KISSING THE VILLAIN

Chapter 2: Hello, Nora Hayes

Nobody had said that name in ten years.

It hit Nora like cold water. Not Hale, the name on her lease and her lanyard and her tax forms. Hayes, the name she had buried with a house and a family and a dead man's code. Hayes was supposed to be a ghost. The only people who had ever called her by it were all in the ground.

Her whole body went rigid against his. She tried to pull back, but the hand on her jaw did not tighten. It simply stayed, warm and patient, like a door left open to see whether she would walk through.

Behind her, something clicked softly. A phone camera.

Her stomach dropped. The flashlight still burned its pale circle on the concrete, and somewhere behind it the thin man was holding up his phone. She stood trapped between a stranger who knew her real name and two men who wanted her for reasons she did not yet understand.

The stranger lifted his head.

He did it slowly, like a man rising from a chair he had no reason to hurry out of. His thumb slid once along her cheekbone. Then he turned her by the shoulders, gently, so that her back faced the light and her face was hidden against the dark of his jacket.

"Don't turn around," he said, very quietly.

He stepped past her and walked into the beam.

Nora turned around.

The light climbed him from shoe to shoulder. A black suit that fit like a decision. No tie, the collar open at his throat. Dark hair pushed back as if by impatient fingers. And a face she knew, because she had spent eight months staring at the only grainy photograph of it in the entire public record, a face that had never once smiled for a camera.

Adrian Kane.

The head of the Kane Syndicate. The man whose shell companies she had been quietly unpicking on paper since winter. The family her father had once kept books for, in a life she remembered only as lamplight and the smell of pencil shavings. She had imagined him a hundred ways. Older. Heavier. Cruel in some obvious way, with a ring on every finger.

She had not imagined him young. She had not imagined the stillness. He looked like a man who had never once been surprised.

Her lipstick was smeared across his lower lip. He did not seem to have noticed.

The beam shook.

"Mr. Kane," the broad man said, and the words came out as if dragged from his lungs.

The flashlight dropped to his side, pointing at the floor. Behind him, the thin man's phone vanished into a pocket so fast it might have been a magic trick.

"Gentlemen." Adrian's voice was soft and pleasant and perfectly empty. "I don't remember sending you an invitation."

"We were told she was alone, sir," the broad man said. "We didn't know she was with..." He stopped.

"With me." Adrian tilted his head. "Go on."

The man swallowed. Sweat shone at his hairline despite the cold. "Sir, we didn't mean any disrespect."

"I'm sure you didn't. Who told you she was alone?"

"I can't, sir. I..."

"Of course you can't." Adrian almost smiled. It was the worst thing Nora had ever seen. "So here is what you will do. You will go back to whoever pays you and tell him exactly what you saw. A man and a woman in a hallway. Nothing more. Tell him the lady was with me, and that if he has questions, he knows where I take my dinner."

"Yes, sir."

"Then go."

They went. Neither of them turned his back until the corner, and neither of them looked at Nora, except the thin man, who glanced at her once on his way past. It was not a frightened look. It was the look of someone memorizing a face.

The service door sighed shut. The music from the ballroom swelled and faded, swelled and faded, like a tide.

Then there was only the two of them and the flickering bulb.

Nora's knees chose that moment to remember they were knees. She locked them. Her heart was still sprinting, and she pressed her clutch against her ribs as though it could hold the beat in.

"How do you know my name?"

Adrian turned around.

Up close, he was worse. His eyes were the color of harbor ice, gray and flat and very clear, and he looked at her the way she looked at a ledger she had read so many times she could recite the totals. Not with curiosity. With something heavier. Something that had been waiting.

"You walked into the wrong corridor, Miss Hayes."

"I walked into the right one. They're gone."

"It was the wrong one for them."

He bent, picked up the flashlight the broad man had left behind, and switched it off. The dark folded back over them. She could hear him breathing. She could hear herself.

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed.

"What do you want from me?"

"Nothing tonight."

The words were so calm that it took her a moment to hear them. *Tonight.* Her fingers tightened on the clasp of her clutch. His gaze dropped to it for exactly one second, then lifted again, and she knew, without being able to say how she knew, that he could have named every word on the folded page inside.

"You're going to let me walk out of here."

"Do you want me to stop you?"

"Men like you don't let people go."

"No," he said. "They don't."

Something moved behind his face, quick and quiet, like a fish beneath ice. Then it was gone, and he stepped to one side and left the corridor open in front of her.

"Go, Nora."

He said it so softly, and so familiarly, that it frightened her more than the two men had. As if he had said it a thousand times before, alone, in rooms she would never see.

She went.

She did not run. Fast made you prey, and she had promised herself that already tonight. She walked down forty feet of cold concrete with her spine straight and her heels loud and her skin crawling with the certainty of being watched. At the door she looked back once.

He had not moved. He stood in the dark with the dead flashlight in one hand, and with the other he drew his thumb slowly across his mouth. He looked at the smear of red on it for a long moment. Then he looked up, straight at her, and she could not read his face at all.

She pushed through the door.

The ballroom roared back around her, light and laughter and silverware. She slipped past the coat check without stopping, skirted a knot of men in tuxedos arguing about yachts, and crossed into the lobby with her pulse still hammering in her teeth.

He knew her name.

Nobody alive knew her name. She had made certain of it. She had changed her address eleven times and her signature twice, and she had never once told a living soul what she had been called before.

And he had let her go.

She did the math, because math was what she did when she was afraid. Two men hunting her. One man, the most dangerous in Ravenport, standing between them. A kiss, a name, a door held open. She ran the figures again and again, and none of them added up.

The lobby was all marble and gold, with a staircase like a wedding cake. The revolving door glittered at the far end, black glass streaked with rain. She aimed for it. Twenty steps. Fifteen. She touched her lips without meaning to, and they were still warm.

Ten.

A society photographer stood beside the grand staircase, a bored man with a heavy camera and a lanyard, who had spent the evening photographing senators holding champagne. He saw her coming. He saw her face, the smeared mouth, the wild eyes, the hair slipping loose, and the second Kane's door swung open behind her at the far end of the hall, he saw that, too.

He raised the camera.

Nora did not even have time to throw up a hand.

The flash exploded across the lobby, white and enormous, and caught her mid-stride.