Adrian
The silence in the car is a physical thing. It presses in on all sides, thicker than the tinted glass that swallows the city lights. Leo drives, his knuckles white on the leather steering wheel. His anger is a hot, acrid smell in the confined space. In the back, she sits. The girl. Clara. I watch her in the rearview mirror. She hasn’t moved. She sits perfectly still, her hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on some point beyond the window.
She isn’t crying. She isn’t shaking anymore. There’s a stillness to her that is unsettling. It’s the stillness of a deep lake. You can’t tell what’s underneath.
“This is a mistake,” Leo says, his voice a low hiss. He doesn’t look at me. His eyes are glued to the road.
I don’t answer. The decision is made. Replaying it serves no purpose.
“You heard what Marcus said. Clean. This is the opposite of clean. This is a mess with a pulse and a student ID.”
“I’ll handle Marcus,” I say. The words sound flat, even to me.
“You’ll handle Marcus.” Leo lets out a short, bitter laugh. “He’s not going to like it. You know how he feels about civilians. About variables.”
I know exactly how he feels. Marcus Thorne built his empire on the elimination of variables. And this girl, this Clara, is the biggest variable I’ve introduced into his equation in a decade.
My gaze flicks back to the mirror. Her face is pale in the strobing lights of the city. There’s a smear of dirt on her cheek. I remember the look in her eyes back in that alley. Not just fear. There was something else. A spark. A flicker of something hard and defiant. It was gone as quickly as it came, but I saw it. It’s the reason she’s in the back of my car instead of in a dumpster.
We pull into the underground garage of a residential tower that scrapes the sky. It’s anonymous, ridiculously expensive, and one of a dozen properties Marcus keeps for situations like this. The engine cuts out, and the silence returns, heavier than before.
“Stay here,” I tell Leo.
He scoffs. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I get out and open the back door. “Come on.”
Clara looks at my outstretched hand for a moment before moving on her own. She slides out of the car, her movements stiff. She’s small. Smaller than I realized in the alley. Her cheap jacket is thin, useless against the city’s night chill. Her canvas bag, my camera bag now, is still slung over my shoulder. It feels alien against my own jacket.
I lead her to a private elevator. The doors open with a soft chime. Inside, the polished steel walls reflect a distorted version of us. A ghost, and the girl he stole.
We ride up in silence. My thumb presses the button for the penthouse. Twenty seven floors. Twenty seven seconds of her breathing, soft and even beside me. I can feel the tension rolling off her, but she keeps it locked down tight. She has control. I respect that more than I should.
The apartment is sterile. All white walls, chrome fixtures, and black leather furniture. It looks like a magazine cover. No one has ever lived here. It’s a holding cell with a better view.
She stops just inside the door, her eyes taking it all in. The floor to ceiling windows display the city like a carpet of scattered diamonds. A gilded cage.
“The bedroom is through there,” I say, gesturing with my chin. “Bathroom is attached. The kitchen is stocked. Don’t touch the liquor cabinet.”
She says nothing. Her gaze sweeps the room, cataloging everything. The exits. The windows. The potential weapons. I can see her mind working. She’s not just a barista. She’s a filmmaker. She sees the world in frames, in angles. She’s looking for a way to rewrite the scene.
“There are no phones,” I continue, my voice hard. I need to establish the rules. For her, and for me. “The television works. Internet is disabled. You will not try to leave. You will not try to contact anyone. Am I clear?”
She finally looks at me. Her eyes are the color of whiskey. They are clear, steady, and full of a quiet rage that I find far more interesting than fear. She gives a single, sharp nod.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I already know who it is. I pull it out. The name on the screen reads MARCUS.
I turn my back to her, walking towards the windows. I need the distance.
“Adrian,” I answer.
“Report.” Marcus’s voice is smooth, cultured. It’s the voice of a man who hosts charity galas and orders executions with the same calm demeanor.
“The package is delivered. The scene is sanitized.”
“Leo called me,” he says. There’s no accusation in his tone. Just a statement of fact. “He seemed… agitated.”
I look out at the sprawling city. Millions of lights. Millions of lives that are not my problem. Except for the one standing ten feet behind me. “Leo is agitated by anything that deviates from the plan by a single degree.”
“And this deviated,” Marcus says. “He mentioned a witness. A civilian girl.”
“A loose end,” I correct him, using his language. “One I’ve tied up.”
There’s a pause on the line. Marcus uses silence like a weapon. He lets you fill it with your own insecurities, your own mistakes.
“Explain to me why she isn’t in a landfill,” he says, his voice dropping half an octave.
“She’s a film student. She was there with a camera. The police find a body in an alley, they write it off as a mugging gone wrong. They find a dead student with a camera nearby, it becomes a homicide investigation with a face. It gets media attention. It gets complicated.” I keep my voice level, professional. The justification sounds plausible. It is plausible. It’s just not the whole truth.
“And your solution is to bring this complication into one of my safe houses?”
“My solution is to control the narrative. We have her. We have her footage. We control what gets seen, what gets known. If we need a narrative to leak, she’s the perfect cutout. A scared student who saw something she shouldn’t have. We can use her.”
It’s a good argument. It’s the only argument that will work on him. The language of assets and control. He understands that.
He doesn’t understand the sudden, white hot anger that flared in me when Leo called her ‘coffee girl’ and talked about ‘snipping’ her like she was nothing. He doesn’t understand that when I looked at her, I saw something other than a liability.
“And the footage?” Marcus asks.
I glance over my shoulder. She’s still standing by the door, watching me. I dump her bag onto a glass coffee table. The clatter is loud in the silent room. I pull out her camera. It’s a good one. Serious equipment. I pop the memory card slot. It’s empty.
“The footage is secure,” I lie smoothly. “Wiped. The camera is just a prop now.” I assume she had another card, maybe in the bag. I rummage through the pockets. Lenses, filters, a wallet, a half eaten granola bar. No SD cards.
She must have dropped it in the alley. Or she only had the one. Either way, it’s a problem that has solved itself. A wave of relief, sharp and unexpected, washes over me.
“See that it is,” Marcus says. “This is your play, Adrian. If this girl becomes a problem…” He lets the threat hang in the air.
“She won’t.”
“I trust your judgment. For now. Don’t make me regret it.”
The line goes dead.
I stand there for a moment, the phone in my hand. I made a choice based on an instinct I don’t recognize. A protective instinct. It’s a weakness. In my world, weakness gets you killed.
I turn back to her. “You’ll be comfortable here.”
She looks around the sterile apartment again. “For how long?” Her voice is raspy, but it’s steady.
“For as long as it takes.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means you are here until I say you are not.” I walk over to the table and zip up her bag. I leave it on the table. A reminder of the life she no longer has. “There are clothes in the closet in the bedroom. Food in the fridge. Don’t give me a reason to come back here before I’m ready.”
I expect pleading. I expect tears. I get nothing. She just watches me with those whiskey eyes, her expression unreadable. Her resilience is a quiet challenge. It gets under my skin. It’s a stark contrast to the sycophants and predators that populate my world. She doesn’t belong here. She doesn’t belong to me.
But she does.
I head for the door. I need to leave. I need space from this apartment, from her, from the choice I made.
“Why?” she asks, just as my hand touches the doorknob.
I stop. I don’t turn around. “Why what?”
“Why am I alive?”
The question hangs in the air between us. It’s the question I’ve been asking myself since I saw her huddled behind that dumpster.
I think of Leo’s casual cruelty. The cold dismissal in his voice. I think of the flicker of defiance I saw in her eyes. I think of the lies I just told Marcus.
“Because I decided you were more valuable as an asset than a corpse,” I say, the professional answer sliding out easily.
It’s the truth. Just not the whole truth.
The other part, the part that feels dangerously personal, I keep for myself.
I open the door and step into the hallway, the lock clicking shut behind me. I leave her in the gilded cage, but I have a feeling I’m the one who is trapped.
