Ruthless Vow

Chapter six

The First Night

He answered on the first ring.

"Say nothing," he said. "Drive home. Lock your door. Don't answer any number you don't recognize for the rest of the night."

"Somebody took a picture of me standing at your desk."

"I know."

"You know."

"I've seen the window ." His voice didn't change at all. "Ninth floor. It's a stairwell with access from the elevator lobby. I'll have it locked tonight."

I sat in my car with the photo open on the screen and my heart going so hard I could feel it in my neck. "You've seen the picture."

"No. I've seen the window." A pause. "Get home, Ms. Marchetti."

He hung up first.

I drove home with my doors locked and checked the rearview mirror every few miles. Nobody followed me. I made it up the stairs and turned my deadbolt and stood in my kitchen with my back against the door and let myself breathe.

I checked the photo one more time before I got in bed.

Me at his desk with the folder open. The pen in my hand. His shoulders on the other side and the top of his head. Shot from high up, through glass, at an angle.

Whoever did it had been standing on a stairwell landing on the ninth floor, forty feet above us, watching two people in a lit office at eleven at night.

I didn't sleep. I lay there with my phone face down on the pillow and listened to the radiator knock until the sky came up.

The car came at ten.

The driver took my two bags without a word and put them in the trunk. I sat in the back and watched my building go by, then the diner, then the corner where I always caught the bus. I kept waiting for it to feel like something. It didn't.

Twenty minutes later we turned onto a street I'd only ever seen in photographs. The building came up on my right. Twenty-eight floors of black glass with the lake behind it.

The elevator opened straight into the apartment. No hallway. No front door. Just an elevator that lets you off inside somebody's house.

A woman was waiting by the doors with her hands folded. Gray hair pulled back. All black.

"Elena Marchetti," she said. Not a question.

"That's me."

"Greta. I run the household." She looked me over once, top to bottom, the way you check a delivery. "Your room is at the end of the hall. He said to give you the one with the lock."

I stopped with my bag still in my hand.

"Why would I need a lock?"

She didn't answer. She held out a brass key ring with a single key on it and waited the way a person waits when they've been told to do a thing and don't plan on explaining it.

I took the key. She turned and walked off toward the kitchen.

The room was bigger than my whole apartment. Two windows, both facing the water. A bed I would have had to climb into. A chair by the window. And a door with a deadbolt on the inside that turned over twice in my hand and caught with a heavy click.

I stood in the middle of it with my coat still on.

He never asked me what kind of room I wanted. He never asked if I wanted a lock. He told Greta to give me the room with the lock before I walked into this building. Before I signed anything. Before I said one word to him about feeling safe or not feeling safe.

I put that in the back of my head and didn't pull it out again yet.

I didn't unpack. I laid Mom's sweater over the back of the chair by the window the way I always did at home and texted Mia goodnight. She sent back a drawing of a cat in a crown. I sat there looking at it for a while.

At 9:40 I heard him come in. Footsteps in the living room. Then down the hall, slow. Then they stopped outside my door.

I put my phone down and stared at the strip of light under it.

I counted the way I count at the hospital when I'm watching Mia's monitor. One. Two. Three. Four.

I got to sixty. Exactly sixty.

Then the floorboards moved back the way they'd come, and at the end of the hall a door opened and closed.

I turned the lock twice before I lay down.

I woke at 12:52 AM with the lamp still on.

No traffic up here. No neighbors through the wall. No radiator knocking the way it did at home. The quiet had a sound to it, a low hum from somewhere in the building. I lay there listening to it with my phone in my hand.

Nothing happened. I lay there anyway until my arm went numb, and then I got up.

The apartment was dark except for one light over the kitchen counter. Damian was standing at it with a glass of water and his sleeves rolled up.

Barefoot. I hadn't seen that before.

He slid a second glass across the counter without a word. I took it.

Neither of us said anything for a while. Fridge humming. City out the window. The clock on the wall reads 1:02 AM.

"You were outside my door," I said.

He didn't deny it.

"How long."

"One minute." He looked at his glass. "I counted."

"So did I."

That sat between us on the counter.

"Why," I said.

He thought about it. He took long enough that I started to think he wasn't going to answer.

"To see if you'd open it," he said.

"And if I had."

"I don't know yet." He set the glass down and looked at me. "That's the problem."

He picked the water back up and walked out of the kitchen and down the hall and closed his door behind him.

I stood there another minute with a glass I hadn't touched.

Then I went back to my room.

The door was shut the way I'd left it. The lock was still turned. I pushed the handle down and opened it.

The lamp was still on. Mom's sweater was still over the back of the chair by the window, right where I'd laid it.

There was a piece of paper on top of it.

Folded once. Blue ink. Small neat print, the same as the note at the club.

I hadn't put it there. I hadn't seen it when I left the room ten minutes ago. I hadn't heard a single thing since I woke up at 12:52 — and I'd counted every second of that minute at my door.

I picked it up and turned it under the lamp.

One line.

*Ask him how he knew you'd need a lock.*

I read it twice. Then a thir

d time.

I sat down on the edge of the bed with the paper in my hand and looked at the door I'd locked twice.

Somebody had been in this room.