For one breathless instant no one moved.
Then Damon did.
Not toward the gun. Toward the steak knife on his plate. In one terrible, fluid motion, he drove it through Peterson’s hand and into the table. Peterson screamed, high and ragged, his body folding over the mahogany. The Russian leader reached inside his jacket, but two men detached from the shadowed walls before he could draw. Submachine guns appeared as if conjured from the dark.
“Don’t,” Damon said quietly.
The Russian stopped.
Damon took out his phone, typed a message, and slipped it back into his pocket. Five seconds later there was a muffled thud overhead, followed by the tremor of a body striking the rooftop deck.
“Problem solved,” Damon said.
He turned to the Russian again, voice soft enough to be terrifying. “Leave my city before sunrise, Nikolai. If I see you again, I’ll use your spine as a coat rack.”
The Russians did not negotiate. They left.
Peterson kept whimpering, pinned to the table, but Damon had already lost interest in him. He stepped toward Lydia until only inches separated them. She could smell cedar, smoke, and the sharp electric scent of adrenaline coming off him.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Lydia Hart.”
He studied her face as though he intended to memorize the geometry of it.
Then he stuffed a thick roll of cash into her apron pocket and said, “You’re fired.”
Her eyes stung. “What?”
“From this place.” His thumb brushed her chin, lifting her face toward his. “Starting tomorrow, you work for me.”
Lydia did not sleep.
She sat on the edge of her narrow bed in Queens with the cash spread beside her like evidence from a crime she could not yet name. Five thousand dollars. More money than she had ever held at once. Enough to pay part of a hospital balance. Enough to frighten her.
At eight the next morning, someone knocked on her apartment door.
No one knocked on her door. The buzzer had been broken for months.
She looked through the peephole and found an older man in a tailored dark suit standing in the stained hallway, holding a tablet. He looked as though he belonged in a diplomatic motorcade, not outside a fourth-floor walk-up that smelled faintly of frying oil and radiator dust.
When she opened the door on the chain, he inclined his head.
“Miss Hart. My name is Silas Vance. I’m Mr. Cross’s chief of staff. The car is waiting.”
“I didn’t say yes.”
A faint smile passed across his face. “Mr. Cross is accustomed to decisive outcomes, not verbal confirmations.”
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