Page 10 of Take Her

Especially because he didn’t remember me.

It didn’t matter how hard he’d made me come—that hurt my feelings.

My father kept prattling on, talking me up—he warned me Rhaim’d be pissed—but he knew Rhaim would do as he was told, eventually. The man was my father’s trained wolf—he’d been my father’s “little beast” for as long as I could remember—and even if this situation made his loyalty waver, I still would bet he had too much pride to let Corvo fall.

“Well—I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” my father said, giving Rhaim a be nice or else glare, and then he left the room, abandoning me.

Rhaim’s gaze flicked to meet mine instantly. I inhaled to speak, but he made a silencing motion with his hand, rather like the slice of a knife through the air between us. “Not here. Never here,” he said, emphasizing the never, and then went back into his office and behind his desk to pick up his coat. “We’re getting coffee,” he announced to Mrs. Armstrong, then left the room, certain that I would follow him.

He stood as far away from me as possible in the elevator—possibly so he wouldn’t be tempted to strangle me—then led me to the public stairs in the center of the building when we got off. I practically had to chase him down them. But then rather than making another turn to take us below once we reached ground level, to where the cafeteria was, he took us both outside.

The sounds of the city enveloped us instantly—cars honking, people having conversations on phones with bad connections too loudly, a distant catcall, the sound of jackhammers running—while I’d been off at boarding school for a decade, I’d forgotten just how loud this place could be.

And Rhaim . . . didn’t turn back once.

I could’ve fallen through an open manhole and he wouldn’t have noticed.

In fact, I got the strong impression he would’ve found that preferrable—especially after we reached where we’d been headed, a coffee cart, and he looked back.

“Two coffees, black,” he ordered, presumably also for me, and then made me follow him to sit beside a public fountain, handing me one, but setting his down, and snapping his fingers out.

“Your phone,” he demanded.

“What?” I asked, rearing back a little. “Why?”

He did nothing but stare at me—with the same face I’d dreamed of at night, and that I’d lurked on my father’s company’s business pages to see.

Why didn’t he remember me?

I sighed, pulled my phone out of my bag, and handed it over after a moment’s hesitation—I could easily imagine him throwing it into the fountain—but instead I watched him turn it over and peel the case off, which was somehow more upsetting.

“What are you doing?” I demanded of him.

“Do you know the provenance of every app currently on your phone?” he asked me, without looking up. The case was off, and he was prying the sides of it apart now with his fingernails—and he didn’t wait for me to speak. “You know how you’ll be talking about patio furniture, and then that’ll haunt you online for a week?”

It wasn’t until he’d finished what he was doing—popping the battery out—that he looked up and spoke again. “Someone is always, always, listening—and I would prefer to yell at you in private.”

He arranged the pieces of my phone between us in a neat row, like a little technological moat, and that seemed to calm him some, although his eyes were still flashing when he next looked up.

“How old are you?” he demanded.

“Why?” I asked back, still confused.

“Because I want to know how close I came to being on Dateline Friday night.”

I dropped my shoulders and rocked my head back. “Oh my God.” Of course that’s why he was pissed—on top of the whole “my father just bequeathed me your legacy” thing.

“Answer the question,” he snapped.

“Twenty-three,” I confessed. But he should’ve been able to do the math himself, if he’d remembered.

Another nail in the coffin of my childhood fantasies.

He closed his eyes and I could almost hear him swearing internally. “And there weren’t any other ways you could think of to blackmail me?” he asked, when he opened them again.

“Blackmail you?” I sputtered. “What?”

His eyes squinted venomously. “How’d you even know I was there?”