6. The Real Payment

Elena’s POV

I stopped breathing, and for a long moment, so did the room.

His face was inches from mine. The lamp turned half of it gold and left the other half in shadow, and in that light he looked less like a man than like a decision. Pay me back. The words kept echoing, and my mind did what it always did when it was cornered: it went somewhere else. Somewhere small and quiet, where nothing could be done to me because I wasn't there.

I had been so sure about last night. I had stood in this room with my blouse hanging open and watched him turn away, and I had thought, That's it. That's the worst of it. But a man who locks a door behind him and says a sentence like that does not mean work.

My hands curled into fists on my knees. Don't cry. Don't beg. Don't give him anything.

"Get up," Jax said.

I blinked.

"You've gone white. If you faint, I'll have to carry you, and I'd rather not." He rose to his full height in one smooth movement and held out a hand. Not gently. Like an order. "Up."

I stared at that hand. Then I put mine in it, because refusing had never once worked for me, and he pulled me to my feet without effort and let go the instant I was steady.

He walked to the door. The lock turned over with that same heavy click, and I flinched, and he noticed and said nothing.

"The door was locked for a reason," he said, without looking back. "That sentence wasn't for anyone else's ears. The Pit has more ears than walls."

I followed him into the corridor on legs that didn't feel like mine. "I don't understand," I whispered. "You said—"

"I said we'd figure out how you pay me back." He glanced at me over his shoulder. His mouth moved, something too dry to be a smile. "What did you think I meant?"

Heat flooded my face. He watched it happen, and the dry thing in his expression sharpened into something that looked a lot like contempt, and I wasn't sure whether it was meant for me or for himself.

"Never mind," he said. "I can see exactly what you thought. Keep walking."

The corridor opened onto a catwalk, and the sound hit me first.

A roar, low and layered, the noise of a hundred men in one room: glasses clinking, chips snapping down, a bell, a crowd chanting something I couldn't make out. Smoke rolled up past the railing, thick with tobacco and whiskey and something metallic underneath, like old pennies. I grabbed the rail without meaning to and looked down.

A garage. I knew that much. Hydraulic lifts stood pushed against the walls, a luxury car I couldn't name sat under a tarp, and tool chests gleamed in rows. But the floor between them had become something else entirely. Green felt tables crowded one side, ringed by men in suits with cigars and women in dresses that cost more than my entire wardrobe. On the other, a square of raised canvas stood under hard white light, and two men were beating each other bloody inside it while the crowd screamed for more.

"The Pit," Jax said quietly, beside me. "By day it's a garage. After dark it's mine."

Mine. I was learning that every word in his mouth had edges.

I had been brought in the back. I had seen a corridor, a door, a black room. I had assumed all of it was his, that the windowless room with the heavy desk and the locked door had been the center of his world. I said so, faintly. "That room. Where I was. Is that your office?"

"That's Gideon's."

"Oh."

"He doesn't like windows." Jax's voice was almost amused. "Neither do the people who come to him for bad news. Mine's up here."

He led me along the catwalk to a heavy black door at the far end. It opened onto a room that took my breath for the second time that night.

It was dim and enormous and dominated by a wall of glass. I walked toward it, drawn like a moth, and understood what I was looking at: the whole garage floor spread beneath us like a stage, every table, every face, every man at the ring. The glass was tinted so dark I could see my own faint reflection in it, and none of the men below had once glanced up.

"One-way," Jax said, closing the door behind us. "They can't see in. I can see everything." He crossed to the mahogany desk, rested one hand on it, and turned to look at me. "Come here. Look closely."

I came. I stood at the glass with my arms wrapped around myself, and he stood a careful arm's length away, and for a moment we both just watched them: dealers, customers, fighters, men in suits who owed him or feared him or served him.

"Someone down there is selling me," he said.

He said it so evenly that the meaning took a second to land.

"My routes. My shipments. Where I'll be and when. Someone in this building passes it to men who want me dead, and they've started to use it." His eyes stayed on the floor. "Three of my trucks have been hit in two months. Two of my men are in the ground. I've turned over every stone I'm willing to turn over and I've found nothing, which means whoever it is, they're good, and they're close."

I waited. I had learned to wait.

"Gideon has been with me eleven years. I trust him because I've watched him bleed for me. I don't trust anyone else." He finally turned. "And I can't watch everyone. I need someone no one looks at. Someone who sits in the corner of a room with her eyes down and sees everything that happens in it."

I went cold. "Me."

"You," he agreed. "Five years in a house with a man like Mark taught you to read a room before you walk into it. Don't tell me it didn't. I watched you do it at your own kitchen counter."

That was what he thought of me. A tool I'd been sharpened into. The words should have hurt, and they did, and underneath the hurt, absurdly, something small and bright flickered and refused to go out: he noticed. Nobody had noticed anything about me in so long.

I shoved it down hard.

"Why would you trust me?" My voice shook. "You took me from my house. You, you said I'd pay for what he did. I could tell them anything. I could go to whoever it is and sell you out. I could hurt you for what you've done to me."

I regretted it the instant I heard it.

Jax laughed.

It was low and unhurried and utterly without warmth. He crossed the space between us in two strides, stopping close enough that I had to tip my head back, and the smile he wore was the cruelest thing I had ever seen on a human face.

"What I did to you?" His voice was silk over steel. "Sweetheart, I walked into your kitchen and pulled you out of the worst thing that ever happened to you. Where would you be tonight without me? Still scrubbing floors for a man who breaks your ribs when you drop a glass. I kidnapped you, Elena. It's the best thing that's ever happened to your miserable life."

My mouth fell open. No sound came out. He was right, and I hated him for it so fiercely I couldn't see.

"And if you did sell me," he went on, pitiless, "who would you run to? Mark? He'd trade you again before you finished the sentence. The men I'm hunting? They'd hand you back to me by morning with a bow on. Tell me, Elena. Where exactly do you plan to go?"

I had no answer. There was no one. There was nothing in the whole world past the door that had my name on it.

"That's why I'd trust you," he said, almost gently, and somehow that was the worst of all. "Not because you're loyal. Because you have no one else."

Tears stung my eyes. I would not let them fall. I turned away from him and stared out at the glass with my jaw clamped so tight it ached, at the men below, at the crowd roaring for blood, and thought with a clarity that frightened me: I have never hated anyone the way I hate you right now.

And under it, so quiet I almost didn't hear it: And you're the first person in five years who told me the truth.

"Here's what happens next," Jax said behind me, cold and brisk again, a man back in his element. "You'll stay in the Pit. You'll go where I send you and watch who I tell you to watch. You'll tell me what you see, and no one else, ever. Mark has seven days to bring me my money. When they're up, I take what he has left. His house, his accounts, his name. You help me, and I might let you watch."

"And if I don't?"

"You will."

I let out a shaky breath. Then, slowly, without being able to stop myself, I said the only thing I could.

"Where do I start?"

He came to stand beside me, and for the first time I realized how quiet he was. No restlessness, no swagger. Just a stillness that took up the whole room.

"Look at them," he said. "Don't look for anything. Just look."

I looked. A dozen men at the green tables, suits and cigars, one laughing too loudly at his own joke. Fighters wrapping their knuckles at the edge of the ring. Dealers moving like clockwork. A thousand small gestures, and I had spent five years learning that every one of them meant something.

"Six men knew the route the night my trucks were hit," Jax said. "All six are down there tonight. One of them is smiling at me right now, drinking my whiskey, with no idea I'm standing here."

A chill slid down my spine. I saw it differently then: not a crowd, but a room full of masks, and one of them hiding a knife.

"You have until Mark's seven days are up," he said. "Find me the one who's lying."

I pressed my fingertips to the cold glass. It hummed faintly with the noise from below, like something alive. For five years every room I had stood in had demanded my silence. This was the first one that wanted something else from me.

It terrified me that some small, treacherous part of me was almost grateful.

Below, a man threw back his head and laughed, and the crowd roared as the fighter in the ring went down.

Which one of you is it? I thought.