Chapter 5

TOO CLOSE:

He gave her the choice, which was more than he usually gave anyone. She could pack a bag tonight and let him drive her to one of the secured properties his company kept, or she could stay in her ransacked apartment with a new lock on a door that clearly hadn’t stopped anyone the first time.

It wasn’t much of a choice, and they both knew it.

“Two weeks,” she said, arms crossed over her chest, standing amid the wreckage of her own living room like she was daring the furniture to argue with her. “Until you figure out who did this. Then I’m coming home.”

“Two weeks,” he agreed, though he had no intention of holding himself to it if two weeks wasn’t enough. He’d learned that lying by omission bothered him less than it should have, at least when it came to her safety.

The property he chose sat on the quiet side of the river, glass and steel and more square footage than two people had any reasonable use for, with a security system that made his office at Obsidian look like an unlocked screen door. She stood in the entryway with her single packed bag, looking around at the place like she expected to find a catch hidden somewhere in the architecture.

“There’s a catch,” she said. “There’s always a catch with you.”

“No catch. Guest room’s upstairs, second door on the left. The kitchen’s stocked. Try not to break into anything while you’re here.”

That almost got a laugh out of her. Almost.

She didn’t sleep well that first night he knew because he didn’t either, and he heard her moving around downstairs a little past one in the morning. He found her at the kitchen island with her laptop open and a legal pad covered in her handwriting, case notes spread out like she couldn’t make herself stop even here, even now, with an intruder’s damage still fresh in her memory.

“You should be asleep,” he said.

“So should you.” She didn’t look up. “Since neither of us is, you might as well make yourself useful.”

He should have gone back upstairs. Instead he pulled out the chair across from her and stayed.

They worked until nearly four, cross-referencing dates against the files he’d spent three years assembling, and somewhere in those hours something shifted between them that neither one of them commented on out loud. She caught a connection in the shipping records he’d looked at a dozen times and missed  a name that appeared twice under two different spellings, six months apart. He sat back and looked at her with something closer to respect than surprise, and respect wasn’t a thing he handed out easily.

“How did you catch that?” he asked.

“I spent a year going through my father’s old business records by hand because nobody else would help me. You learn to notice when a name doesn’t quite match itself.” She finally looked up, pen still in hand. “You’ve had this file for three years. How did you miss it?”

“I had assumptions I wasn’t willing to question. You didn’t have any to protect. That’s an advantage most investigators never have.”

She studied him for a long moment, like she was recalculating something. “That’s the closest thing to a compliment you’ve given me since I got here.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

But she smiled, small and real, and he found himself wanting to see it again before the night was over.

The days that followed fell into a rhythm neither of them had planned on. She worked from the house during the day, cross-referencing files under his supervision, and in the evenings they simply existed in the same space here at the kitchen island, him on the far end of the couch, the television playing something neither of them actually watched. It should have felt like surveillance. It started to feel like something else.

She found the community center by accident, scrolling through his phone to find a number he’d asked her to look up, and stumbled instead on a folder of budget reports for a youth program in the same neighborhood, she realized, where the newspapers said he’d grown up before the money and the nightclubs and the reputation.

“You built a community center,” she said, holding up his phone like evidence. “You built a community center and you never once mentioned it.”

“It’s not a secret. It’s just not relevant.”

“It’s completely relevant. It’s the opposite of everything the tabloids print about you.” She set the phone down slowly, watching him with a different kind of attention now, like she was seeing an entirely different person standing in the kitchen. “Why keep it quiet?”

He didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t used to being asked, and he wasn’t entirely sure he had a good answer even for himself. “Because the reputation only works if people believe it. The moment they see something soft, they start looking for what else might be underneath it. I can’t afford that. Not with what I’m trying to do.”

“But I’m seeing it right now.”

“You’re an exception.” The words left him before he’d fully decided to say them, and he watched her register that, watched the careful walls she kept up around herself waver, just slightly, just for a moment.

“Why?” she asked quietly.

He didn’t have a safe answer for that one either. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

She crossed the kitchen toward him, slowly, like she wasn’t entirely sure she was allowed to, and he didn’t move away, which told her everything she needed to know before he said another word. They ended up close enough that he could see the exact moment her breathing changed, close enough that six years of careful distance from every person who’d ever tried to get near him suddenly felt like the wrong strategy entirely.

“Kane,” she said, and it wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t a warning either. It was just his name, said like she was testing whether she trusted the shape of it in her own mouth.

He reached up, tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, and let his hand rest against the side of her face longer than the gesture strictly required. She didn’t pull back. Neither did he, not for several long seconds that felt like they belonged to a different, simpler version of both their lives.

Then he stepped back.

“We can’t do this,” he said, and hated how much it cost him to say it. “Not yet. Not while there’s a leak inside my company and someone out there willing to break into your apartment over a photograph. If they find out what you mean to me, it makes you a bigger target than you already are.”

She pulled back too, arms wrapping around herself, and he watched her decide not to argue with the logic even though every other part of her clearly wanted to. “You already said it. What I mean to you.”

He hadn’t meant to say that much. He didn’t take it back.

The rival arrived the next morning without calling first, the way she always did, carrying a bottle of wine and an expression that turned faintly brittle the moment she took in the scene  Elena’s legal pad still open on the kitchen island, two coffee mugs by the sink, the unmistakable evidence of two people who had been living, however briefly, in each other’s space.

“Well,” she said, setting the bottle down with more precision than the gesture required. “This is cozier than I expected.”

“Vivienne.” Kane’s voice carried a warning she chose not to hear.

She turned to Elena with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You’ll have to forgive my surprise. Kane has never let anyone stay in one of his properties before. Not even me, and I’ve known him since we were children. He must trust you a great deal. That’s not something that comes easily to him.”

“We’re working a case together,” Elena said carefully. “That’s all this is.”

“Of course it is.” Vivienne’s gaze flicked toward Kane, cataloguing something in his expression that he wasn’t quick enough to hide. “I only mention it because I’d hate for you to read too much into anything. Kane’s world isn’t easy to belong to. There’s a great deal you don’t know yet     about his family, about what’s actually expected of the woman who ends up standing beside him.” She smiled again, softer this time, almost kind, which was somehow worse than if she’d been cruel about it. “I only want to save you from heartbreak. I’ve had a lot longer than you to learn how this usually ends.”

Elena didn’t answer. She gathered her legal pad and her laptop and excused herself upstairs with a composure that Kane recognized, because he’d built the exact same kind of composure himself, brick by careful brick, for exactly this purpose     to keep anyone from seeing how deep a wound actually went.

He watched her go, and something in his chest pulled tight not the investigation now, but the fact that he no longer wanted her to leave. Not the room. Not the house. Not any part of the life he’d spent six years building alone.

That realization frightened him more than anything the leak investigation had turned up so far.