Chapter 2: Because

The pen was still where he had put it.

Adrian gave it one more second. Then he came up off the sofa low and fast.

He put his foot through the side of the knee of the man at the end of the rug—the one who had spent the whole evening standing there pretending to be furniture—and the man went down without a sound, and Adrian was already stepping over him with the pistol out of his jacket and up, crossing the room at Emmett.

His detail took the cue before he gave it. Two of them went for the doors. One went for the bar. The room came apart: chairs over, glass gone, a round took the lamp off the side table two feet from his head, close enough that he felt the heat of it pass. Then the room was only noise, and none of it was aimed anywhere in particular.

Emmett let him come. He waited until Adrian was four steps in, and then he got both hands on Julian Crane’s shoulders and threw him, and stepped past the far end of the sofa into the dark behind the light, and stayed there.

Julian came across the floor at him off balance, thrown more than walking, hands out. Adrian had a man coming at him, and he caught him—one arm, hard, the way you catch anything falling. He had signed for this.

He kept the pistol moving over the room, and for a second and a half nothing else came at him.

“Are you all right?” he said. “Are you hit?”

“I’m sorry—“

“Are you hit.”

He made a small sound and did not know he had made it, and looked down.

Blood was coming through his shirt in a line that widened while he watched it, dark in this light, more of it than he had ever seen come out of a man still standing. Julian’s hand was at the lower end of the wound, closed on the grip of a knife with a pale handle. The blade was red to the guard.

Adrian pushed him off with both hands. His own hand came off the wound to do it, and the room slid half a step sideways and then came back.

“You and him,” he said. “You set this up together.”

Julian was still holding the knife. He kept starting sentences and losing the ends of them.

“Why,” Adrian said.

“I’m sorry. Adrian, I’m sorry—I didn’t—I never wanted—“

That was as far as it got.

“Good work,” Emmett said.

He said it pleasantly. He had come back out of the dark at the far end of the sofa with his pistol down along his leg, and he stood where Adrian could see him, and he took his time.

“Now you’ll want to know how long,” he said. “I’ll tell you, since you won’t be repeating it.

“Julian was mine before he was ever yours. I put him next to you. Everything you know about him, I wrote. He has never told you one true thing. Not one, in all of it.”

He looked around the room—at his own men, at Adrian’s men, at the blood on the carpet—and he was smiling.

“How long have I been working on tonight? Longer than you’ve had the office. Longer than the company has had your name on it. The folder was the last piece. Everything before it was arithmetic.

“This was a con from the first night. That’s the part I want you to take with you. Not the knife. Not him. This.”

Adrian didn’t answer him. He was looking at Julian. Julian had gone down onto his knees on the carpet by then with the knife still in his hand, and his head was turned away, and he did not look up.

Emmett raised the pistol.

“Die, then,” he said.

The door at the far end of the room was open. Nobody had been watching it.

Adrian saw him move.

Milo Ellery. His husband. Two words Adrian had never once said out loud. And there was the face that went with them, crossing a room full of guns toward him, through men who had forgotten to hold onto him—a face Adrian had not once looked at on purpose.

Now he looked.

The eyes were not frightened, and he had nowhere to put that.

Emmett fired.

A flat, close, muffled sound, and then blood hit his face—hot and fine, across his cheek and into the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t his.

Milo came down against him, all his weight and no legs left under it, and Adrian caught him, and went back a step with him, and stayed up.

He had never put his hands on this man before. Not once. The first time, he was using them to keep him off the floor.

Something came up in him that he did not have a name for, and would not have a name for until much later, and there was no time for it now. Milo had a fist in his coat and was pushing at his chest with it.

“Go,” Milo said. “Go. Get out.”

Adrian didn’t go. He got his arm under the man’s shoulders and held him up off the carpet and asked the only question he had left.

“Why did you do that.”

“Because—“ Milo said. He stopped. Then he tried it again from the front. “Because, because—“

Nothing else came.

Adrian waited. What he got instead was the man going still against his arm, and the eyes—which had been warm the entire time he wasn’t looking—closing on his face and staying closed.

“Sir.”

His detail chief had a hand on his shoulder and his other arm up over his own head.

“Mr. Hale. We have to go. We’ll cover you.”

Adrian put him down.

He got his arms out from under him one at a time and set him on the carpet, and stood up out of it, and did not let himself look at the face again. Then somebody got a shoulder into him and pulled his arm over it, and they went out through the service door.

Behind them the room was still firing at everything and nothing. The folder went with it—Emmett had it, or one of his men did. Adrian didn’t see, and didn’t ask, and did not turn around for it.

They got him down the north stairs with two men carrying him and a third with his palm flat over the wound, and by the second landing he couldn’t take his own weight anymore, and the shooting above them had stopped being aimed at anything.

If he could do it over, he wanted to know why.