Chapter 3 Almost Caught

POV: Lila Monroe

The card had been sitting in the front pocket of my bag for four days and I had not thrown it away, which was a problem.

I had a system. The last time I worked without it, something went wrong and took three months to quietly repair. The first rule was simple: I did not let variables I could not control stay inside the system

A card with a phone number from Ryder Kane was a variable I could not control, connected to a name I could not neutralise and a father who owned half of Westfield's funding infrastructure.

I should have left it on the pavement that night, but I didn't. 

Thursday afternoon I sat in my last lecture of the week and stared at my notes and thought about Eli's fourth instalment, which was now due in eighteen days, and which I was still short by more than I could ignore.

I had one booking tomorrow night. It would cover just over half of what I needed.

Half was not enough.

I walked back to my dorm after the lecture, changed out of my lecture clothes, made tea I did not drink, and eventually stood at my desk and took the card out of my bag.

A handwritten number. Nothing else. No name, no title, no social media handle the way some clients left because they wanted to be found again. Just a number,  from someone who clearly understood that more information was more exposure and had deliberately kept it minimal.

I put the card back in my bag.

The next evening I was forty minutes into the booking, a dinner with a client named Marcus who talked mostly about his investment portfolio and expected me to ask follow-up questions, when my phone buzzed in my bag under the table.

I did not check it.

Marcus ordered dessert, which added twenty minutes I had not accounted for and cost me the window I had planned to use to check my student portal before it closed for the night. He talked about a property deal that had nothing to do with me and I asked two questions that made him think I was genuinely interested and he ordered another coffee on top of the dessert, which was the kind of thing clients did when they were comfortable and which I normally counted as a success.  At eight forty-seven I  checked my phone.

A message from my mother. She had spoken to the hospital. The fourth instalment due date had been moved up. Not eighteen days. Eleven.

I stood on the pavement outside the restaurant in the cold and read the message three times and then put my phone in my pocket and started walking.

One booking tomorrow, half covered. I had two other regulars I could contact but one was travelling and the other had gone quiet for six weeks which meant he had met someone and would resurface apologetically in about a month.

The math did not work no matter how many times I ran it.

I reached into my bag and took out the card.

I was not making a decision. I was just looking at it again, outside, in better light than my desk lamp.

I thought about what he had said on the pavement. I need something specific. You are good at something specific.

He had not said what the something specifically was. He had also not done anything at all with what he knew about me in four full days, which was its own kind of information.

I took out my phone.

I told myself I was only going to save the number. Not call it, not text it, just move it from the card into my phone so I did not lose it, in case I decided later that it was worth the risk. 

I had barely finished the thought when my thumb pressed call.

It rang exactly twice.

"I was starting to think you weren't going to," he said.

I stood very still outside the coffee shop with my heart going faster  and said, in the flattest voice I had, "What exactly do you need."

There was a brief pause, just long enough to make me wonder if I had miscalculated everything, and then he said, "Meet me somewhere public. I will explain it once. You decide after."

"Where," I said.

He named a coffee shop near the east gate.

He had chosen it carefully. That was either reassuring or the most organised kind of threat I had ever walked toward.

I was already walking toward it.