Chapter 7

Day three at the safe house. The heat finally gave out completely.

The sea wind came through the cracks in the window. I pulled my coat tight around me and went back to the accounts.

The old accounts were worse than I'd thought.

I didn't know how long I worked. At some point I felt a chill seep out from between my bones.

I thought it was just late, the temperature dropping. I got up and pushed the window the rest of the way shut.

The cold didn't lift.

I sat back down and kept working.

By afternoon I had a fever.

I went down to the pharmacy downstairs, bought fever reducer, came back, kept working.

By night my temperature was a hundred and two. The letters on the page started blurring. I closed the laptop and lay down on the bed.

One of the bulbs in the ceiling was dead. The other still worked. A yellow half-light spread across the ceiling. The horns from the docks came in at steady intervals, like some kind of countdown.

I thought about the early days with Vincent.

It was my second year. I'd gone out alone to close an arms deal on the East Coast. They'd switched people on us at the last minute, wanted every clause renegotiated. I spent three days and three nights on their turf, and when I got back, Vincent didn't ask me how the talks had gone.

He held me. He asked if anyone had hurt me. He said he couldn't show his own face on that one, that he had to send the person he trusted most. He said he hadn't been able to stop thinking about me, that he'd had shooters staked out for three days in case anything went wrong, and thank God I'd come back.

Then he'd added: "In this whole world, you're the only person I trust."

At that moment I thought: for those words, all of it had been worth it.

I pulled out my phone, opened Vincent's contact screen, and stared at his name for a long time.

The screen was lit. The name was right there.

The phone buzzed.

A voice message from Sofia. Sent to our thread. Not pulled back.

I assumed she'd sent it by mistake.

I tapped it.

Sofia's voice was soft as cotton. "Sir, Marco said the spare key to the wine cellar has always been with Elena. I've looked through half the house and can't find it. Do you know where she keeps it?"

A two-second pause. Then Vincent's voice — that lazy tone he only had after a certain kind of satisfaction.

"East wing storeroom, second steel cabinet. I had the combination changed. The new one is your birthday."

Sofia laughed. A little smug. "So all of this is mine to look after now?"

"Mm."

"And you? You're mine to look after too?" Sofia's voice drifted through the speaker, the ends of the words hooked upward like honey.

"Of course, baby. Come here. Climb on top of me..."

Then I heard Sofia's startled sound, and then, broken up: "But Elena, over there..."

"Baby, this is the wrong time to think about her. Don't worry about her. She knows what she's doing."

The message ended.

I pressed the screen off and set the phone on the pillow.

I'd been keeping that spare key for five years. In five years Vincent had never once asked me what the combination was.

Now he'd had it changed. I didn't even know when.

I swallowed the fever reducer with cold water, lay back down, pulled the coat over me.

The fever hadn't broken. Hands and feet burning. My head was a mess.

But I didn't open that contact screen again.