10. An Invitation

Elena's POV

The file on Viktor Kozlov was thinner than I expected.

Gideon laid it on the mahogany desk at noon, a plain black folder, and Jax opened it without a word. I sat in the leather chair opposite, hands folded, trying to look like furniture. Jax had told me to come. He hadn't told me why. After the dawn, after the slip, after the way he had looked at me when I said it out loud, I had the feeling he was keeping me close the way you keep a new tool where you can reach it.

"Fifty-one," Gideon said. "Came up through the docks. Owns the east harbor, six restaurants, a shipping firm, and half the judges who'd ever sit on his case. Never been arrested."

"Never been charged either," Jax said.

"Eleven men who crossed him have left the city in the last four years. Nobody's heard from any of them." Gideon's voice flattened. "He's patient, Boss. He smiles while he does it."

A chill slid down my spine.

"And Vance?" Jax asked.

"Seen going into Zima twice since Thursday. That's Kozlov's restaurant on the harbor. Once for two hours. Once he left in a car with a driver."

"So he wasn't lying." Jax turned a page. "Kozlov did take him in."

I listened, silent. My husband had gone straight to the one man in the city Jax kept a file on, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted to laugh or be sick.

The phone on the desk buzzed once.

Gideon stiffened. Jax glanced at the screen, and I watched his face do the thing it did when something interested him: nothing. Complete stillness.

"The gate," he said.

Gideon was gone four minutes. When he came back he had an envelope, thick black paper edged in gold, as out of place in that room as a flower in a gun case.

"A driver left it," Gideon said. "Didn't say a word. Handed it to the guard and drove off."

Jax slit it with a thumbnail. The card inside was heavy and cream-colored. He read it once and set it face-up on the desk where I could see.

Mr. Mercer,

Tomorrow evening, nine o'clock. Zima. My table. Mr. Vance has asked me to settle his account, and I will bring the sum in full. In return, I would be delighted to receive the lady. Mr. Vance will join us.

V.K.

Nothing else. No threat. The handwriting was elegant, slanting, polite. It was the most frightening thing I had ever read.

"Nine years," Gideon said quietly. "He hasn't asked you to his table in nine years."

"The last time we shared a table," Jax said, "a man was shot between courses."

"It was soup."

"It was soup."

It should have been funny. It wasn't.

I read the card a second time. A third. The words wouldn't hold still. Settle his account. In full. Receive the lady.

"If he pays," I heard myself say, "then the debt is paid."

Jax's eyes came to me.

"And when it's paid, I'm not collateral anymore. You have your money. You don't have a hold on me. You'd have to—" My throat closed. I forced the rest out. "You'd have to let me go."

The room was very quiet.

"So you want me to hand you back?" Jax said.

I couldn't answer. I couldn't say no, because no meant admitting that I would rather stay in a place where a man had told me nobody would touch me. And I couldn't say yes, because it would be the biggest lie of my life.

"It doesn't matter what I want," I said, and my voice was thin. "You don't have a choice anymore."

Jax didn't argue.

"On the debt," he said finally, "no. I don't."

That was when it hit me.

Not slowly. All at once, like a wave. He couldn't refuse. A debt paid was a debt closed, and I had lived long enough around men like Mark to know there was no argument against a closed debt. The money would be counted, and my name would be crossed off, and Kozlov would stand up from his chair with that elegant, slanting smile and receive the lady.

I stood up. I didn't remember deciding to.

"Please," I whispered. "Not him. Not either of them."

"Elena."

"You don't understand." My breath was coming in sharp little pulls. The walls of the office seemed to tilt, the glass wall, the roar below, the red light blinking in the corner of my mind. "Mark will be at that table. Mark, with Kozlov's money behind him. And Kozlov— I don't know him, I don't know what he does with things he receives, and no one in that room will stop him."

My hands were shaking so badly I wrapped my arms around myself. I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.

"You promised," I said. "You said no one under your roof would touch me. And the second that money changes hands, I'm not under your roof. I'm nowhere. I'm anyone's."

The tears were coming now, hot and furious. I hated them. I hated that I wasn't braver, that I couldn't stand there and take it the way he could. I hated, most of all, that some stupid, traitorous part of me wanted to say keep me.

I won't be lucky twice, I thought. Not with them. Not like this.

Gideon looked at the floor. Jax didn't look away from me at all.

"Breathe," he said.

"I can't—"

"You can. Do it." It was an order, but there was something under it, not warmth, something steadier, a hand held out in the dark. "In. Out. Again."

I did it. It took four breaths before the room stopped swinging.

"Now listen," Jax said, low and level. "A paid debt is a closed debt. If I break that, no man in this city will ever deal with me again. My word is the only thing I own that can't be burned. So I take the money." He let it hang. "But the money buys the debt, Elena. It doesn't buy you."

I stared at him.

"You've been inside the Pit for three days. You know where the doors are. You know how the glass works, and the vault, and how the six sit. You found a thread in a box of paper that none of my men ever noticed." His eyes held mine. "No man lets that walk out of his house and into a rival's. Kozlov wouldn't. I won't."

"That's why?"

"That's why." Flat. Cold. Unarguable. "You aren't collateral anymore. You're a witness. And I don't release witnesses."

The knot in my chest loosened, and tightened again.

It was a reason. It was a good one. It was nothing at all like kindness, and I knew it, and I held on to it anyway like a rope.

"Will Kozlov accept that?" I whispered.

"I don't know." Jax almost smiled. It was an ugly, thin, dangerous thing. "I'll have until nine o'clock tomorrow night to make him."

"Boss." Gideon finally spoke. "This is exactly what he wants. You walking into his place with her on your arm."

"Yes."

"If they hit the car—"

"They will, if someone tells them to." Jax's voice didn't change. "For two months, every time my route leaks, my trucks burn. Tonight I tell each of the six I'm going to Zima with Elena, and I give each of them a different route. Six routes, six cars. Mine is one of them, and only Gideon knows which until we leave. Whichever car gets hit tells me who talked." He glanced at me. "I'm not predicting an attack. I'm handing someone a shot at me."

I understood, and the understanding landed like ice. "Six cars," I said. "Any one of them could be hit." My voice thinned. "And if it's yours, I'm sitting next to you."

"Yes."

My heart began to hammer. One in six. I didn't know which car, which road a man with a gun would be waiting. I knew only that I'd be in the back seat in a dress, next to the man they wanted dead, with nowhere to hide and nothing to hold.

"Don't," I whispered. I could hear myself starting to come apart. "Please. I know I'm not the one they want. But a bullet doesn't ask who it was meant for. I can't be the thing that just happens to be sitting in the way."

"I know what I'm asking."

"No, you don't. You've never been the one who just happened to be in the room." My voice cracked. "I'm the one who's always there when it goes wrong. I've been in the way for five years."

It was the truest thing I had ever said out loud, and it hung in that glass-walled room like a thrown knife.

Jax's jaw moved once.

"You won't know which car," he said at last. "Neither will anyone but Gideon. It's what I have."

"Is Kozlov the one who's been hitting your trucks?"

"I don't know," Jax said. "That's why you're coming."

He came around the desk. I braced, but he stopped a few feet away, hands loose at his sides.

"You'll sit beside me the entire night. You won't leave the table without me. You won't eat anything you didn't see me eat. You'll keep your eyes down, and you'll look at me before you answer anyone." His eyes were hard. "And you'll watch. Everything. The six aren't there, but his men are. You see what other people walk past. You're not the target, Elena. I am. I'm bringing you because I need your eyes."

Eyes.

No one had ever called me that. Not a wife. Not a prize. Not a thing to be kept clean. And I knew it was a hook dressed in a better coat, and I felt it close around me anyway, the first time in years someone had told me what I was for.

"And if it goes wrong?" I asked.

"I'll find a way."

"You don't know that."

He was silent a long moment.

"No," he said at last. "I don't."

It was the first honest thing he had ever said to me that wasn't also a threat.

Then he picked up the gold-edged card and slid it into his pocket.

"Marta will lay out what you're to wear. Put it on. Do your hair the way she shows you." He started for the door and stopped. "And Elena."

I looked up.

"Stay where I can see you."

He left. The door shut behind him, and the glass wall hummed with the roar of the floor below, and I stood alone in the middle of that room with my arms wrapped around myself.

Six cars. Six routes. Somewhere beneath me, one man was already counting the hours until he could pass one of them to someone who wanted Jax dead.

And tomorrow night I would find out whether I'd be sitting beside him when they came.