Chapter 5: The Card

The month between Asher's booking and the party itself felt like the longest of Nina's life. She went through the motions of her cover, saw a client here and there, played the companion, collected nothing. She spent her off hours at the precinct, combing old files, looking for anything that might tell her who El Sombras really was. Nothing. The man was a ghost.

She called Valeria on a Sunday, the way she used to. Her sister was mid-semester, stressed about a public health midterm, and talked for twenty minutes about a professor she hated and a boy in her study group who kept correcting her. Nina sat on her kitchen floor with the phone pressed to her ear and listened and almost cried, because this was the life she was supposed to be protecting, this ordinary, beautiful, boring life where the biggest problem was a pompous professor and a boy who wouldn't shut up.

"You okay?" Valeria asked. "You sound weird."

"I'm fine. Just work stuff."

"You never talk about work."

"It's boring. That's why."

"You could say hi sometime. I worry about you, living alone in that apartment."

"I'm fine, Val. I'm always fine."

She hung up and sat in the dark kitchen and thought: I'm not fine. I'm sleeping with strangers to catch a drug lord, and I'm carrying men I don't know inside my body, and I haven't told my sister the truth about anything in months, and the worst part is that the lies are getting easier.

She checked in with Marsh twice a week now, coded, brief. He ran the party lead, pulled permits, searched security firms, catering companies. Nothing. Whoever hosted it kept it off the books entirely.

The night of the party she dressed in the gown Asher had bought her, a deep green that set off her dark hair and her green eyes, and she stood in her apartment and looked at herself in the mirror and thought: tonight, maybe, this ends.

The estate was all glass and marble hanging off the side of a canyon, lit gold against the dark hills, waterfalls and fire pits and a valet who took Asher's car without a word. Cars worth more than Nina's yearly salary lined the drive. Men in suits, women in dresses that left little to imagine. She walked in on Asher's arm and felt the room shift when she entered, heads turning, eyes following.

Asher's hand was on the small of her back, proprietary, guiding. "Stay close," he murmured. "Smile. Don't speak unless spoken to. Don't make eye contact with anyone unless I introduce you."

She scanned every face. Somewhere in this house was the man who'd been a ghost for years, the man who'd had Tello killed the night Sloan named him, the man who saw the threads before she could pull them. She was close enough now to breathe his air, and her skin prickled with it.

"Who's the host?" she murmured to Asher.

"Nobody knows. Nobody asks." He squeezed her hip, his fingers digging in, a reminder. "Smile, beautiful. Be charming. And don't go anywhere I can't see you."

She lost Asher to a card table within the hour and worked the room, playing the pretty companion, collecting names, cataloguing faces, dropping a question here and a smile there. A woman in white, throat dripping diamonds, leaned close to her at the bar and laughed, gin on her breath.

"You're new," the woman said. "I can tell. You still look around like you expect the walls to bite."

Nina smiled. "Guilty."

"You'll learn. The rules here are simple. You don't find him. He finds you."

The hairs on the back of Nina's neck rose. "Him?"

The woman in white smiled, secretive, and looked past Nina's shoulder. "Him."

Nina turned.

Across the room, half in shadow at the bar, a man was watching her. Not the casual once-over of a bored rich man. Something sharper, more deliberate, the gaze of a man who'd already decided something about her and was waiting to see if she'd prove him right. He was tall, lean, broad through the shoulders, dark hair pushed back from a face that could stop traffic. Jaw shadowed with stubble. A clean suit, no tie, collar open. Tattoos peeked above his collar, ink crawling up his neck and down the backs of his hands, disappearing beneath his cuffs. His eyes were dark and steady and didn't leave hers.

He lifted his glass to her, the smallest nod, the ghost of a smile.

Nina's mouth went dry. Her heart thudded once, hard, against her ribs. She looked away first, and hated that she did, hated the heat that climbed into her face, hated the woman in her who responded to that gaze like a moth to a flame.

"Who is he?" she asked, her voice too steady.

The woman in white followed her gaze and smiled, knowing. "Him? He's the one you don't approach. He comes to you. If he comes to you." She laughed. "Every woman in this room has tried. Most of them failed."

Nina excused herself to the bathroom, heart pounding. She pressed her back to the door and closed her eyes and tried to think like the detective, the professional, the woman on a mission. But the detective had gone quiet, and something else was speaking, something that had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the way that man had looked at her, like he'd already undressed her with his eyes and found her wanting more.

When she came back out, the shadow at the bar was gone. But on the table where she'd left her clutch, a single black card. No name. A phone number. One line on the back in a sharp, slanted hand:

*Next time, don't look away.*

Nina stood in the middle of the party, the card burning between her fingers, the man with no face somewhere in the house around her, and she understood with a cold clarity that she'd just been found by the very thing she was hunting.

The question was which one of them was the predator now.

She moved through the party in a daze, the card in her clutch, her eyes scanning every face for the man who'd been watching her. He was gone. The bar where he'd stood was occupied by someone else, a woman in gold this time, sipping champagne. It was as if he'd never been there, as if the shadow had dissolved back into the dark.

But the card was real. The number was real. The words on the back were real. Next time, don't look away. He'd seen her look away. He'd noticed. And instead of coming to her, instead of introducing himself, instead of playing the game the way every other man at this party played it, he'd left a card and a challenge. He'd made it hers to decide.

That was power. Not the crude, transactional power of the men who paid for her body, not the controlling power of Sloan's good girl, not the dominating power of Asher's hand on her throat. Something subtler. Something that said: I see you. I know what you are. And I'm giving you the choice.

No man had ever given her a choice.

On her way out, she passed two men in the hallway, low voices, Spanish. She caught fragments without meaning to, Rojas and territorio and la reunión, and filed them the way she filed everything, automatically, without thinking. The war Sloan had mentioned was live tonight, woven into the party's fabric, men on both sides circulating in the same room like sharks in the same water.

She left the party on Asher's arm, the card hidden in her clutch, and she didn't sleep that night, and she didn't call Marsh, and she told herself it was because she was working a lead and not because she couldn't stop thinking about the man at the bar and the way he'd looked at her like she was the only real thing in the room.