Chapter 2 - The Room She Chose
The hotel lobby smelled of polished stone and coffee that nobody had bothered to drink. At 3:52 a.m., a night clerk glanced at Silas's bleeding cuff, then at Mave's bare ankles beneath her coat, and wisely asked for identification instead of explanations.
“Mave Holloway,” she said, putting her driver's license on the counter herself.
Silas reached for a room card. She held out her hand before he could take it. “I'll carry mine.”
The clerk gave her a key for suite 2804 and another for 2806. Mave read both numbers, chose the first, and told Silas to take the second. When the elevator arrived, he waited until she stepped inside. He had never waited for her permission to do anything important before. She refused to confuse a new courtesy with a repaired relationship.
“Who were those men?” she asked as the elevator climbed.
“I recognized one. Former contractor. His name's Bram Keene.”
“Contractor for what?”
“Security.”
“Yours?”
“Until six weeks ago.”
“Did you fire him?”
“Yes.”
“That's one straight answer. See? You're capable.”
Silas looked at their reflections in the elevator's brass wall. “I fired his supervisor too. Adrian Vale. He was selling access schedules to someone outside the company.”
“Someone who sent three men through my front door?”
“I don't know yet.”
“Then say that. Don't give me a conclusion just because it sounds safer.”
On the twenty-eighth floor, Mave kept the room door open while she inspected the bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. An absurdly large floral arrangement occupied a console. She took one look at it and laughed until a sob interrupted her.
“Want me to have that removed?” Silas asked from the threshold.
“No. I want you to leave.”
He did. The latch clicked without a deadbolt. Mave pushed a chair beneath the handle anyway, then sat on the edge of the enormous bed and let her hands shake. Her phone held eight missed calls now, all from a number she did not recognize. One voicemail contained nothing but traffic noise and a low male voice saying, “Ask Carbone what he promised Creel.”
She saved it. She took screenshots of the threatening photograph and the time of the news broadcast, then emailed them to an account Silas did not know existed. She had made that account years earlier to keep client contracts separate from her personal life. It was a small thing, a backup of a backup. Tonight it felt like a door she owned.
At 4:11, she called her friend June Alvarez.
“Mave?” June answered, thick with sleep. “Is somebody dead?”
“No. I need you to tell me whether I can stay at your place tomorrow. And please don't ask about Silas first.”
June had helped Mave turn freelance architectural drawings into a real business. She knew Silas only as the man who appeared at odd hours with expensive takeout and an aversion to photographs. “You can have the couch or my bed. I'll take the couch. Are you hurt?”
“Not physically. There was a break-in. I called the police from the alley, but I left before they got there.”
“We'll call them again together. I'm coming to the hotel.”
“Not yet. I don't want you followed.”
June exhaled. “All right. I'll wait for you to call from somewhere public. But I'm staying awake.”
For the first time since the television report, Mave cried without trying to win an argument with herself. June stayed on the line until she could speak normally. Friendship, Mave realized, did not ask her to forgive anyone as an entrance fee.
A soft knock came at 4:29. Through the peephole she saw a uniformed housekeeper standing beside a covered trolley. “Mr. Carbone ordered breakfast.”
Mave did not open the door. “Please leave it outside.”
The housekeeper's eyes flicked toward something off-camera. Mave stepped away from the peephole and called the front desk using the number printed on her card. No room service had been dispatched. The desk clerk asked her to stay on the line.
The trolley rolled away. Heavy footsteps followed it.
Silas answered his phone on the first ring. “What happened?”
“Somebody came pretending to bring your breakfast. I checked with the desk. It wasn't them.”
“I'll come over.”
“Don't. Have hotel security preserve the camera footage and call the police. I want the name of the person who issued that uniform.”
Silence. Then: “All right.”
An actual security officer arrived with a uniformed police sergeant fifteen minutes later. Mave opened the door only after they showed identification and the desk confirmed their names. She gave the officer the voicemail, showed him the photographs, and described the three men who had forced their way into the townhouse. She mentioned that Silas knew one of them. She did not omit the part where Silas had injured two attackers in the alley.
The sergeant wrote everything down. “Was the property in your name?”
“No. I lived there. I had a key. I don't know whose name is on the deed.”
Another small humiliation arrived disguised as paperwork. Mave signed her statement and asked for the incident number, then photographed the card he gave her. When the police left, she found Silas standing at the far end of the corridor, hands visible, waiting rather than approaching.
“You told them about me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She almost wished he'd protested. Anger would have been familiar. His acceptance left nowhere to put the sharpest part of her hurt.
“I have questions,” she told him. “Not tonight. I don't want you deciding which answers protect me. I want documents. Dates. I want to hear from Vivien, if she'll speak to me. I won't be anybody's secret witness while men arrange the truth around me.”
“I can ask her.”
“You can give her my number. She gets to decide.”
Silas nodded. In the corridor, his phone began ringing. The screen displayed VIVIEN. He showed Mave the name without answering.
“Take it,” she said. “But don't tell her I'm fine. You don't know that.”
He stepped away. Through the closed door, Mave could hear only the rise and fall of his voice. Then her own phone vibrated with a message from an unknown number. There was no photograph this time. Just a single sentence:
May you like
The hotel room isn't the part we came for.
Mave stared at the screen. Under the message sat an attachment: a photograph of her architectural studio's front window, taken less than five minutes earlier.
