Mine to Protect

Chapter 3 — Shadows and Lies

Sofia

Sofia's first instinct was to scream.

Her second instinct the smarter one remembered that screaming hadn't exactly served her well in the alley earlier tonight. She'd screamed then too, and all it had gotten her was carried over a very large man's shoulder like a piece of luggage.

So she breathed instead. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way her mother had taught her when she was seven and afraid of thunderstorms.

You're not seven, she reminded herself. And this is significantly worse than thunder.

The hand over her mouth was firm but not cruel. The body behind her kept a deliberate distance — close enough to control, not close enough to frighten. Which somehow frightened her more, because it suggested someone who knew exactly how much pressure to apply and how much to withhold.

Calculated. Like someone else she'd met tonight.

"I'm going to move my hand," the voice said. Still low. Still that cold, edged accent she couldn't quite place. Eastern European, maybe. But different from Petrov's broken syllables in the alley. This was clean. Precise. The accent of someone educated in it. "You're not going to scream. Correct?"

She considered her options. The marble soap dish was still in her right hand. The bathroom door was behind her. Dmitri was — theoretically — outside the front door, though given that this man had gotten in without apparently using it, that felt like cold comfort.

She nodded once.

The hand lowered slowly.

Sofia spun around.

He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, like he'd been waiting for a bus rather than standing in a billionaire's stolen suite having just appeared from nowhere. He was younger than she'd expected — late twenties, maybe thirty. Dark blond hair pushed back from a face that was sharp and angular and would have been handsome if it weren't for the scar that ran from his left eyebrow to the corner of his jaw. Light grey eyes, the color of ice over deep water.

He was wearing black. Of course he was wearing black. Everyone in her life tonight was wearing black.

"Who are you?" Sofia asked.

"Someone who knows things," he said.

"That's not a name."

"No," he agreed pleasantly. "It isn't."

She tightened her grip on the soap dish. "How did you get in here?"

He glanced at the dish with something that might have been amusement. "I'd put that down. It won't do what you're hoping."

"It'll make me feel better."

"Fair enough." He uncrossed his arms and moved to the sitting area, dropping into one of the armchairs like he owned it. "Sit down, Ms. Carver. I'm not here to hurt you. If I were, we'd already be past that part."

She stayed standing. Partly out of stubbornness. Partly because her legs felt steadier when she wasn't moving.

"You said Luca is the reason I'm in danger," she said. "Explain that."

He looked at her for a moment with those glacier eyes. Then he reached into his jacket she tensed and produced a small photograph, which he set on the coffee table and slid toward her side without getting up.

Sofia crossed the room carefully, keeping distance between them, and picked it up.

It was a surveillance photo. Grainy, taken from a distance. A restaurant, maybe candlelit, elegant. Two men at a table. One was heavyset, grey-haired, the kind of face that belonged on the cover of a Forbes magazine.

The other was Luca.

"That was taken six weeks ago," the man said. "Do you know who he's having dinner with?"

"Obviously not."

"His name is Viktor Renko." He paused, letting the name land. "He runs the largest human trafficking operation on the eastern seaboard."

The photograph felt suddenly dirty in her hands.

"Luca Moretti has been negotiating a partnership with Renko for three months," the man continued, his voice measured and even, like he was reading from a brief. "What you saw tonight in that alley wasn't random, Ms. Carver. Petrov — the man on his knees — was a courier. He was carrying proof of that partnership. Documents, transactions, names. He was supposed to deliver them to my people."

"Your people," Sofia repeated carefully. "Who are your people?"

A slight pause. "People who want Renko stopped."

"That's not an answer either."

"You're very persistent for someone in a towel."

Sofia felt heat rise to her face and absolutely refused to acknowledge it. "So what are you saying? That Luca had Petrov — what, punished? For going to you?"

"Petrov was playing both sides," the man said. "Renko found out. Luca was there to send a message — not just to Petrov, but to anyone else thinking of talking." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "And then you walked into that alley. An ordinary woman. A witness."

"He didn't hurt me," Sofia said, and hated that it came out sounding like a defense.

"Not yet."

The words sat in the warm golden air of the suite like something cold dropped into still water.

"He could have," she said. "In the alley. He could have" she stopped.

"He didn't," the man agreed. "Which is what makes him interesting and what makes him dangerous. Luca Moretti doesn't make impulsive decisions. Everything he does is deliberate." Those grey eyes held hers steadily. "Including this. Including you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I don't know yet," he said, and it was the first thing he'd said that sounded entirely honest. "But a man like Luca doesn't bring a witness into his personal suite. He doesn't cover her rent and tell her she's safe. That's not procedure. That's not strategy." A pause. "That's something else."

Sofia set the photograph down on the table.

Her thoughts were moving too fast, colliding into each other Luca's voice in the elevator, maybe I'm saying it enough times so I believe it. His eyes in that last moment before the doors closed. The flicker of something human in all that careful darkness.

She pushed it away.

"What do you want from me?" she asked.

The man reached into his jacket again and this time produced a small black device — a phone, she realized, except thinner than any phone she'd seen. He set it beside the photograph.

"There are documents in this suite," he said. "In the study — through that door on your left. Luca uses this suite for business meetings sometimes. There's a safe behind the painting on the north wall." He met her eyes. "I need what's inside it."

Sofia stared at him.

"You want me," she said slowly, "to break into a mafia boss's safe."

"I want you to help me access it. The device will do the actual work."

"I don't — I'm a waitress. I've never broken into anything in my life. I don't know the combination, I don't know—"

"You don't need to know the combination. The device handles that." He stood, smoothly, and picked up the phone. He held it out to her. "All I need is someone on the inside. Someone who's already here."

"And if I say no?"

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again his voice was quieter, and something in it shifted — not softer, exactly. More serious. The difference between a warning and a threat.

"If those documents don't surface, Renko walks. He's been walking for eleven years, Ms. Carver. And the people he takes — they don't." He let that settle. "I'm not asking you to be a hero. I'm asking you to open a safe."

Sofia looked at the device in his outstretched hand.

She thought about trafficking routes and courier documents and a man named Renko having dinner by candlelight like someone ordinary.

She thought about Luca Moretti's voice saying you're safe here and the part of her that had almost, almost believed him.

She thought about thirty-seven dollars and a dead cell phone battery and how none of that seemed remotely relevant anymore.

She reached out slowly.

Her fingers were an inch from the device when the elevator chimed.

Both of them froze.

The grey-eyed man moved faster than she thought possible one moment he was standing in front of her, the next he was gone, the balcony door swinging silently shut behind him, the photograph off the table and the device vanished, like he'd been erased from the room entirely.

Sofia spun to face the elevator doors.

They opened.

Luca stepped out.

He'd changed no coat now, dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a tiredness around his eyes that hadn't been there before. He stopped when he saw her standing in the middle of the room, still in her towel, still holding the marble soap dish with white knuckles.

He looked at the soap dish. Then at her face.

"Are you alright?"

Sofia opened her mouth.

Behind her, through the glass of the balcony door, she could see the faint shape of the grey-eyed man pressed against the exterior wall, seventeen floors above the city, waiting.

Watching her.

"Fine," she said. "I just couldn't sleep."

Luca studied her face for a long, terrible moment. Those dark eyes moving over her the way they had in the alley — reading, calculating, searching for the thing she wasn't saying.

Sofia held his gaze and kept her face still and thought about Renko and Petrov and partnership documents and wondered which one of the two men in this situation was telling her the truth.

Then Luca crossed the room toward her, slow and deliberate, and stopped close enough that she could see the rain still caught in his dark hair.

He reached out.

Sofia's breath stopped.

His hand closed around the soap dish gently and lowered it from her grip.

"You should sleep," he said quietly. "Things look different in the morning."

"Do they?" she whispered.

He looked at her for one more long moment and this time, whatever she'd glimpsed in the elevator was closer to the surface. Unguarded, almost. Like the tiredness had worn something thin.

"Sometimes," he said. "Not always."

He set the soap dish on the counter and went back to the elevator without another word.

The doors closed.

Sofia turned to the balcony.

The grey-eyed man was gone.

In his place, on the outside of the glass, pressed against the surface like it had been left there deliberately, was the photograph.

Luca and Renko.

Candlelight. Smiling.

Except now, in the suite's warm light, Sofia could see what she hadn't noticed before what the angle of the photograph had hidden the first time.

On the table between the two men, half-obscured by a wine glass

Was a photograph.

Of her.