We both tensed as a salt-splashed BMW blipped up the ramp from the lower parking floor, then slowed as it drew level. The driver was a middle-aged woman with aggressively coiffured hair who stared at the pair of us as she crawled past. Not because she had hostile intent or was concerned for my safety, but more likely because she thought there might be a chance we were about to vacate a valuable parking space.
When she was just past us, she braked, the rear lights flaring, and I saw her head angle towards the interior mirror. She must have realized, from our lack of movement, that we were having a standoff of some kind, that the situation was far from normal. But, would she intervene on my be-half?
After only a moment, the car’s brake lights snapped off again and the car began to edge forwards, then quickened. No, she wouldn’t.
My eyes went back to Sean. His body was giving off threat cues in waves, like heat. I could see them rippling outwards from his center.
“Sean, come on-”
“What?” he threw at me. “Do you want me to make things easy for you, is that it?”
And that’s when I saw the knife in his left hand.
In truth, I only saw it because he let me. Because he meant for me to do so. He was holding it concealed, with the blade slanted upwards so it was hidden by the sleeve of his coat. The hilt pointed downwards and as he spoke he’d flexed his fingers slightly to allow it to drop just into view between his forefinger and thumb. He must have palmed it just as he’d turned towards me.
Christ.
I stared at him and the hurt and the surprise must have been clearly visible on my face. How long have you been planning this?
I didn’t get an answer, vocal or otherwise. As we stood facing each other I was aware of the adrenaline now punching through my system, constricting my breathing and locking my muscles as it tried to override sense and training in a stampede of panic.
A knife. Oh, it would have to be a knife, wouldn’t it, Sean?
I swallowed again, shrugged out of the constriction of my jacket and let it drop to the ground, using the time to make my decision.
“OK,” I said softly, abandoning all pretense that I might still be able to dissuade him from this course. “If that’s the way you want to play it …”
I just had time to see the gleam form in his eyes.
“Hey, you!” yelled a voice from over to our right. “What’s going on? Back off or I’ll call the police!”
I jumped and half-turned to cover both threats, guilty. Sean barely seemed to move, but he pocketed the knife as slickly as he’d brought it out in the first place. One moment it was there. The next, his hands were simply empty.
A uniformed security guard was standing at the top of the far ramp, body tense. His unease was such that it was causing him to bend slightly forward at the waist, like the possibility of engagement had brought on an actual pain in his stomach. His gaze was on Sean, not me.
“There’s nothing for them here,” Sean said calmly, raising his voice enough to be heard. Just the fact that he’d turned his focus onto the guard visibly increased the man’s anxiety.
The guard stayed thirty meters away, unwilling to advance any farther. He had one hand clenched round the large flashlight he carried at his belt-his only weapon-and walkie-talkie in the other. Despite the distance, I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively above the button-down collar of his khaki shirt.
He was wearing dark green trousers with a gold stripe sewn into the side of them and had the polished peak of his cap pulled well down over his forehead, military police style. Even in civilian dress, Sean had him outranked and outclassed in every way possible, and it was clear that both men knew it.
Still, he stood his ground-I’ll give him that. ‘Are you all right, miss?” he called to me. “Is this bloke bothering you?”
I glanced at Sean. There was nothing in his face. No heat, no light, no anger. I wondered if it counted as successfully dealing with the threat he presented if I said yes and had him arrested. I waited a beat but, if I’d been hoping to make him sweat, it didn’t work.
“No, everything’s fine,” I said, consciously injecting some warmth into my voice to drive out any notion that I was under duress. I leaned down and picked up my jacket from where it had fallen, shaking the worst of the dirt off it. “But thank you for checking on me. Actually, we were just leaving.”
The guard nodded and remained by the ramp, shifting his feet uncomfortably, until Sean had crossed to the Shogun, unlocked it, and we’d both climbed inside. He finally moved away only as the engine turned over and fired. I followed my would-be protector’s progress in my door mirror. He looked back twice before he finally disappeared from my field of view.
When I glanced over I found that Sean had sat back in his seat and was regarding me with those bottomless black eyes.
I had a raw fluttering in my chest as reaction set in, a kind of adrenaline hangover. I knew if I reached out now he’d see that my hands were shaking, and I would not give him that satisfaction. I kept my hands together in my lap and refused to meet his eyes.
He sighed. “I was wrong about you, Charlie,” he said evenly. His eyes flicked to the windscreen. “You’ll never know how sorry I am that I had to threaten you to find out for certain.”
I wanted to ask, What were you trying to find out? But what I asked instead was: “So why did you?”
The question came out stark and I knew he’d picked up on what was there between the lines, but he was silent for long enough for me to regret asking. Did I really want to know the answer?
“Because I care about you,” he said at last, turning his head and looking straight into my eyes with such sincerity that my body lit up in reflexive response, the way a pupil reacts to light.
So, yes, I did want to know, after all.
He had exactly the same concentrated look on his face that he’d had when he’d pulled the knife on me. It was that, more than anything, that shut down my unexpected spike of pleasure.
“Oh, of course,” I said with a kind of breathless little laugh that didn’t entirely obscure the bitterness in my voice. “In some cultures, coming at me with a blade could be considered almost akin to a proposal of marriage.”
He reached out and pushed a few strands of hair back from my face with infinitely gentle fingers. My heart stammered in my chest, then overreached in its effort to catch up.
“In my head, I know how good you are, Charlie,” he said. “I’ve always known. Right from the moment I first started to train you-you had that instinct, that spark. You should have had a brilliant career as a soldier. You burned so bright you were dazzling.” He paused, looked away and said quietly, “What happened to you was criminal, in every sense of the word.”
I didn’t speak. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say.
Somewhere below, on another floor, a multitone car alarm siren was sounding, muffled by the distance and ignored anyway. London teemed and bubbled around us. We were encircled by millions of people, and utterly isolated from all of them.
“But in my heart,” he went on, “I’m so afraid for you every time I send you out on a job, I can hardly function.”
Part of me knew what he was saying, but something goaded me into provoking him, even so. “You don’t trust me,” I said, an accusation rather than a query.
He made an uncommon gesture of frustration. “Christ, you know that’s not it. It’s not being able to be out there with you.” The Shogun’s engine note dipped as the cold-start disengaged and it dropped back to slow idle. “It would break every rule in the book if I put us on a team together when we’re involved. How could I be sure, if you were in the line of fire, that I’d always cover the principal? And if that happened, well-,” he shrugged his shoulders, “I’d be finished.”