Chapter 3
“Gabriel. Stop.”
Norah stepped toward the desk and stopped short of touching it, as if the mahogany itself might burn her.
“Don’t do this. If you do this, I become a liability. The cops will look at him, then they’ll look at me, and then they’ll look at who I work for.”
Gabriel held up one finger.
The line connected.
“Elias.”
His tone was casual — the register he used to order lunch. He leaned back in the chair and let his eyes rest on Norah, and he did not look away for the length of the entire conversation that followed.
“I need a cleanup. Localized. No, not business. Personal.”
Norah’s stomach went through the floor.
Elias was not a soldier. Elias was the other thing — the man who made people stop existing so completely that their own families eventually stopped bringing them up at dinner. In four years, she had written his invoices, funneled his expenses through three shell companies, and never once been in a room with him.
“Name is Jared Knox. Resides at the apartment on Fourth and Elm, building B, unit 4C. Queens.”
Gabriel said it without emotion. He was reading from memory, and his memory was better than any file in the building.
“He currently owes money to Mickey’s outfit. I want that debt bought. Today. Pay Mickey a twenty percent premium for his trouble and get the paper transferred to us.”
Norah wrapped her arms around herself. The office was enormous and she had never felt smaller in it.
“Once you hold the paper,” Gabriel said, “call it in. All of it. Today. When he can’t pay, you know what to do.”
There was a pause. Something short came down the line. Gabriel’s expression did not change.
“No. Don’t kill him. Dead men don’t learn lessons, and dead men bring detectives.”
He shifted his weight in the chair, and his voice stayed exactly where it was — conversational, unhurried, the voice of a man buying a car.
“I want him ruined. I want him evicted by sunset. I want the car repossessed.”
A pause.
“I want both of his hands broken in a way that guarantees he never holds a hammer again. Or makes a fist. Clean fractures. They hurt more.”
Norah pressed a hand over her mouth.
She had wanted to leave Jared. She had wanted him to feel the sting of her absence — to sit in the apartment with the broken plate and the smell of cheap beer and understand exactly what he had thrown away.
She had not wanted this.
And yet, standing on a Persian rug in a soundproofed office with her hand over her mouth and a plum-colored bruise ballooning under her eye, some dark, cynical, exhausted corner of her soul understood something she would never say out loud.
She felt relief.
It arrived in her chest like a drug, and it was shameful, and it was real, and she would spend a long time afterward trying to decide which of those two facts mattered more.
“And Elias.”
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed a fraction.
“Make sure he understands why. Tell him if he ever comes within a mile of Norah Hayes again, I won’t send you to collect a debt.”
A pause.
“I’ll send you with a bone saw.”
He hung up.
He didn’t slam it. He set the receiver down into its cradle with a small, precise click and folded his hands on the desk.
“It’s done.”
Norah walked to the leather armchair because her legs had stopped negotiating. She sat down and buried her face in her hands, and the pressure against her cheek sent a spike of pain up through her skull — a clean, bright reminder of precisely why she was sitting there.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I could have left it,” Gabriel said. “You would have moved to a hotel. He would have found you in a week.”
She lowered her hands.
“Men like Knox are parasites. They feed on fear and proximity. You leave, he stalks you. He apologizes. He cries. He shows up at your door with cheap flowers. And when you say no, he hits you again.” He shrugged, one shoulder, barely. “I removed the cycle.”
Norah looked at him.
Really looked at him — the man who ran freight through federal inspection points like water through fingers, who had ordered eleven men into the ground before he was thirty-five, who had just turned the entire apparatus of a criminal empire toward the private grievance of a woman in a cubicle.
“Why.”
Her voice cracked, and she was too tired to be embarrassed about it.
“I’m just your assistant.”
Gabriel stood and came around the desk and knelt in front of the armchair.
The fabric of his suit pulled tight across his thighs. He was close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him, and he raised one large, calloused hand and held it an inch from her uninjured cheek.
He didn’t touch her.
“You run my life, Norah. You anticipate my needs before I say them out loud. You stand in rooms full of murderers and thieves and you don’t flinch.”
His voice was quiet and entirely level, which somehow made the words land harder than if he had raised it.
“You are the only person in this city I trust to guard my back.”
He lowered his hand to the armrest and left it there, which meant she would have to move past his arm to stand up.
“You are not just my assistant.”
She did not move. Neither did he.
“And no one,” Gabriel said, “gets to bleed you but me.”
Then he stood abruptly and walked back behind the desk, and the temperature of the room snapped back to business.
“There’s an empty penthouse in the company building on Fifth Avenue. Fully furnished. Secure. A team will pack your apartment tonight while Knox is being dealt with.”
“Gabriel—”
“Strictly logistics.” He picked up his coffee for the first time and drank from it, cold. “You’re moving there. Don’t argue.”
Norah sat in the chair with her hands in her lap and understood, in a way that settled into her bones and stayed there, that she had just been moved off a chessboard she had been standing on for four years.
She nodded slowly.
“And the ten o’clock with the senator’s aide?”
Gabriel looked at her ruined face for a moment — the swelling, the popped blood vessels, the trembling hands she was trying to hide in her lap.
A ghost of something touched the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile. It was a man reading a number he liked.
“I’ll handle the senator,” he said. “Go to the bathroom in the back. Wash that spackle off your face.”
May you like
He set the cup down.
“Here, you don’t hide your scars.”
