8. Is She Still Alive?

Elena’s POV

I didn’t sleep. I sat against that door until the slits in the window turned from black to gray, and when Marta came with a tray of eggs and toast, I ate every crumb, because I had learned that being watched was easier when you gave the watcher nothing to criticize.

Gideon arrived an hour later.

“He wants you,” was all he said.

I followed him through the vault door and into the glass office. Daylight had changed it. The garage floor below was a different creature now: hydraulic lifts rising, men in coveralls moving among half-dismantled engines, sparks spitting from a welding torch. The tables were gone. The ring was a bare square of canvas under a tarp. It was so ordinary that I almost didn’t believe what it hid.

Jax sat behind the mahogany desk in a black shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbow, a phone laid face-up in front of him and a cup of coffee going cold at his hand. He didn’t look up when I came in.

“Close the door, Gideon. Stay.”

The door clicked shut. I stood in the center of the room, arms folded over the cardigan, not knowing where to put my eyes.

“You were up at three,” Jax said.

My stomach turned over. “I—”

“You put your hand on the knob. You opened the door an inch. Then you shut it again.” He finally raised his gaze, and it was as unreadable as it had been in the dark. “Why?”

So it had been him. The red light. The unlocked door. A small, humiliating heat crept up my neck.

“Where would I go?” I said quietly.

Something crossed his face too fast to name. “Good answer.”

It wasn’t praise. It was just a fact, noted and filed. But I felt it land somewhere under my ribs, and I hated how badly part of me wanted to catch it.

“Sit.”

I took the leather chair opposite the desk. Gideon leaned against the wall behind me like a gargoyle.

“Your husband has called my phone eleven times since Thursday,” Jax said. “I haven’t answered. This morning he left a voicemail crying.” His thumb tapped the edge of the phone. “I’m going to answer him now. You’re going to listen. You will not speak, you will not make a sound, and you will not react where he can hear it. Understand?”

“Why?” The word escaped me again. I braced.

Jax didn’t strike. He only looked at me, patient, almost curious. “Because a man shows you who he is in the first thing he asks for. I want to hear what Mark asks for first.”

My mouth went dry. I understood. This was another test, and I was not the one taking it. I was the question.

He pressed a button on the phone. It rang once.

“Mr. Mercer?”

Mark’s voice filled the room, tinny through the speaker and unmistakable. It hit me like a blow to the sternum. For two days I had almost, almost convinced myself he was a story I’d been told. Now he was in the room, and every cell in my body remembered him.

Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Fold your hands.

I folded my hands.

“Mr. Mercer, thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you, I’ve called—”

“Eleven times,” Jax said. His voice was perfectly pleasant. “I counted.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry, I just—” Mark’s breath rattled. He sounded like he hadn’t slept either. Good, said a small, vicious voice inside me, and I flinched at my own thought. “Listen, I need more time. I’m working on it, I swear to you I’m working on it, but two hundred and fifty, that’s not a number you just find. A couple of weeks. A month, if you can—”

“You have five days.”

“Five days is— Mr. Mercer, that’s impossible, you have to see that, I don’t have—”

“Mark.”

The line went silent. I realized I was holding my breath.

“You’ve been talking for ninety seconds,” Jax said. “Is there something you wanted to ask me?”

A pause. A swallow. Mark’s voice dropped, lower, careful, and I knew that tone. I knew it better than my own name. It was the voice he used right before he asked me for something he didn’t think he deserved.

“Is she…” He cleared his throat. “Is she still alive?”

There it was.

Not is she all right. Not did you hurt her. Not please, I’ll do anything. Just that. A man checking whether his property had been returned in working order.

Jax’s eyes were fixed on my face. He didn’t blink. I understood he was waiting for me to break, and a cold, clear anger rose in me, the first real anger I had felt in years. It steadied my hands. I kept them folded. I kept my face still.

You will not get anything from me.

“She’s alive,” Jax said.

“Oh, good. Good. That’s— that’s a relief, I was worried, I—” Mark laughed, a brittle, hopeful sound. “Is she, is she in good condition? I mean, she’s not— nobody’s damaged her, have they? Because she’s still worth—”

He stopped himself. Too late.

My fingers dug into the backs of my own hands. Worth. I could almost see him, pacing the room in his wrinkled shirt, wetting his lips, doing the math.

“I’m just saying,” Mark rushed on, “you can keep her longer, if that helps. As, you know, as interest. She’s useful. She cooks, she cleans, she’s very quiet, she does exactly what she’s told. You’d barely know she was there. If you wanted to hold on to her for a few more weeks, I’d understand, I’m sure there’s—”

“Mark.”

Jax had not raised his voice. He had lowered it. And somehow it was infinitely worse.

“You offered her to me,” he said. “On your own floor. In front of her. I accepted. That transaction is finished.” Each word fell like a tile. “You don’t get to put her back on the table. She isn’t yours to bargain with. Not anymore.”

“Of course. Of course, I didn’t mean—”

“What you meant was very clear.” He lifted his coffee, drank, set it down. “Your wife is eating better than you are. Don’t call me again to talk about her.”

I sat very still. Behind me, I felt Gideon’s attention sharpen like a drawn blade.

The line crackled. Then Mark made a sound I had never heard from him, a thin, desperate scrape, and when he spoke again, his voice shook with what he thought was cleverness.

“Mr. Mercer, I may have found a way. A solution. I’ve met someone, a friend, he’s very interested in helping me, he knows who you are, he knows exactly what you do, and he said that if I—”

“Who?”

“His name is—” Mark hesitated, and I heard him take a breath like a man stepping off a ledge. “It’s Viktor Kozlov. He said he’d cover the whole—”

Jax ended the call.

He didn’t hang up in anger. He simply pressed his thumb to the screen, and Mark’s voice cut off mid-sentence, and the silence that followed rang in my ears.

Nobody moved.

I looked at Jax. He was staring at the dark phone, and for the first time since I had met him, I saw something move behind his eyes that was not calculation. It was quick and cold and ancient, and it was gone before I could name it.

“Gideon,” he said softly.

“I heard.”

“Everything we have on Kozlov. By tonight.”

“Boss, if Vance has—”

“I know what it means.”

Gideon went. The door shut. The room was too quiet.

I had been told to say nothing. But my throat had gone tight and the silence was unbearable and the question left me before I knew I would ask it.

“Who is he?”

Jax didn’t answer for a long time. When he did, his voice was flat and low.

“The only man in this city I’d call my equal.” His eyes met mine. “And your husband just walked him to my door.”

I sat in that leather chair with my hands still folded and my heart thudding against my ribs, and I thought about Mark’s voice, she’s very quiet, she does exactly what she’s told, and how he had not once asked if I was hurt, if I was afraid, if I was safe.

“You didn’t flinch,” Jax said.

“I’ve had practice.”

I hadn’t meant it to sound bitter. It did. His gaze held mine, hard and unreadable, and for one suspended second something in it shifted.

“I noticed,” he said.

Then he looked away, and the moment was gone.

But I knew, with a cold certainty that settled in my bones, that my husband had just made the biggest mistake of his life. And I was standing in the middle of what came next.