I went back inside. Not because he told me to. Because the man on the platform was still standing there and the smart list was longer than the brave list and I wasn't going to die in Union Station to prove a point.
I locked Treeline's door and stood in the dark behind my counter. Through the window—the concourse, the lights, the man on track three who hadn't moved. My shop smelled like coffee and cedar panels and the absence of the man who'd been filling this room for two months. I stood in the dark and waited.
Headlights swept the west entrance. A black Audi pulled to the curb. I knew the car before I saw the driver the way I knew his knock, his scent, his thumb—by the way my body responded before my brain confirmed.
My phone buzzed. Cole: West entrance. Now.
I could have called the police. Instead I grabbed my bag and crossed the concourse and got into Cole Ashford's car the way my body had been getting into his spaces for a week—against every fact I'd assembled and toward a gravity I couldn't name.
He pulled away before my door was fully closed. The interior—leather and cedar, concentrated in a small space, nowhere for the scent to go except into me. I'd been breathing this man for a week. His sheets. His hallway. His condo. Now his car, and the proximity was closer than any of those—two feet between his shoulder and mine, the gearshift between us like the maple counter at Treeline, another surface pretending to be a barrier. His jaw was tight. His hands on the wheel were the steadiest thing in the car and my body tracked them the way it always tracked them, cataloging the grip, the tendons, the controlled strength that I'd felt on my shoulder and my arm and through a ceramic cup that held both of our warmth.
"Who is he?"
"I don't know yet."
"You have cameras on my shop and you don't know who's standing on a platform fifty feet from my business?"
"That's why I'm here and not someone else."
He'd come himself. Not sent someone. Driven across Denver in ten minutes and pulled up to the curb like a man who had one priority and it wasn't operational.
"Your research flagged something," he said. "The filings. The law firm. It connects to a part of my organization I influence but don't control."
"Your organization."
"The 303."
He said it like a name I should have heard before. I hadn't. But the weight of it landed the way everything about him landed—heavy, certain, unavoidable. The same weight I'd felt at Vintage when his world settled onto the table. The same weight I'd felt on my shoulder when his thumb found it.
"The man on the platform wasn't mine. Someone noticed you asking questions."
"You're telling me I'm in danger because I looked too hard at your empire."
"You're in danger because you're good at it."
I looked at him. Streetlights moving across his face—light, shadow, light—and I saw concern. Not the composed kind. Raw. The worry of a man who'd driven across a city because the woman he wanted was being watched by someone he didn't send. His jaw hadn't unclenched since I'd gotten in the car and I wanted to put my hand on it—my palm against his jaw, my thumb on the hinge where the tension lived—and I wanted it so badly my fingers curled in my lap to keep from reaching.
Nine minutes from Union Station to my building. The quietest car ride of my life. Cedar filling my lungs. Six inches between his hand on the gearshift and my knee. I didn't close it. Didn't increase it. I let the space exist—charged, specific, full of everything neither of us was saying. His hand shifted gears and his knuckles brushed the air above my knee and my entire body held its breath for a contact that didn't come.
He was the threat I'd been investigating for three days. Right now he was the safest place I had. I couldn't make those two things fit in the same sentence and my body didn't care—it wanted his hand off the gearshift and onto my knee and it wasn't interested in reasons why that was a terrible idea.
He pulled up to my building. I opened the door.
"I'm not going to stop looking."
"I know."
"Is that why you're here? To stop me?"
"I'm here because the man on that platform wasn't mine. Until I know whose he is, you're not walking to your car alone."
I went inside. Deadbolt. Chain. Dark kitchen. I stood at the window.
His headlights were still on. Engine running. He was sitting in his car outside my building and I was standing at my window in the dark and the distance between us was forty feet and a pane of glass and it felt like the six inches over the gearshift—close enough to feel, too far to touch, and neither of us willing to be the one who broke first.
I waited. He waited.
He didn't drive away until my kitchen light came on. I didn't turn it on until I was ready to stop watching him.