I didn't ask for two

Episode 7

POV: Kim

The decision arrived at 11:47 p.m. with the clarity of someone who had finally, after several days of exceptional stupidity, located the exit sign.

I was going to leave.

Not because of the bikers. Not because of Frank carrying me through a dining room like a parcel, or the locked door, or the missing envelope, or the fact that nobody in this building had given me a straight answer about anything since the moment I'd opened the wrong door.

I was going to leave because of the way Jake had looked at me.

Because of the way I'd opened my mouth.

Because of the way my body had decided, entirely without my permission, to have opinions about a man I'd known for seventy-two hours.

This is how it starts, the Femme Fatale said. She wasn't crying now. She was quiet in a different way — the way she got when she'd seen the shape of something before it happened. You know how this ends.

I know, I said.

It always ends the same way.

I know, I said. That's why we're leaving.

For once, she didn't argue.

* * *

The plan was simple. Simpler than the sheets. Simpler than the nail file. I had learned from my previous attempts that complexity was the enemy.

The plan: find a window on the ground floor. Exit through it. Walk.

I got further than I expected.

The ground floor had three windows that weren't decorative, one door to what looked like a garden, and a staff corridor that smelled like the kitchen. I was four steps from the garden door — I could see the handle, an actual handle on an actual door to actual outside — when someone stepped out of a doorway I hadn't clocked.

He wasn't Jake. He wasn't Frank. He was large, professionally so, with the specific expression of a man doing a job that currently involved me.

We looked at each other.

"Miss Parker," he said.

I ran anyway. On principle.

* * *

My room looked exactly as I'd left it. Same bed, same lamp, same window I still wasn't supposed to touch. The guard set me down — he'd carried me over his shoulder with considerably less drama than Frank, as if this were a routine task he'd completed before — and checked the lock on the door with the thoroughness of someone who'd heard about the nail file.

"Alpha's orders," he said, not unkindly. "You stay inside."

"I've heard that," I said.

He moved toward the door.

"He also said—" He paused. Like he was deciding whether this was his information to give. "Reid knows you're here. Has known since yesterday."

The name landed in the room like a drop in barometric pressure. The air suddenly felt thinner, colder.

I looked at him.

"If you go outside these walls without escort—" He said it carefully, like he was reading from something. "You don't come back."

The door closed.

The lock turned.

* * *

I sat on the bed.

I sat there for a while.

I had come in to deliver an envelope. I had walked through the wrong door. I had seen a face I wasn't supposed to see, and the man with the still eyes had said she stays, and I had assumed — with what I now understood was spectacular naivety — that I was a problem to be managed.

A loose end.

An inconvenient witness.

I was not.

I was a courier who had been sent here by someone who knew exactly where she was sending me, carrying a message for someone who had known exactly what it meant, and the man in the expensive jacket whose face I had seen was connected to a name the guard had just said like it was self-explanatory.

Reid.

Something is specifically wrong, Voice of Reason had said, in the dining room, watching Mason ask about the envelope. And it involves that envelope and we don't know what it is yet.

We still didn't know what it was.

But the shape of it was getting clearer.

I wasn't a prisoner.

I was a target.

The distinction mattered in ways I was only beginning to map.

* * *

I WOULD LIKE, Panic said, very quietly, TO REVISE MY EARLIER POSITION ON LEAVING.

Noted, I said.

I'M REVISING IT TO: PERHAPS WE STAY A LITTLE LONGER.

Also noted.

Voice of Reason said nothing. She was running numbers somewhere, the careful way she did when the math was complicated and she needed to not be interrupted.

Adventurer was uncharacteristically silent.

The Femme Fatale sat very still.

He looked at you, she said, after a moment. Not the way she usually said things. Not sad. Careful. Before Frank called him off. He looked at you like—

I know, I said.

That's not the same as before, she said. That's not the look that comes before the laugh.

I didn't answer.

I'm not saying trust it, she said. I'm saying it's different. I know the difference.

She would. Of all of them, she would know.

I was still sitting with that when the knock came.

* * *

Two knocks. The door opened before I answered.

Jake came in, closed the door, and didn't lean on anything. That was the first sign. Jake always leaned on something — doorframes, counters, the general concept of not being in a hurry. Standing straight in the middle of a room was not his register.

"Garrett found you by the garden door," he said.

"I found it first, technically."

"Kim." Flat. No performance. "Reid's people have had eyes on this building since yesterday morning. You would have made it half a block."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that." A muscle feathered in his jaw. "That's the point."

He was close enough now that the usual, easy heat radiating from him felt different — compressed, dense, like a furnace with the vents closed. It was considerably more alarming than his grin ever was.

Say nothing, Voice of Reason said. This is a moment for saying nothing.

Agree with him, Panic added, with unusual tactical sense. Nod. Be small.

I opened my mouth.

"I didn't know about Reid when I decided to leave," I said. "So technically, that particular decision was completely rational given the available information."

Jake looked at me.

"The available information," he said.

"At the time."

"You were running," he said. "From this building. Where you are safe. Into a city where someone wants you dead. Because of available information."

"I wasn't running from the building," I said.

The words came out before I'd decided to say them. That was the problem with being scared — it came out sideways, as language, as things I meant in a way I hadn't meant to say out loud.

Jake went very still.

"Then what," he said, very quietly, "were you running from?"

The room was silent.

Do not answer that, Voice of Reason said, at full volume for once. Do not answer that. Walk it back. Say "never mind." Say "forget it." Say literally—

"You," I said. "Both of you. I was running from you."

The silence that followed was a different kind of silence.

Jake looked at me for a long moment, and whatever had been compressed in his expression shifted — recalibrated into something hotter than anger and quieter than everything else.

He didn't ask for permission.

He didn't make a joke.

He just took one step toward me.

And the door was still closed behind him.