down. Her legs weren’t reliable anymore. “Who sent him?” “The same person dismantling your father’s life. The same person who called in that debt and wanted you gone before you got close enough to ask why.” He tapped the document. “Read.” She picked it up. Her hands didn’t shake. She made sure of it. Her name. Her address. Her brother’s school. Her father’s hospital ward number. And below all of it, an offer so clean and cold it read less like a contract and more like a sentence. Twelve months. His penthouse. His personal assistant. Debt cleared in forty-eight hours. She set it down. “You want me to live with you.” “I want you alive. Living with me does that.” He leaned forward, dark eyes level. Up close, he was more dangerous than photographs suggested. “I have been building a case against the person destroying your family for fourteen months. You are the missing piece. You are also now a target.” A pause. “I can’t use a dead woman.” “So this is about using me.” “This is about keeping you breathing long enough to matter.” He held her gaze. “Sentiment comes later.” She looked at the contract. Thought about her father in that hospital bed. Her brother at home pretending everything was fine because he was seventeen and had learned it from her. She picked up the pen. “Three conditions.” She wrote them at the bottom before he could object. “I don’t cook. I don’t clean. You don’t touch me without permission.” He looked at what she wrote. A muscle moved in his jaw. “Agreed.” She signed. He took the document and placed it in his drawer like the whole thing had already been decided long before she walked in. She stood to leave. “Miss Voss.” She stopped. “Your father didn’t stumble into this.” His voice was the same. Flat. Certain. “He made a choice seven years ago. Ask him about the night of the fire.” A beat. “Ask him about the woman who died in it. Ask him why he took the money.” She turned slowly. His face gave her nothing. “What woman?” “Her name was Lydia.” He picked up his phone. Done with her. “She was going to be my wife.” The floor disappeared under Elara’s feet. She walked out. The elevator was already open. She stepped in and rode down forty-seven floors with her back against the mirror, eyes on the ceiling, one thought circling her skull like something that couldn’t find the exit. Her father had watched a woman die. And someone had paid him to forget it. The lobby gleamed when she reached it. The man was gone.