From Broke Technician to Luna novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Price of Silence

Tiernan won't explain her name, but offers forty thousand dollars for one week of work; Stevie sets her terms, feels his thumb on her pulse, and at midnight gets a text signed A.R.: do not go back to that tower.

I turned around very slowly.

Larkin was the name on my foster paperwork.

I had never been told another one.

"Who told you that?" I asked.

"Nobody told me," the blond man said. "I read it."

"Tiernan," Dane said carefully. "You said an hour, and then you said you'd stay out of the way."

"I changed my mind." He didn't take his eyes off me. "Miss Larkin, sit down. Three minutes."

I stayed in the doorway, one hand on the open door and the other in my pocket on the mace.

"I'll stand. Start with what you read."

"I can't tell you yet."

"Then I'm leaving."

"If I tell you tonight, the wrong people hear it from you before you understand it." "I'm not threatening you. I'm asking you to stay one week."

"Doing what?"

"What you just did. The man on the webcam took something from my files. I want to know where he is and what he'll do next."

"You have forty analysts for that."

"I have forty analysts who didn't catch him. You found him in one hour, using my own laptop."

Dane cleared his throat. "He's good for it. Forty thousand dollars."

I laughed, because it was the only thing I could do.

Then I stopped, because I did the math.

I owed sixty-one thousand dollars. Forty thousand of that would be gone by Friday.

"For a week," I said.

"Paid before you start," Tiernan said. "On the first day."

"I name the hours. I work from my own office. I quit any day I want, and you keep whatever I've already earned."

"Agreed."

"And your people don't follow me home."

A muscle moved in his jaw.

"Agreed," he said, after too long.

"And I don't sleep with the boss." I made myself say it to his face. "That's my rule. It isn't up for discussion."

Dane made a small choking noise and found the ceiling very interesting.

Tiernan's mouth moved at one corner.

"Noted," he said.

He crossed the room to the desk, wrote a number on a card, and walked it over to me instead of handing it to Dane.

When I reached for it, I didn't take the card.

I took his hand by mistake, because he turned it at the last second.

His thumb landed on the inside of my wrist, right over my pulse.

Heat went up my arm and into my chest, fast and all at once.

I looked up.

He had stopped breathing. His eyes had gone darker around the green, and the muscle in his jaw jumped once.

Neither of us moved.

The suite was just too warm. That was what I decided.

He was a big man who ran hot, and the heating in these towers was always set for people with no sense.

"That's your number," he said. His voice had gone rough.

"Right," I said. "I'll text you."

He let go of me.

He did it carefully, one finger at a time, and I felt each one.

"Dane will drive you to your party," he said. "He'll wait outside, and he won't follow you in."

"I said no followers."

"He's a driver. You'd pay a cab forty dollars."

That was true, and he knew it.

I went down in the elevator with Dane, who kept looking at me sideways.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." He grinned at the floor. "I've known him eleven years. I've never seen him tell anyone yes that fast."

Velvet Row was loud, hot and packed to the walls.

Roxy found me before I'd cleared the door.

"You're here!" She threw both arms around me. "You smell like a hotel. Where did you go? Who is the giant in the car?"

"A job. He's the driver."

"The driver is six feet five and watching you from the street."

"He's a very tall driver."

She dragged me onto the floor and put a drink in my hand.

For an hour I didn't think about the card in my pocket, or the green eyes, or the name Ansel Roth.

I didn't think about the thumb on my wrist either.

I thought about it twice.

At midnight Roxy blew out her candles, and I stepped into the corridor by the restrooms to get away from the music.

My flip phone buzzed against my hip.

I flipped it open to a message from a number I didn't know.

It said: Happy birthday, little wren. Do not go back to that tower. A.R.

My birthday was in three days.

The cards had always come three days early.

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