Page 46 of Levi

I ran my mouth in the car last night, half past sober and worn through, and Dante doesn’t let go.

“I’ve already told you too much,” I say. “Let it go.”

“I’ve never let one thing go in my life. Ask anyone I’ve ever closed against. What else are they tracking?”

He sets the donut down on the box lid, and now both his hands are free and his attention is laser-focused on me, which is its own kind of pressure.

A minute ago, he couldn’t keep his eyes on my face. Now he won’t take them off me, and it’s nothing like the first kind of looking. I suspect this is how he gets his footing back.

“Are they tracking your visitors?” he asks. “Do they know about me? About this house being for sale?”

I study him a second. Decide what’s safe to tell him. “No. They don’t know about you or the house. And it needs to stay that way.”

“That’s not what I asked. I asked if they could find out. I’ve got a stranger living in my listing, I pulled him out of a drunk tank in the middle of the night, and now there’s someone with eyes on you I’ve never heard of. If they ever land on my name next to yours, I need to know before it happens. Not after.”

“They won’t. You’re a blank spot on their map. Nobody’s tracking you, nobody knows you exist.” I hold his eyes. “That’s the most valuable asset you’re holding, and you don’t even know it.”

“Whoever rented this place for you doesn’t know it’s also for sale?”

“That’s correct.”

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

I let out a long breath. Because I can’t, is the answer, and I can’t tell him that either.

The moment Freddie finds out this house is double-booked, everything is gone. They’d be a new rental, somewhere with a grocery service and a driver who reports in. No Dante. No apartment. No floor I can sleep on with the doors thrown open. Everything depends on Freddie staying in the dark, and I’m not about to explain that to Dante.

“Trust me,” I say. “It’s better that he doesn’t know.”

Shit, I said the word ‘he.’ I hear it leave my mouth a heartbeat too late to take it back. Dante hears it too.

And here’s what scares me worse than the slip itself. I know exactly how it happened. A few minutes of Dante staring at me with those brown eyes, and I’m handing out clues like party favors. He doesn’t just get past my guard. He gets me to set it down and walk away from it.

“What else about you is he tracking?” he asks.

“Credit cards. Phone location.”

“Let me get this straight because I need to understand.” He says it carefully, lining it up. “When you’re at my apartment, he thinks you’re here. Because your phone’s here and it’s being tracked by an app.”

I nod.

“How long has this been going on?”

“Eight years.”

The number’s out before I can shrink it, and I watch it land. Eight years is a sentence, not an arrangement, and he hears the difference.

“Since you were what? A minor? A kid?”

“Older than I looked.” I don’t give him the number.

He goes silent, and I realize I’ve made a fatal mistake.

I handed him the knife to gut me with. It goes straight through me cold. Same as a door shutting behind me.

He knows it too.

Fuck.