030— A PROJECT.

                 ~KAI~

I left before anyone woke up.

No coffee. No Anton. I took the Aston Martin because it was closest to the gate and I drove.

The road was empty at 6am and I needed empty because my head was not.

Her face.

That was the problem. That was the real problem I had been lying awake with since the terrace and was now trapped in a moving car with at 6am because staying in that mansion one more hour without doing something about… about the way she looked so… ethereal, her rose-red lips, her doe eyes, her everything… was going to make me do something significantly worse than what happened on the terrace.

I pressed the accelerator.

I had grabbed her neck and kissed her.

Not a calculated thing. My hands had moved before my brain was consulted and she had kissed me back with both hands in my hair pulling me closer and the sound she made— I took a turn too fast and corrected it.

The sound she made.

The way she had moaned my name.

I had stepped back. Driven home for twenty minutes without looking at her once and called it handled. I lay in the dark for four hours listening to the mansion breathe and thinking about finishing what I'd started on that terrace until I wanted to put my fist through the wall.

Handled.

Until she came into my room.

3am, her hand over mine in the dark, her voice saying my name until the nightmare let go of me, the way I'd pretended to be asleep while she counted my breaths, her cheek on my mattress when I woke up and the way she pulled the door shut without making it a thing. 

‘Go to sleep Kai’ — like she hadn't just sat beside me for hours holding my hand like it was the most natural thing she'd ever done.

Thank you, I'd said.

She'd walked out.

I gripped the wheel until the leather creaked.

The way she'd looked coming down, the way my mouth had stopped working, the way my brain had shortcircuited.

And why was I breathing like this now?

There was something wrong with my chest.

Structurally. Some chamber misbehaving. Because normal hearts didn't do what mine did when she walked into a room. When she sat at the breakfast table pretending I wasn't there while I sat across from her pretending the same thing.

I should see a doctor.

I took a U-turn.

The office. Files and calls and the investigation. She was clearly the cause of the malfunction and the solution was not seeing her face for several hours and coming home reset.

Clean plan.

I drove to the office and almost believed it.

                    …

I read the same paragraph four times.

Closed the files. Opened them. Read it again.

I called my Silvercrest operative and got a full update on Crew's movements and processed approximately thirty percent of it while the remaining seventy percent of my brain replayed a terrace and a staircase and a kitchen counter and the sound of her breathing in the dark after the nightmare stopped.

I ended the call.

Opened the files.

The paragraph was still there.

I spent the day like that. Performing the motions of someone whose priorities were in order while my priorities sat in a mansion twenty minutes away doing whatever she did when I wasn't there. 

She was fine.

I turned the ring on my finger and looked at the paragraph and at 6pm my secretary knocked.

"A Luka Markov is here. No appointment."

"Send him in." I said. 

Luka came through the door the way he did everything. Like he'd assessed the room from the corridor, found it acceptable, and was mildly disappointed about that. 

Six months had done nothing to him. Same build. Same face. He looked at my desk and at me and…

"You look terrible."

"You drove eight hours without telling anyone," I said. "How's your mother."

"Recovering. Furious about it." He sat without being invited. "She told me to come back. Said she didn't need watching."

"She needs watching."

"She does." He picked up the paperweight from my desk, turned it over, set it down. "I want my position back."

"Done."

He looked at me. "Just like that."

"You were gone six months. Your position was held." I looked back at him. "Niko filled in."

Something crossed his face. "How is he."

"Insufferable. Exactly the same."

Almost a smile. Almost. "Good." He looked around the office. "Why are we here and not somewhere with drinks. This place is exhausting."

"So is everything else today," I said.

He looked at me with that look he had. Luka read people the way he read rooms. Efficiently and without announcing the results.

"Come," I said, standing. "We'll go back to the mansion."

We walked to the car park.

"Someone is staying at the mansion," I said.

Luka stopped walking.

"What did he do," he said. "Do you need a second opinion. Is he in the dungeon."

"It's a woman."

Silence.

He turned and looked at me fully. I kept walking. He caught up.

"A woman," he said.

"Yes."

"In your house."

"Yes."

"Voluntarily."

"Mostly."

He said nothing for a moment. "Who."

"A project," I said. "Connected to the Crew investigation. She needed somewhere safe."

Luka repeated the word project like he found it fundamentally unconvincing. 

“A project.”

I drove.

He said nothing else until we were halfway back to the mansion and then…

"If that's what you say."

I drove.

We heard it before we reached the drawing room.

A shout that moved through the mansion walls with impressive force. Something pulled in my chest before I decided to move and I was already walking faster when I pushed the drawing room door open.

I stopped at the doorframe, my eyes widening before I had time to decide what I was looking at.

Luka stopped behind me.

The drawing room had been rearranged.

All four maids were pressed against the far wall in a cluster with Anton positioned in the center of them giving me that “This is your problem” look.

The furniture had been pushed back. Two wine bottles sat on the coffee table. One empty, one close to it.

In the center of the room stood Sloane.

Her hair everywhere. One shoe missing. A kitchen knife in her right hand pointed at Anton and the maids.

She turned and saw me.

Her face lit up like I was exactly who she'd been waiting for.

"HERE HE IS," she announced, to the room, to Anton, to the wall, to Luka, to anyone within range. She turned back to the maids and pointed the knife at them again and they pressed harder against the wall and Anton closed his eyes briefly. "NOW." She looked at Anton specifically. "Go ahead. ASK HIM."

Nobody moved.

Nobody asked anything.

"Ask this MONGREL," she said, with the careful enunciation of someone operating a mouth that was not fully cooperating, "if it was really. A. MISTAKE."

The drawing room held its breath.

Luka turned his head toward me like he was enjoying this and had decided not to hide it.

I looked at Sloane. At the knife. At Anton's expression. At the empty bottles. At Sloane again — one shoe, disheveled hair.

"A project," Luka said quietly. Completely straight-faced before looking at me a second too long.

"Right."