Chapter 4 The enforcer Arrives

POV: Zara Wells

The door held for exactly two seconds after the kick and then the frame just gave out boom.

Three men came in fast.

I pulled Priya back toward the kitchen counter, not thinking, just moving, putting something solid behind us. My phone was in my hand. I didn't know when I had picked it up. My thumb was on the screen but I couldn't look down at it because I couldn't stop watching the door.

The three men didn't speak. They spread out across my living room with the ease of people who had done this severally and found it easy every time.

One of them looked at the laptop. One of them looked at me. The third one just stood near the door like he was there to make sure the math stayed simple.

I had dialed three numbers before I realized what I was doing. My thumb had found 9-1-1 on muscle memory alone.

"Don't," the man nearest the laptop said. Not loud. Just a statement of what would happen next if I finished pressing call.

I stopped.

Then the fourth person came through the door and the air in my apartment changed.

He wasn't rushing. That was the first thing I observed.

Dark eyes. Calm face. The particular stillness of someone who had decided, at some point a long time ago, never to show anything he didn't choose to show.

He stopped in the middle of my living room.

"Your phone," he said.

I looked at him for a second. Then I looked at the man by the laptop, then at the one near the door, then back at him.

He was the one who mattered. I understood that immediately and completely from the way he entered the room.

"I've already sent the video to three people," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected.

"Your phone," he said again.

"Why?"

He didn't answer. He just waited.

"Who are you?"

Still nothing.

Priya stepped forward, half in front of me, which was insane because Priya was five foot four and the man near the door was twice her size. "She asked you a question."

He looked at Priya for the first time. Something about his look made her stop moving, but she didn't step back. I had never loved her more than in that specific second.

He looked back at me.

I unlocked my phone. I opened my cloud backup. I showed him the screen. Three copies of the video file, already synced. I watched his eyes read the file names and the timestamps and the little green checkmarks that meant they were uploaded and live.

"Those are copies," I said. "So whatever you think taking my phone is going to do."

He was very still for a moment.

The man by the laptop said something low to him in a language I didn't catch. He didn't respond to it. He was still looking at me with that flat, even look that gave nothing and took everything in.

Then he said: "How many servers."

Not a question really. More like he was running the numbers out loud.

"Enough," I said.

It was a bluff and it wasn't. I had the three cloud copies. I didn't have five encrypted servers. I didn't even know how to set up five encrypted servers. But I knew that I needed him to believe I did for the next thirty seconds and I knew that what I said in the next thirty seconds was the thing that determined what happened after.

His jaw shifted slightly. He looked at Priya then At me.

"Kill me and you kill your only way to any of it," I said. "So I guess we're stuck with each other."

I didn't know where that came from. My mouth just produced it and then it was in the room and I couldn't take it back.

He looked at me for a long, slow count of five.

The three men didn't move. Priya didn't breathe.

He didn't leave.

He pulled out his own phone, dialed, and turned slightly away. Two words into the receiver, quiet enough that I couldn't hear them.

Then he hung up and turned back and looked at me.

"Does your friend need to be here for this conversation?"

My stomach dropped.

Because that meant there was going to be a conversation and I had just negotiated myself into something I didn't have a name for yet and I had no idea if that was the smartest thing I had ever done or the last.