Chapter 6: Next Time, Don't Look Away

She told herself she was calling the number because it was a lead. She told herself that every day for two days, while she held the card in her hand and thought about him and failed to get him out of her head. She told herself that right up until the moment she dialed.

She waited two days to call. Two days of telling herself it was a case lead and not the way her skin had prickled when he watched her, not the heat that had pooled low in her belly, not the way she'd touched herself in the dark thinking about those dark steady eyes and failed to get them out of her head. When she finally dialed, a low voice answered on the second ring, accented, unhurried.

"I wondered if you'd be smart or stubborn." A pause, a hint of amusement. "Which are you?"

"Depends on who's asking."

A laugh, quiet and warm, the kind that did things to the pit of her stomach. "Cruz. My name is Cruz."

"Nina." She gave hers and meant it in a way that surprised her, in a way that had nothing to do with the case.

They talked. For an hour. He didn't ask what she did for a living, didn't ask about the men she accompanied, didn't ask about the party or the diamonds or the world they both moved in. He asked what she read, what music she loved, whether she preferred the ocean or the desert, what she'd wanted to be when she was a girl.

"A musician," she said, and surprised herself with the truth of it. "I wanted to be a musician. I played piano. For years."

"What happened?"

Nina was quiet a moment. "Life happened. The things you think you want when you're young, they get buried under the things you have to do."

"Then maybe it's time to dig them up again."

She smiled, and he couldn't see it, and she was glad. "You're a strange man, Cruz."

"I've been called worse."

"And what do you do? When you're not being strange?"

He was quiet a beat, and she heard him deciding what to say. "I'm in business. Imports. Logistics. The boring parts of moving things from one place to another."

"Sounds vague."

"It is. On purpose."

She laughed. "At least you're honest about being dishonest."

"I try."

There was something in the way he didn't ask about her work, in the way he steered every conversation away from the world they'd met in, that a small, careful part of Nina's brain flagged. Not suspicion, exactly. More like a note in the margin of a case file: he's careful too. He knows which questions not to ask. She filed it and didn't think about it, because thinking about it would mean thinking about why a man at that party would have the same instincts she did, and she wasn't ready for that answer.

He didn't touch her all night, when they met three days later. Not a hotel, not a transaction. A rooftop bar downtown where the city glowed below them and he ordered her something she hadn't known she liked. He was even more striking up close. The tattoos ran from his knuckles up his forearms, disappearing under the rolled sleeves of his shirt. A hard body, lean muscle visible through the linen, the kind of stillness that came from controlling every movement, every breath. Spanish, his accent surfacing on certain words, softening others, making her name sound different in his mouth.

"You're staring," she said, and her voice came out lower than she intended.

"I'm deciding something," he said.

"What's that?"

"Whether you're real."

She laughed, nervous, and hated that she was nervous. "I'm real."

"Then prove it. Tell me something true about yourself. Something you wouldn't tell a stranger."

Nina thought about lying. Thought about the cover, the story she'd built, the woman she was supposed to be. Instead she said, "I haven't felt safe in a long time. I don't remember what it feels like."

He didn't look away from her. "I could make you feel safe."

"That's a big promise from a man I barely know."

"I keep my promises."

He noticed things about her that the men who paid for her body never did, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was thinking, the way she held her glass with both hands when something pleased her. He listened. He made her laugh, a real laugh, the kind she hadn't made in months.

And once, when a man at a nearby table glanced at her too long, Cruz's eyes tracked to the man and held there for a beat too long, and the man looked away. Not the way you look away from a stranger's stare. The way you look away from something that frightened you. Cruz turned back to Nina and his expression was warm again, but she'd seen the other face underneath, the one that had made a man go still with fear without raising his voice or moving a muscle.

She filed it. She filed everything.

When he walked her to her car he stopped under the streetlight and brushed a thumb across her jaw, tilted her face up to his. His eyes dropped to her mouth, and her breath caught, and the space between them went electric.

"Next time," he said, his voice low and rough. "When it means something."

Then he let her go, turned, and walked away, leaving her standing in the streetlight, pulse hammering, cursing him and wanting him in equal measure, her body already aching for the next time.

In her car she sat shaking, hands gripping the wheel. This wasn't the job. This wasn't intel. This was something real trying to grow in soil that couldn't hold it, and she knew it, and she couldn't make herself care.

She drove home and didn't sleep, and didn't call Marsh, and knew she was already in trouble, the kind that had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the man who'd looked at her like she was the only real thing in a room full of ghosts.

She told herself she'd see him once more, get what she could, and walk away. She told herself that lie and almost believed it.

She sat at her kitchen table at four in the morning with the file open and her gun on the table and tried to think like a cop. She'd been trained to debrief after every contact, to catalog what she'd observed, to build a profile. So she did that now, with Cruz, the way she'd do it with any subject.

Physical description: male, Hispanic, mid-thirties, approximately six-one, lean build, estimated one-ninety. Tattoos on hands, neck, forearms. Professional, possibly cultural, not prison ink. Clothing: high-end, tailored, designer. Movements: controlled, deliberate, the body awareness of someone trained or dangerous. Demeanor: confident, watchful, alternated between warmth and something harder underneath.

Behavioral observations: didn't ask about her work, which meant he either didn't care or already knew. Steered conversation away from the world they'd met in, which meant he was careful about what he revealed in that world. The man at the bar who looked away in fear, which meant Cruz commanded respect or fear in spaces where rich men didn't normally defer to anyone.

She wrote it all down on a legal pad, the way she'd been trained, and then she stared at what she'd written and felt sick. She was profiling the man she was attracted to, building a case file on someone who'd made her laugh, who'd noticed the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, who'd promised to make her feel safe.

She closed the file. She put the legal pad in a drawer. She told herself she'd deal with it in the morning, the cop part and the woman part, and figure out which one was going to win.

She already knew which one was winning. She'd known since the rooftop.