Chapter 6
She packed that night.
It took eleven minutes, because she had almost nothing to pack. Maria had found her a few things — two blouses, a pair of jeans, a soft gray sweater, an emerald green dress that had arrived with no explanation at all and that Khloe had hung in the closet and not once tried on.
She left the dress. She folded the cashmere shirt and set it on the bed.
The clothes she had arrived in had been thrown out. There was nothing left of the girl who had crawled in through the service doors, which meant there was nothing in this room that belonged to her except her, and that made the arithmetic very simple: leaving cost her nothing, and staying cost the only man who had ever stood between her and the world everything he had.
She had watched what had happened to the woman who couldn’t be collected. She had read about it in the paper, page nine.
Whoever this man is, he’s an insect on my windshield.
But there was a machine behind the insect. Aaron had taught her that much.
She wrote a note and put it on the pillow. It took four attempts. It said: Thank you for the food and the doctor and the roof. You were kind. That is not something I will forget. But I heard what your man said because he was right, and I have never once in my life been worth what it costs to keep me. Please don’t come looking. It was not you.
Then she picked up the bag and went out into the hall.
The private elevator was at the end. It required a code, she had learned, but Maria’s code opened it and Khloe had been given Maria’s code in case of fire on the second day, and she had never imagined she would use it for this.
She was ten feet from the doors when the lights in the living room came on.
Khloe stopped. She did not turn around.
“You’re leaving.”
His voice was flat. It was the same voice she had heard through the door of the study, the same voice that had ordered a man’s hands broken, and it was coming from the window, from the dark, from a place where he had been standing the entire time.
“I have to.”
“No.”
“Lorenzo—”
“Turn around.”
She turned.
He was silhouetted against the floor-to-ceiling glass, in the black shirt with the sleeves rolled, and the city was lit up behind him like something falling. He did not come toward her. She realized, distantly, that in three weeks he had never once crossed a room to her without stopping first.
“You heard Mateo.”
“Yes.”
“He’s right.”
“He is frequently right,” Lorenzo said. “It is the main reason he is alive.”
“He said you’d have to move me.” Khloe’s voice came out steadier than she expected, given that she could feel every heartbeat in her ribs. “That a man with one thing he can’t lose can be steered. And I’m the thing, Lorenzo. I’m a coat-check girl’s friend and a rumor at the Hall of Justice and a reason for a man on Calumet Avenue to find out what your hands do. I’ve been a reason men get hurt my entire adult life, and last time it was me getting hurt, and I have never once been worth—”
“Stop.”
It was one word, and it stopped her.
Lorenzo moved finally, away from the window, and came to the middle of the room and stopped — six feet away, exactly like always.
“Say the last part again,” he said.
“I’m not—”
“Say it.”
Khloe’s eyes burned. “I have never been worth what I cost.”
The room was very quiet. Somewhere below, the city made its enormous indifferent noise.
“Two weeks ago,” Lorenzo said, “a police detective with a commendation on his wall beat a woman unconscious and left her in an alley on Rush Street, and she got up, and she walked, and she found the one door in this city that a badge cannot open through. She did it with two broken ribs and a hole in her ribs that Dr. Hayes says she has been walking on for nine days.” He tilted his head. “You are the single most expensive thing that has ever walked into my life, Khloe Bennett. And I have not once considered the price.”
“That’s what I’m saying. That’s the problem.”
“No.” He took one step. “That is the answer.”
She didn’t understand what he meant. She wouldn’t for a while yet.
He looked at the bag in her hand, and then at the elevator behind her, and then at her face, and something in his posture changed — some rigidity going out of the shoulders, the way it did only when Dr. Hayes had left the room and it was only her.
“Stay tonight,” he said. “That’s all. Not a promise. Not a claim. Stay tonight, in that room, and tomorrow morning if you want the bag, I will put you on a plane myself and nobody in this city will ever find you again. I’ll give you a name and an account and you will never hear from me.”
Khloe stood in the middle of the floor with her bag in her hand and her heart going too fast.
“One night,” she said.
May you like
“One night.”
She put the bag down.
