CHAPTER 2: The Black Car

He didn't say a word for the first fifteen minutes and neither did I.

I sat pressed against the door with my hands folded tight in my lap, and my eyes straight ahead while the city lights slid past the windows. The driver moved through every turn without hesitation like a man who had made this exact journey too many times to count.

I studied the inside of the car because looking at him felt dangerous. Black leather seats without a single mark on them and a small bar built into the center console with crystal glasses and amber liquor lined up neat, and the kind of vehicle that didn't need to announce itself because everything about it already said exactly what needed to be said.

I counted my breaths and told myself to think.

He had known my name before tonight. He knew my shift schedule and my address and the name of my cat and my neighbor on the second floor, that wasn't information you gathered in the few minutes between an alley and a car. That was information someone had been sitting on and waiting with which meant tonight hadn't been random, and which meant I needed to stop panicking and start paying attention because running was off the table and fighting was also off the table. Observation was the only thing I had left.

Watch everything. Learn everything. Wait.

"Are you going to kill me?"

I hadn't planned to say it out loud but it came out flat and direct the way my worst impulses always did at the worst possible moments, and he turned his head toward me slowly. In the passing light from outside his face was all shadow and sharp lines and he looked at me the way you looked at something unexpected. Not a threat exactly. Just something still being decided.

"No," he said and I let out a breath I had been holding since the alley.

"Then what…"

"Not tonight," he added and I stared at him.

"That is genuinely not reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be." He turned back to the windscreen and that was apparently the end of that conversation.

I looked at my own reflection in the dark glass beside me. Pale face and wide eyes and hair coming loose from the knot I had put it in at the start of my shift. And I looked exactly as terrified as I was which felt like a personal failure because I had a rule about not letting men see fear on my face. I had built that rule over years of difficult shifts and difficult people and a father who taught me early that showing fear was the same as handing someone a weapon and asking them to use it. I had abandoned it completely in the alley and I needed to find it again fast.

He reached into his jacket and every muscle in my body seized before I registered it was just a phone. He made a call in quite rapid Italian I couldn't follow a single word of and when he finished he put the phone away and settled back into his seat like a man without one single concern in the world, and I watched him from the corner of my eye. Jaw set. One hand resting easy on his thigh. Whatever had happened in that alley existed nowhere on his body. No tension. No weight. No evidence at all that he had ended someone's life and put a witness in his car and driven away into the night like it was just another Tuesday.

He looked like a man going home.

"My cat," I said. "Biscuit. He needs feeding in the morning."

Dante turned and looked at me and something moved briefly across his face before he put it away. "It's been handled," he said.

"What do you mean handled?"

"Your neighbor Mrs Paola has a key and she'll look after him until further notice."

I sat with that for a moment because he already knew my neighbor's name and had already made arrangements somewhere between the alley and this car without me asking or knowing. And the fact that he had thought about the cat while I was sitting here trying not to fall apart should have made everything worse but somehow it didn't, and I didn't want to think about why.

"How long is further notice?" I asked.

He looked back at the road. "I don't know yet."

The city had disappeared completely behind us and we were moving through dark flat countryside with no lights anywhere. I could see and I didn't recognize this road, didn't know how far we had come or in which direction and the realization of that sat heavy in my chest like something I couldn't move.

Then the car turned off the highway.

The road narrowed immediately and the old tarmac gave way to something quieter with trees pressing in on both sides. No streetlamps, no other cars, just the darkness and the quiet hum of the engine carrying us deeper into it. I pressed my fingers together in my lap, kept my breathing even and told myself to keep paying attention.

But the truth was I didn't recognize this road at all and the city behind me felt very far away and getting further with every passing second. There was a man sitting beside me in the dark who had just killed someone and hadn't thought twice about it and I was completely and entirely alone.

I kept my face still and my breathing even and I told myself I was fine.

But I was not fine.