Page 86 of You Can Run

And across from him, his back to her, his shoulders rigid beneath a red jacket, was Dante.

He was alive. He was sitting upright, holding a glass, apparently having a conversation. He didn't look injured. He didn't look restrained. He looked like a man in a booth at a club, and the ordinariness of the image was so disorienting that she had to stop walking and grip the edge of the bar to keep her legs from doing something stupid.

He's alive. He's right there.

Her hand moved involuntarily toward her pocket, toward the Ruger, and she stopped herself. Not yet. Not here. There were four—no, five—men positioned around the booth in a loose perimeter, plus the man at the staircase. Even if she got the gun out, even if she fired, she'd be dead before she cleared the second shot, and Dante would be dead a second after that.

She needed a plan that wasn'twalk up to a table full of armed men and start shooting.

She moved to the far end of the bar, as deep into the shadow as the pink light would allow, and ordered a drink she wouldn't touch, and watched the booth, trying to make her brain work faster than her fear.

That was when she noticed the man working his way through the crowd toward her.

He wasn't obvious about it. He moved the way the other security men moved—with the crowd, not against it, using the dancers and the noise as cover. But his trajectory was wrong. He wasn't circling the room. He was cutting across it, angled toward the bar, toward her end of it, his eyes fixed on something he'd already identified.

Her.

The bouncer. The half-second too long he'd looked at her. He'd made a call.

Jessica turned her body slightly, as if watching the nearest stage, and felt the distance between her and the approaching man shrink with every pulse of the bass line. She had maybe thirty seconds before he reached her. Maybe less.

She could run. The front door was behind her and to the right, maybe forty feet through the crowd. She’d be on the street in fifteen seconds, and Dante would still be in that booth and she'd be standing on a sidewalk again, useless, having come thirty-one hours on a bus to accomplish nothing.

She could pull the gun. End this in the loudest, most chaotic way possible, and bet on the confusion to buy her something—though what it would buy her, other than a few seconds of noise before someone put a bullet in her, she couldn't say.

Or she could stay exactly where she was and let the man reach her and see what happened next.

Jessica didn't run. She didn't reach for the bag.

She turned and faced the man coming toward her and waited.

THIRTY-FIVE

Borya's phonebuzzed on the table.

He glanced at the screen. A text, short, from a number Dante couldn't read at this angle. Borya's expression didn't change but his hand stopped turning the glass. When he looked up from the phone, he regarded Dante with something new in his eyes.

“It appears,” Borya said, “that your girl is more stubborn than you gave her credit for.”

Dante felt the floor drop.

“She's here, Daniel.” Borya set the phone face-down on the table with the delicate precision of a man placing a card he'd already won with. “In my club. Right now. Sonny flagged her two minutes ago.”

Dante didn't move. His hand stayed on the whiskey glass, his shoulders stayed loose, his breathing stayed even. Every part of him was still except for the thing happening inside his chest, which was the feeling of a plan—Sofia's plan, the twenty minutes, the signal, all of it—developing a crack that might become a collapse.

Jess. What the fuck did you do?

“You seem surprised,” Borya said, watching him. “That's interesting. Either you're a better liar than I thought, or you genuinely didn't know she was coming.”

Dante said nothing because there was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse.

“This changes things,” Borya continued, his voice lighter now, almost conversational. He had energy of a man whose evening had just improved beyond his expectations. “Five minutes ago, I was sitting here with half a payment. Now I have both of you in the same building.” He straightened his cuffs. “Bring her,” he said, not to Dante. To the man standing at the end of the booth.

The security man moved immediately, pushing off from his position and cutting into the crowd toward the bar.

Dante watched him go. Behind Borya, past the crowd, Dante saw movement at the bar. The security man. And beside him, being guided forward with a hand at her elbow, a figure in a denim jacket and a black cap, her face pale in the pink wash of the club.

Jessica.