Chapter 2: An Unexpected Windfall

Lyra's POV

Elias's messages were always short. "Bonus came through. Dinner's on me." I sent back one word: "Okay." Then I swiped the screen away.

I don't understand how Brandon Whitaker has that much free time on his hands. Every day he sends me a pile of messages, all of it play-by-play: which car he drove today, who he ate with, how his coach wrecked his swing again. I answer the ones I feel like answering. When I'm busy, none of them.

The newest one had just come in: "You got prettier again."

"That's the dress you bought me." My face didn't move while I typed it.

"Send me a few more. I want to look at you more."

Where do men get this script? Today he wants to look at me more, tomorrow he wants to spend more time with me, and the day after that he'll be telling me his family is actually very traditional. I opened my album, dug out a video, and sent it over: white camisole, tight flared pants, the girl on camera with a waist that didn't look real, dancing like she was selling something while the clothes stayed decent. "Pretty?"

Brandon Whitaker: "? That's not you. I want to see you."

Before I could answer, his next one landed on top of it.

"Though if you wore that, you'd look good too." A Venmo was hanging below it. I tapped Accept and replied: "Then I'll go buy it." The amount was exactly enough for the outfit.

All he really wanted was a few selfies. But I know how it works—send a man a video like that, even with someone else in it, and he'll cast himself in the role and let his imagination run.

Before I left I only changed my shoes. Elias had picked some place on the other side of town. I called a car and gave the driver the address and said nothing else.

We came around a strip of bars just as the rain that had been threatening all evening finally quit. Neon sitting in the puddles, music leaking out every time a door swung open, two guys on the curb smoking and watching a girl walk past. And against the brick between two of the doors, half in shadow, Damian Quinn.

Baseball cap, mask, tie loose at the collar, half his shirt pulled out of his waistband. One hand braced flat against the wall.

I'd been tracking that name for nearly a year and never once gotten within ten feet of him. He doesn't stand around on sidewalks. He moves in a sealed room. You wait for the one night he's alone, off balance, and unwatched.

Tonight was that night. Elias could keep twenty minutes.

I told the driver to pull over.

"Are you okay?" I kept my voice low and crouched down in front of him, and my fingertips found his wrist.

His skin pressed flush against mine. Mine runs cold; his was running hot. Under my hand he settled, the way a fever leans into a cool cloth, and he leaned into it.

Then the pictures came.

I'd worked the mechanics out over two weeks of testing, and the mechanics were simple. Something in between, nothing: a sleeve, a glove, a shoulder through a jacket. Bare skin, and only when I was the one who closed the gap. One second bought a flicker. Three or four brought color. Ten gave me the whole thing, and it always cut out on its own around ten, like something in me got tired and let go.

I never got to aim it. I never got answers to questions I actually had. I got whatever the person was carrying, and what people carry is usually the thing they'd never say out loud.

This one arrived in pieces, fast. A very small boy. Two adults. A house I couldn't place. The boy curled into the woman's arms, the man drawing them both in, the three of them on a couch, laughing. No hiding in that laugh and no calculation in it either. Complete happiness.

That's my read on it, anyway. He wasn't showing it to me. It came off him the way heat comes off a wall.

Ten seconds. It stopped.

I wanted another one. My hand was halfway back up when his eyes snapped open.

Blue, shot through with red, fixed on mine. He ground the words out one at a time: "Get lost."

My fingers hung in the air a beat, then came back. With a man like this you don't show him a single number. The second he feels he's being priced, everything you've built goes in the trash. I could have apologized, said I'd mistaken him for someone else, said sorry for the bother and walked off. Safest possible move. Also worth exactly nothing.

I stood up instead and let my voice go soft. "Lyra Valente. I'm a student at St. Jude. Don't worry—I'm not a bad person."

Real name. A fake one is a lie he can catch later.

He tried to push off the wall and his legs weren't having it. I got his arm over my shoulder, his weight came down on me and nearly took us both to the pavement, and I flagged a guy coming out of the bar with a cigarette in his mouth. Two of them carrying him worked better than one.

Two blocks down there was a hotel with a lit sign and a kid behind the desk who'd been on this shift too long to ask questions. I kept Damian's chin down through the lobby and turned his face away from the camera, and when the kid asked for ID I slid my own card across the counter. The kid shrugged and ran it.

Cash would have been cleaner. Cash would also have made it look like exactly what it was—some girl buying a room for a man who couldn't stand up. A card reads like a girlfriend putting him to bed. There's a version of that story every desk clerk in the city has seen a hundred times, and it isn't the one that gets remembered.

The elevator had that bleach-and-old-carpet smell. The hall carpet was the kind you only walk on when somebody else is paying. The room was one ninety for the night, and by Thursday it would be a line on my statement with a hotel name on it.

I'd deal with that Thursday. A hotel, a Tuesday, one hundred ninety dollars—on its own that reads like nothing. A record is only dangerous in company. I've kept mine empty. That's why I don't take their money.

He sat on the edge of the bed with the cap and the mask still on and his upper body rigid, like a man braced for a hit. Then he dug in his pocket and came out with every bill he had. Two of them. He held them out.

"You can go. That's your payment."

I didn't take it. "I just wanted to help," I said. "Once you're safe, I'll leave."

I turned and walked out. The lock clicked shut behind me.

Some men you negotiate with. Him you don't.

Back in the car I texted Elias one word. Late. Then I leaned against the seat and watched the streetlights slide past one by one. My left temple had started up, steady, a nail tapped in behind the eye. It always costs something. Mine takes it in the head.

That was his parents back there. I'm nearly sure of it. The woman, the man, the boy between them—that's a family. That's not a family that stopped.

But the rumor is that the Quinn family came apart years ago, and that Damian Quinn's father died young.

Those two things don't sit in the same room. Families don't laugh on a couch like that after the man's been gone. So either the rumor's wrong, or the man in the picture isn't his father, or the boy was small enough that I've got the years wrong.

I don't know which. I put it under his name with everything else and left it there.

I'd find out the same way I find out everything.