Mine to Protect

Sofia The rain in Chicago didn't fall it attacked. It came down in sheets so thick Sofia Carver could barely see three feet ahead of her as she ran, heels clicking against the slick pavement, her umbrella long since turned inside out and abandoned two blocks back. Her shift at Rosario's Diner had ended forty minutes late, her tips had been insulting, and now the universe had decided that wasn't punishment enough. She ducked under the awning of a closed flower shop and pressed her back against the glass, catching her breath. Water dripped from the hem of her black uniform skirt. Her hair, which she'd actually bothered to curl this morning, was plastered flat against her neck. Perfect, she thought. Absolutely perfect. She pulled out her phone to check the time — 11:47 PM — and groaned. The last bus on her route had stopped running at eleven. Which meant she was either walking twenty blocks in a rainstorm or spending money she didn't have on a cab. She was still debating when she heard the voices. Low. Sharp. Coming from the alley beside the flower shop. Sofia told herself not to look. She was a twenty-three-year-old waitress in a bad part of the city at midnight in the rain. Looking into dark alleys was exactly the kind of thing that got people killed in the true-crime podcasts she was always listening to. She looked anyway. There were three men. Two she didn't recognize — broad-shouldered, expensive suits soaked through, faces that looked carved from stone. The third was on his knees in a puddle, hands zip-tied behind his back, bleeding from a cut above his eyebrow. And there was a fourth man. He stood with his back to her, but everything about him commanded the surrounding space. Tall. Dark coat. Hands clasped behind his back like he was surveying a boardroom, not a man bleeding in an alley. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, which somehow made it worse. "You had one job, Petrov. One." The man on his knees — Petrov — said something in a language Sofia didn't understand. Russian, maybe. His voice cracked on the last word. The tall man tilted his head slightly. "I know," he said, in English this time, almost gently. "I believe you." Then he nodded once to the man on his left. Sofia's hand flew to her mouth. She must have made a sound, a gasp, a step backward, something because the tall man turned. For one terrible second, the alley, the rain, the whole city disappeared. His face was angular and sharp, like something sculpted rather than born. Dark eyes under darker brows. A jaw that could cut glass. He was younger than she expected mid-thirties at most and more beautiful than anyone standing in a rain-soaked alley had any right to be. He looked at her the way people looked at problems. "Get her." Sofia ran. She made it half a block before a hand closed around her arm and spun her around. The man was one of the broad-shouldered ones — up close he was even larger, a wall in a suit. "Don't scream," he said quietly. She screamed. He sighed like she'd disappointed him personally and threw her over his shoulder like she weighed nothing. Sofia kicked and clawed and said every word her mother had specifically raised her not to say, but it made no difference. She was carried back to the alley and set down — not roughly, which somehow frightened her more — in front of the tall man. He studied her for a long moment. Rain ran down the sharp planes of his face. He didn't seem to notice or care. His dark eyes moved over her slowly — not in the way men sometimes looked at her at the diner, hungry and careless. This was something else. Calculating. Like he was reading a document. "What's your name?" His voice was low and accented faintly — Italian, she thought. Or maybe she was just noticing because of how precisely he shaped each word, like language was a tool he'd sharpened. Sofia lifted her chin. Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her throat. "None of your business," she said. Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one. "Wrong answer." "Sofia." She said it before she'd decided to. "Sofia Carver." He considered this. Then he reached into his coat — she flinched — and produced a phone. He typed something with one hand, then turned the screen toward one of his men without ever looking away from her. "Find out everything," he said. Sofia's stomach dropped. "You just witnessed something," he said, slipping the phone back into his pocket. "That creates a problem for me." "I didn't see anything," she said immediately. "You're a terrible liar, Sofia Carver." The way he said her name — both parts, like he was filing it somewhere — made her skin prickle. "Please," she said, hating that the word came out small. "I'm nobody. I'm a waitress. I have thirty-seven dollars in my bank account. I have nothing to do with—" she gestured vaguely at the alley, at him, at whatever this entire situation was. "Any of this." He was quiet for a moment. "What were you doing here?" "Waiting out the rain. My bus was gone. I wasn't following you, I wasn't—" "I know," he said. "If you were following me, we wouldn't be having this conversation." She didn't want to think about what that meant. He looked at her for another long, unreadable moment. Then he turned to the larger man who had carried her. "Call Marco. Tell him we need the Lake Shore suite prepared." "The suite?" The man blinked. "Boss." "Tonight." Sofia shook her head. "I am not going anywhere with you." He looked back at her then, and the expression on his face was almost patient. The way someone looked when they already knew how the conversation ended. "You saw something you weren't supposed to see," he said quietly. "There are people in this city who will kill you for that. Not because they want to. Simply because it's efficient." He paused. "I am not going to kill you, Sofia." "How comforting," she said, her voice only slightly shaking. "But I can't let you walk back out there alone tonight." He turned away, already moving toward the alley's entrance. "Come." "And if I don't?" He stopped. Didn't turn around. "Then Dmitri carries you again." A beat. "Your choice." Dmitri — the wall in the suit — looked at her with something that might have been sympathy. Sofia looked at the rain. On the empty street. In a dark city that suddenly felt very large and very dangerous. She thought about thirty-seven dollars and a dead cell phone battery and twenty blocks between her and home. Then she thought about the look in his eyes when he'd said I am not going to kill you — steady, certain, like a man who kept his word not out of kindness but out of principle. She hated that it was the most reassuring thing she'd heard all night. Sofia Carver pulled her soaked cardigan tighter, lifted her chin, and followed the most dangerous man she'd ever seen out of the alley. She told herself it was survival instinct. She told herself it was the only logical choice. She told herself a lot of things that night.