THE BILLIONAIRES BODYGUARD

Chapter 3: House Rules

Adrian Vale's penthouse occupied the top two floors of a building he owned, which Naomi told him was his first mistake before she'd finished walking the entry hall.

"You live above your own name on the deed," she said, moving through his living room with a small flashlight she hadn't asked permission to use, running the beam along skirting and sightlines. "Anyone who wants to find you starts at the county recorder and ends at your pillow. It's a straight line, and you drew it yourself. We'll be talking about a second residence no one can trace back to you."

"I like this one."

"I can see that. So did someone else." She crouched by the wide bank of windows that made up the western wall and ran the light along the frame. The glass gave back a warped reflection of the room, the two of them small and distant in it. "These don't open, which is good. This glass isn't rated for anything more serious than weather, which is bad. Curtains stay drawn after dark from now on. Every night, without me having to remind you."

"I have the best view in the city."

"You have the best sightline in the city," she corrected, straightening, "and a sightline runs both directions. You look out; someone looks in. Right now you've been letting them."

He watched her work from the doorway with his arms crossed, still in the shirt from the office, and if her presence in his home unsettled him he was doing that expensive job of hiding it again — though she noticed he hadn't sat down, hadn't poured a drink, hadn't done any of the small territorial things a man usually did to reclaim a space someone else was cataloguing. It was past eleven. She had already walked the service floor, met the two Sentinel operators who'd rotate the lobby downstairs, memorized the building's camera coverage and, more importantly, the four places that coverage lied — the blind corner by the freight elevator, the stretch of garage where a pillar ate the frame, the two landings where a fisheye lens turned a person into a smear.

"Rules," she said, clicking the flashlight off and turning to face him. "You'll hate all of them. Learn them anyway."

"I'm listening." He didn't sound like he was going to enjoy it.

"You don't confirm your schedule more than twelve hours out — not to your board, not to your calendar, not to anyone who doesn't strictly need it. You don't take the same route twice in a week. You tell me before you go anywhere, and I mean before, not from the back of the car once you're already moving. When we're on foot you walk where I put you and you don't stop to shake hands with strangers, however good they are for business. And you give me the names of every single person who holds a key to this apartment."

"Three people," he said. "My housekeeper. My brother. Me."

"Your brother has a key."

"Marcus has had a key to every place I've lived since I was nineteen and he was the only family who'd take me in." There was a warning underneath the words, quiet but unmistakable, a line drawn in a soft voice. "He is not on your list, Ms. Cole. Put him out of your head and keep him out of it."

She said nothing, which he was already learning to read as disagreement — she watched the recognition of it cross his face and harden.

"I mean it," he said.

"I heard you." She kept her voice level, unbothered, because the fastest way to make a man dig in was to push him where he'd already braced. "I'm not going to suspect your brother because he owns a key. I'm going to suspect everyone, because that's the job, and then I'm going to turn out to be wrong about almost all of them, and that's precisely how you stay alive — by being wrong in the safe direction. Your brother included. It isn't personal. It can't afford to be."

"Everything's personal," Adrian said. "That's the only thing I've ever been sure of."

They stood a moment in the low light, the drawn curtains breathing faintly with the building's ventilation, and Naomi felt the shape of him come clearer than it had all day: a man who had decided, somewhere far back, that trust was a debt, and that debts were the thing that got you killed. She knew the feeling more intimately than she intended to let him see. It was, more or less, her own religion. The difference was that she'd chosen hers after losing someone, and she suspected he'd chosen his before he'd ever had anyone to lose.

"Get some sleep," she said. "I'll be in the guest room by the door. If you hear me moving at night, it's me. If you hear anything that isn't me, you say my name once, and then you stay down and you stay quiet, and you let me do the part I'm here for."

"And you'll do what, exactly?"

"My job."

He looked at her a beat too long, something behind the flat gray of his eyes turning over. "Do you ever sleep, Ms. Cole?"

"When it's safe," she said, and went to check the locks he'd installed himself, all three of which she intended to have replaced by Friday, because a man who chose his own locks was a man who trusted the wrong things to keep him alive.