Touch Me Not (Book 1 of Sanctuary & Sin)

Chapter 12 -Break

The room had started to close like a fist, staff in slate moving to their marks with smiles that didn’t blink, screen light washing the crowd in the false daylight of my own hallway, the sound of my kitchen clock amplified until it felt like a countdown laid over my skin. Ren’s “Out” still echoed in my ear, Sandro’s palm had found my elbow with the kind of warmth that reads as casual from ten feet away and as strategy from two, and Kael was already angling toward the seam in the drape where the stage threw a shadow that looked like a door if you’d ever learned to see them.

We moved without running, which is its own kind of training, the three of them creating the geometry around me that said this is ours even while the room tried to suggest otherwise. A hostess in slate stepped, a security man adjusted his earpiece, a server pretended to rescue a fallen napkin and incidentally blocked a lane; Sandro coughed once, too loud and perfectly placed, and a cluster of guests shifted to avoid him, which gave Ren the gap he needed to slip along the perimeter and draw our path in negative space.

“South exit blocked,” Ren murmured. “West service door clears to freight in twelve meters. Kael?”

“Camera right is looping,” Kael answered, calm as rain. “Walk normal until my count. On three, you’re ghosts.”

Maeve kept speaking as if we were a thesis being proved in the back of the room. The screen with my house faded to a generic office, then to a classroom with clean lines and smiling children, as if the demonstration had not been a knife but a lecture on knives. She didn’t look at me again. She didn’t need to. She had already placed the mirror where she wanted it.

“One,” Kael said softly. “Two. Three.”

We slipped through the seam in the black drape, passed a stack of road cases labeled with other people’s names, and took the narrow hall that bands use when they don’t want to meet their audience in the wild. The air back there was colder, the kind of conditioned chill that makes steel hum; the floor was taped in colors that only meant anything to a person who had rehearsed this thirty times.

A security guard halfway down the hall looked up with the polite confusion of someone who expects trouble to announce itself first. Ren’s voice dropped to that pitch he uses when he wants to move a person by rearranging the day they thought they were having. “Ops sent us—AV needed the splitter swapped,” he said, lanyard up, contractor’s neutral smile engaged. “We’re late because the florist upstairs decided eucalyptus can power Wi-Fi.”

The guard blinked like the sentence had been designed to overwhelm the part of his brain that makes more questions and then nodded at the cart Ren didn’t have and the ID he did. “Make it quick,” he said.

“We always do,” Ren replied, and the guard was already looking past us to the next thing on his list.

At the service door, Kael eased it with a thumb so practiced it might as well have been a key. The freight corridor breathed on the other side—long, concrete, arterial, the hotel’s true hallway where deliveries and secrets moved. The mirrored dome to our left showed the world a view of itself; Kael’s eyes flicked to it without respect.

“Thirty seconds blind,” he said, and we were through, steps quiet, shoulders narrow to keep our shape clean.

I heard the room we’d left recede behind us: the applause after a line that had been rehearsed, the swell of a sizzle reel, the faint crackle of a comms net sharpening. The fact of my house on that screen didn’t panic me now; it clarified something I had been circling for weeks. Fear was loud and scattered. Resolve was quiet and directional. I chose quiet.

At the freight elevator bank, a catering crew waited with racks of glassware that blinked like small cities. Sandro picked up a tray, balanced it like a man born to improvisation, and kissed the air beside the nearest server’s cheek with a flourish that made her laugh even as she frowned. “You can’t be back here,” she said automatically.

“But I am,” he murmured, rolling the tray toward an empty corner, and in the moment her attention followed the silver, we were past.

Ren hit the call button for the second lift with his knuckle, then didn’t wait for it to arrive. “Stairs,” he said. “Cameras on B are paint, but the stair landings are live.”

Kael was already moving, palm skimming the handrail once like a ritual, the pace he set fast enough to matter and slow enough to be invisible if anyone happened to glance. I counted floors in the tight wind of my breath and kept the memory of Zoe’s serve in my chest like a metronome. At the landing for C, voices on a radio rose in a volley of clipped jargon that said the room had finally registered a problem. Ren’s hand came up. We stilled.

“Oxalis to House,” a voice crackled through a door. “We’ve had a content anomaly at Ember. Lock east exits, route VIPs north.”

“Copy,” another voice returned, bored, local, used to being told to protect rich people from inconvenience. “Escorts to North. Security to West.”

Kael leaned close enough that his breath touched my ear. “We’re going to come out into a laundry hall. If anyone asks, you lost your way to Bridal Two and feel sick. Sandro will handle the rest.”

“I always handle the rest,” Sandro whispered, offended on principle. “But she looks too radiant to be ill.”

“I can fake it,” I said.

“No,” Ren said, and the no was not control as much as it was the kind of care that refuses to trade dignity for cover. “We don’t make you small to make us safe.”

“Then we make me boring,” I offered, and the three of them smiled in the same brief, sharp way that told me we were in tune again.

We pushed through into the laundry hall, which smelled like heat and soap and a thousand private stories, and joined the slow migration of carts being steered by people whose backs kept the city dressed. Kael angled us behind a stack of folded tablecloths that would hide a small army for twelve seconds. A man in a vest glanced up from paperwork, decided we were part of his day, and let us be.

“Right in three,” Ren said. “Then left through the cage and out to loading.”

At the wire-mesh gate, a keypad blinked a bland green that said enter something. Kael’s fingers hovered, paused. “They changed the sequence,” he murmured. “Two new digits.”

“Can you—” I began.

He closed his eyes for a beat, listening not with his ears but with some sense I couldn’t name, then pressed six numbers with the certainty of a person who remembers songs by their breath, not their notes. The light blushed, the lock sighed, and we were through.

The loading dock yawned like an open mouth to a wet alley, Chicago rain rinsing the backside of glamour into its truer colors. A pair of smokers huddled against the wind with the posture of men taking their only ten minutes; they watched us with the disinterest cities teach. Ren scanned the alley once, head canted like a wolf’s. “Right,” he said. “No street cams that angle back. We cut across and down.”

Sandro shed the too-bright brochure he’d been waving all morning and let it sail into a puddle. “Forest Virtue,” he said solemnly. “May you rest.”

We moved.

Rain softened sound, turned the city’s edges kinder. Kael walked point now, not because he needed to but because the path he’d stored in his body would be faster than anything we could argue. He didn’t hustle. He threaded. Two blocks through a service corridor that smelled like dough and steam, past a loading bay where bakers stacked racks with a precision that could teach surgeons, across a nameless street where a bus sighed and left heat in its wake, and into a narrow garage where a gray SUV waited like a punctuation mark that had decided to be useful.

“Don’t tell me you hotwired that,” Sandro said.

“I paid cash for the right to borrow it,” Kael answered, unlocking the doors with a small chirp that sounded obscene in the rain. “If anyone asks, we’re moving sample racks for a linen company that believes in gentler nouns.”

Ren took the wheel without being asked; Kael slid into the passenger seat with the quiet of a man who could drive but doesn’t need to control to be useful. I climbed into the back, Sandro with me, close enough that our shoulders touched and neither of us minded. The doors thumped shut. The city receded by inches until it gave us the gift of motion.

We cut south on a street lined with old brick, east on one that kept its name to itself, then north along the slant of an elevated track. Ren talked to the car the way he talks to maps—no drama, just choice and consequence. “Two tails possible,” he said. “Camera at Wabash probably picked the plate when the gate chirped.”

“It’s a dummy plate,” Kael answered. “Registered to a floral vendor with a taste for eucalyptus.”

Sandro snorted. “Your commitment to bits impresses me.”

“Bits keep you breathing,” Kael said mildly.

I watched the city pass in a slick reel, buildings recognizing themselves in their puddles, faces turned into quick stories I didn’t have time to read. Every third block a hotel camera blinked without apology; every fourth, a delivery bike cut through light like a declaration. I thought of my house’s “wag” and “growl,” the language Mateo had given us for machines, and felt the way my body now registered threat as information rather than prophecy.

Ren took us through a narrow run of rowhouses and up a ramp that looked like it had been poured as an afterthought. The SUV nosed into the shadow of a low rooftop lot where three other cars slept like old dogs and a fourth pretended to be worthy of its price tag. He killed the engine. The sudden quiet was like stepping into a church after sirens.

We sat for a moment without speaking, rain tapping the roof with the politeness of someone who needs to be let in before it announces itself. Far below, a siren cut sideways and kept going. Ren’s hands rested on the wheel, not shaking—just present. Sandro’s exhale found a laugh and made it taste like relief. Kael rolled his shoulders once, the only acknowledgment that his body carried weight like anyone else’s.

“Status,” Ren said finally, keeping his voice low because there was no need to be loud to be sure.

“South exit reopened,” Kael answered, eyes on the city. “Maeve will decide whether to chase or to posture. She’ll choose posture first. The demo will end on time. She’s performing for money.”

“Good,” Sandro said, leaning back until his head hit the rest and his eyes captured a piece of sky. “Let her audition for the people who think fear is a product.”

I turned in my seat to face Kael and found him already watching the far edge of the roof where footfalls might announce themselves if the day wanted more drama. He didn’t flinch from my attention. He just met it, the way he had from the first moment—calm, clinical, unafraid of what honesty might cost.

“Why did you come back?” I asked, the question landing with more weight than I meant to give it, because it wasn’t about the hotel or the SUV or even the program that had broken the line between safety and control. “To us,” I clarified, “to this. You could have stayed in the shadows and passed notes.”

His answer didn’t rush. He watched a woman cross the far intersection with an umbrella the color of summer, then brought his gaze back to me. “Because notes don’t catch children,” he said. “And because I watched a good man break himself on a system that taught him to plan for every exit but his own. I can’t undo what Maeve built, but I can make sure you don’t dismantle yourselves while you fight it.”

He lifted a shoulder, almost a shrug and almost a prayer. “Also,” he added, and now a small warmth touched his voice, “your son named the house like it was a dog, and that’s exactly the kind of language that keeps people human when machines start telling stories about them. I pick teams that speak human.”

Sandro made a soft sound that might have been agreement and might have been the beginning of a joke he decided not to make. Ren didn’t look back, but his grip on the wheel eased by a degree you wouldn’t notice unless you knew how much he kept from showing.

I nodded, the motion less permission than recognition. “Then welcome to the wag,” I said.

“I’ll take first growl,” Kael replied gently. “You should call home.”

I did. Zoe picked up breathless and victorious—We won by six. My serve was evil—and Luca reported purring at 1:12 with the diligence of a boy who has made peace with the idea that vigilance can be love, and Mateo held the phone too close and shouted, We made pasta and the house wagged three times because I told it a joke. I let their voices remind me what this was—not strategy, not theater, not a vendetta dressed as justice, but a line we would hold because it kept them on our side of the door.

When the call ended, the rain thinned. Kael opened his door and stepped out, lifting his face to what was left of the weather like a man who calibrates himself against elements instead of clocks. “There’s access to the next roof,” he said over the car, and pointed. “The sightline’s better from there. We’ll watch for fifteen and then move the car.”

We climbed the concrete steps to the upper ledge and stood with the city spread out like a map none of us could fully read and all of us could feel. The wind threaded my hair; the wet air tasted like pennies. Below, the Caldera shone, a jewel that had learned mirrors, pretending it did not bleed the same as any building if you cut it in the wrong place.

Ren came to stand on my right, Sandro on my left, their shoulders a familiarity I could lean into without losing height. Kael stayed a pace ahead, hands in his pockets, head tilted like he’d heard the room downstairs adjust itself by a click.

“She’ll come,” Ren said.

“She always does,” Kael answered. “And when she does, we won’t be where she thinks.”

“And where is that?” Sandro asked, soft, curious.

Kael looked back at us, the rain making his hair fall in a way that would have read as romantic if he were another kind of man. “Together,” he said simply.

The word sat between us like a promise and a plan.

We stood there until the city forgot to be dramatic and remembered how to be a place where people cross streets and take buses and go home to houses that wag and growl and purr. Then we went back to the car, not running, never running, and let the day change without letting it change us.