Chapter 3
"Because your name is on a list I wasn't supposed to see," he said, pulling me up by the arm, steadying me when my legs buckled from three hours of sitting in one position. "A list of collateral. People connected to a man named Silva who owes money to people who don't collect debts with lawyers." He looked at me, hard, assessing whether I could walk. "You waited on a table two weeks ago. A man tipped you forty dollars and left an envelope under his plate for someone else to pick up. You don't remember him. He remembers you."
I did remember, vaguely, a quiet man in a gray coat who'd left too much cash and barely spoken. I had no idea that moment had been the hinge of my entire life.
The footsteps outside stopped directly beside the door.
"Stay behind me," he said, and for the first time his voice lost its clinical flatness and went low, focused, dangerous in a way that wasn't aimed at me. He positioned himself between me and the door exactly as it opened, and the two men who'd kept me in that room for three hours froze at the sight of him standing there in shirtsleeves, my restraints already cut, his coat around my shoulders.
"Vale," one of them said, and I heard, in the way he said it, that whatever this man's name was, it meant something in rooms like this one. "You're not supposed to be here yet."
"And you weren't supposed to leave her wrists bleeding," Adrian Vale said. "Change of plans. She's mine now, and so is whatever debt Silva thinks this collects."
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What happened next moved faster than my exhausted brain could fully track, a blur of motion near the door, a single sound like a fist meeting a jaw, and then only one man still standing, breathing hard, and it wasn't the one who'd walked in first.
Adrian didn't look triumphant.
