Chapter 7: The Empty Side of the Bed

HAUNTED BY THE MAFIA KING

By Ann E

Tyler POV

Chapter 7: The Empty Side of the Bed

I wake at the sound of the latch.

It is a small sound, a click no louder than a pen set down on a desk. In another life it would not have reached me. But I have spent twenty years sleeping like a man who expects to be woken, and my eyes are open before the door finishes closing.

The room is grey. The curtains hold a thin line of dawn. The bed beside me is still warm in the shape of her, and then, as I lie there counting my own breaths, it is not.

I could follow.

I know exactly how long it would take. Four seconds to dress, the lift, the lobby, the street. She is on foot, in heels, in the rain. I would reach her before she found a taxi.

I stay where I am.

I expect nothing from you, I told her. Not gratitude. Not tomorrow. Not your name. I said it so smoothly. I meant it, which is the irritating part. A man who gives his word and breaks it at six in the morning because he doesn't like how the room feels is not a man I intend to be.

So I lie in the cold and look at the ceiling.

The shower does nothing. Neither does the coffee, which Teodor leaves outside the door at seven as he has every morning for nine years, without knocking.

I stand at the window with the cup going cold and the city spread beneath me, grey and glittering and entirely mine, and I find I am not looking at it.

I am looking at the bedside table.

The hairpin lies where I set it down. A small gold leaf, curved like something caught mid-fall. In the daylight it is plainer than it was in the lamp, slightly worn at the tip where fingers have turned it over and over.

It was a present for someone who didn't want it. I took it back.

She said it to her glass, not to me. I remember the way her thumb moved on the stem. I remember thinking that I had sat across tables from men who had lied to my face for forty minutes, and I had never believed anyone as completely as I believed that sentence.

I pick it up. It weighs almost nothing.

On the inside of the curve, so small I have to tilt it to the window, there is a mark. Two letters and a tiny wren, stamped into the metal. A maker's mark.

I turn it over once more.

Then the door opens, and Damien Cross walks in without knocking, because he is the only man alive who is allowed to.

"You're late," Damien says. "You're never late."

"It is seven forty."

"You've been at that window since I got out of the lift." He puts a folder on the table. He is tall and sparse and unhurried, forty-one years old, and he has never in his life looked surprised. He looks at the rumpled bed. He looks at me. He looks at the hairpin in my hand.

"Ah," he says.

"Don't."

"I said nothing."

"You said ah."

"It was a very short word." He sits. "Rourke's men were at the Marlowe last night, as you know. The nervous one, Pell, checked the door eleven times. I counted. He's reporting to somebody who isn't Rourke. I'd like to know who."

"Then find out."

"I'm going to. But I've a better question first." He nods at my hand. "Who is she?"

I say nothing.

"Tyler."

"I don't know."

"You don't know her name."

"No."

"You don't know where she lives, where she works, who she's with, why she was alone in a hotel bar on a Sunday night wearing a dress that clearly wasn't chosen for the occasion."

"Green," I say, before I can stop myself. "The dress was green."

Damien looks at me for a long, quiet moment.

"I've known you nineteen years," he says. "That is the first time I have ever heard you volunteer a detail."

I put the hairpin on the desk, a little harder than I mean to.

"She left on her own. She was not coerced and she was not careless. She dressed in the dark and closed the door as if it might break." I hear my voice, level and dry. "I told her she was free to go. She went. That is the whole of it."

"Then why are you holding that?"

"Because she left it."

"Ah," Damien says again, gently.

He is quiet for a while. When he speaks, it is in the tone he uses when he intends to say something I will not enjoy.

"There's a difficulty."

"There's always a difficulty."

"Last night, on your instruction, nothing left that building. The cameras in the lift and lobby are wiped. The doorman's log is blank. Marcus and the second driver were told to forget a passenger. If I want to find a woman who walked out of here at five o'clock this morning, I have nothing. No face, no taxi, no time-stamp." A pause. "You erased her, Tyler. Very thoroughly."

I close my eyes.

I did. Of course I did. In the lift, with her hand beside mine and the whole city listening, I thought only of one thing: that no one who had seen me with a woman I did not know could use her to reach me. It was prudence. It was the first reflex of a man who has buried people for less.

It was also the one order I would give back, if I could.

"Then we do it the slow way," I say.

"Meaning?"

I lift the hairpin from the desk and hold it out to him.

"There's a mark on the inside. Two letters and a bird. A jeweller made this, a small one. Someone sells it, somewhere in the city. Someone remembers selling it, or the person who bought it."

Damien takes it, tilts it to the light, and his eyebrow rises by a millimetre.

"A wren," he says. "There's a workshop on the east side that stamps a wren. They sell through a handful of boutiques."

"Then start with those."

"Discreetly."

"Obviously."

"And when we find her?" He turns it over in his fingers. "You're not usually a man who chases. You're a man who is chased. If she doesn't want to be found..."

He lets it hang.

I look at the window. At the grey light and the wet glass, and the single bright place on the sill where the rain has run in a line.

I know what the answer ought to be. The answer I would have given, a year ago, a week ago. Then we'll find out why. A promise with a blade in it.

It rises to my tongue and I stop it there, and for a moment I do not know what to put in its place.

"She chose to leave," I say slowly. "I want to know she's safe. That's all."

"That's all."

"And that she isn't in any danger on my account. Not from Rourke. Not from anyone who might look for her through me."

"And if that's all you find out?"

"Then it's all I'll know."

It sounds true while I say it. It sounds, almost, like something a better man would say.

Damien does not smile. But the corner of his eye changes.

"I'll start this afternoon," he says. He slips the hairpin into a small plastic bag and the bag into his coat, and the little gold leaf disappears from my desk as if it had never been there.

I watch it go.

The room is very quiet after he leaves. I sit on the edge of the bed on the side that is still made, and I put my hand where she slept, and the sheets are cool, and smooth, and smell faintly of something floral I will spend a long time not being able to place.