Page 76 of Last Flame
We leave with one door, three bags of hardware, and a deadbolt rated for banks.
Sounds right.
We left Leif alone with the fairy tale.
The man handles assassins, border disputes, and Vestry summons without blinking.
Surely he can handle Elara Dorne for an hour.
“So, Erik,” I say as we step out.
He glances at me and he already knows I’m going to say something he’d qualify as stupid.
“When were you going to tell Beautiful those notes came from you?”
Chapter 23
Elara
The thing nobody tells you about four men leaving your apartment at once is how loud the quiet gets.
Also, I have no door. I have a doorway. There’s a difference, and the difference is that anyone in this building can currently watch me vacuum.
“Technically, Rayner broke the door,” I tell Gerald over the vacuum. “But sure. I’ll handle the murder confetti.”
And yes, I’m talking to him again. I’ve been publicly shamed for it once today already, so now it’s a matter of principle.
The splinters are everywhere. Under the desk. Behind the pull-out. There’s a piece of my door in the fruit bowl.
“The fruit bowl, Gerald! Explain the physics of that.”
I keep my back to the doorway while I work, which lasts about four minutes, because a doorway with no door in it is just a rectangle anyone could walk through, and apparently my body has opinions about that. Fine. I turn around. I vacuum facing the rectangle like a woman guarding a castle with a Dyson.
Which is why I see him.
An orange head, peeking around the doorframe at exactly ankle height. One paw on my floor. The rest of him still in the hallway, undecided.
A cat.
I turn the vacuum off slow, like it’s a hostage negotiation, and I’m crouched down with my hand out before I’ve decided anything about anything.
“Hi,” I say, in a voice I will deny using. “Aren’t you just the cutest thing. Come here, baby.”
He watches me. Not skittish. Just watching, taking the whole room apart with his eyes first, like cats do.
Then he backs up a step, and my heart does something embarrassing.
“No no no, wait—”
I follow him into the hallway in my socks, doing the psspsspss, which I would rather die than have witnessed, and I’m alone and still embarrassed. He stops a few feet down the hall. Turns. Looks at me.
Then he comes to me like it was his idea the whole time.
I kneel on the hallway floor of my building, still in the sleep shirt with a hole in it, and this orange tabby walks straight into my hands, and that’s it. That’s the whole story. I’m gone.
No collar.
“Oh, buddy,” I whisper. “You know what that means.”
