Who: Olive, Silver, and some Giacoma NPCs What: An unexpected extraction Where: Outside Bailar When: Backdated to a few minutes after this, and just after Olive's convo with Peter Warnings/Rating: Three dead Giacoma
Perhaps she would have been better served to run into the night immediately after Nico left her room in the back of Bailar. But running was not something that came naturally to someone like Olive. She'd spent nearly a decade staying, and like a dog accustomed to doing as she was told, she had trouble disobeying the command that had been given five years earlier in the basement of her old home, all while the blood dripped through the floorboards and into her eyes. The outside world was, in its own way, as terrifying as the man that had burst into her room minutes earlier and dragged the past in his wake.
And so it took time.
She packed an entire suitcase first, before realizing that it would look odd, her dragging a suitcase behind her through a class of pirouetting girls in tutus of pink tulle. She had unpacked it all then, putting every last item back where it lived. And then, again, she had repacked a few things into a bag she could carry at her shoulder, one that might go unnoticed.
Olive was a creature of habit, as recluses tended to be, a narrow world creating a narrow life. She left the studio once a day, and once only. Daily, she called a cab beforehand, and she went to the hotel every morning. She returned after the studio's last afternoon classes, and she holed up in her room and made tea and played console games and lost herself in a world made of four walls and safety.
Any deviation, she feared, would be noticed.
And there was no real cause to worry, she thought. The past had walked in, but it hadn't greeted her or spoken her name. There was no reason to think-
But no, no, no. Then she noticed the missing cellphone, and circumstances all changed. A page turned in life's book, and she shoved her entire fist into her mouth, cram and shove, as she realized it.
She didn't think of calling Connor or Dylan, though perhaps she should have done. She didn't think of calling Peter, not after she'd traumatized him with too much reality. She grabbed her bag and, tripping not even once, she stepped out of her bubble and faced the rows of girls in pink tulle. Beyond them, she could see Nico on the phone, and her gaze swiveled to the girls in mid-twirl, seeking out the familiar one amidst them. Leo's daughter, there, in the front row.
And Olive ran. She made for the back door, and she shoved it open wide and noisy fast. She had no way of knowing there was family business happening behind the studio's wood-floored sanctuary. She didn't hear the men immediately, the world drowned out by the thrumming of her own heartbeat in her ears. She was a mess, brown hair tangled and clinging to her cheeks and her shoes untied. Her corduroy pants were a fawn brown, and the t-shirt she wore was a snug boy's thing that declared her a Trekkie. Brown and grey and brown again, she rounded the corner behind the studio, a haunt-pale shadow of a creature.
It was not just recluses, but all people, rich and poor, old and young, people inevitably became creatures of habit. They forged deep ruts into the forests of their lives by discovering what they assumed to be the most efficient track before choosing it as The Path to Take, and they stuck to it like ants without even thinking about it. Modern life made people lazy and complacent; they posted their class schedules online and put their business schedules on poorly guarded computers. Even criminals, the notoriously paranoid constituency of life, had habits. Serial killers developed patterns, burglars chose targets, and assassins picked weapons. The illusion of efficiency was a tempting path away from safety. Difficulty turned professional procedure into mistakes.
Not even Silver had been immune to those mistakes. He had allowed himself a job, and all jobs had a set schedule, a kind of expectation that he needed to answer with his presence. He had allowed Justine to press him into a residence, and he took up a credit card and with it, more bills and more expectations. He had gotten thoroughly wrapped up in a woman, which had to be the stupidest thing he’d done in a very long time. It was only instinct that saved him, instinct and freak chance. It was like that, sometimes. Sometimes you’d be watching an asset, a perfect extraction in place, and then a fucking tire would go flat or there’d be a freak hailstorm. Someone who was usually calm would panic, or someone who shouldn’t be there would show up completely by chance.
The brown and grey woman was like that. A freak twist of fate. A sudden and utterly unexpected wrench in the works. Silver had absolutely no idea who she was or what she was doing there. He thought maybe he had seen her before, but he didn’t have time to let the recognition settle and click, because he was too busy trying to adjust his approach so that he would survive the experience.
It started with the assassin. The one who cased Silver’s house without detection and missed him by a fly’s whisker. That instinct again. Fate’s hand. Silver had come out on top in a short brawl only to find himself mired in a mess of his own making, and it was taking weeks to clean it up. A few people turned up dead, here and there, but really it was missing files and burned identities that got the job done. Stock showed up in the wrong hands and black secrets about shady business, international contacts, and illegitimate children all surfaced at the worst possible times. Silver quickly and efficiently destroyed several lives and removed threats precisely and carefully, and he researched the holy hell out of everyone and everything. He exacted vengeance with paper and byte, chance words and anonymous calls. The people who died all deserved it, even if their personal sins weren’t related directly to his own problem. He was clean. He was careful.
And now he was here, out behind a studio he’d long associated with Justine, with three men he had connected with the man who had punched a needle into his pillow two months ago. Three more hired killers, though these were ten times sloppier and all the more dangerous because they were just smart enough to realize what they were facing if they failed. Silver assumed they were at this location because of some connection to him. He didn’t know who was standing in front of the studio, and it was one of those insane chances that the three hired killers here just so happened to serve a tour with the silent man left dead in Silver’s bathroom.
They were like the three bears: big, medium, and small, only the strength and training went in reverse, with the biggest the stupidest and the smallest the most dangerous. The Smallest Bear recognized her when Silver did not, and he turned away from the threat of Silver, who was still in innocent “I’m a journalist asking uncomfortable questions” mode at the other end of the alleyway, to face the running steps. The grey and brown woman ran smack into him. He twisted with skill and attempted to slam her up against the side of the studio before she could get away or scream, and the two remaining Bears turned to look at Silver. The “innocent journalist” who had just become a witness, but who was actually the Grim Reaper pretending he was on vacation. Silver blinked. “Who’s that?”
Olive did not resist the slam. Whether it was fear, shock or just the inevitable giving in that comes with months of torture in a cellar and years of being kept inside on a tight leash, that was anyone's guess. So, no, she did not resist the slam. Perhaps, even, she leaned into it, as a prisoner would walk into the cell that they knew to be theirs. She had always, you see, known the day would come when she would be exposed. She'd merely been foolish enough to expect something good to come of it, a bringing down of these dogs that had destroyed the only life she had known. And, ah, perhaps she was just beginning to see the edges of Stockholm around that life as well, perhaps she was beginning to question this sacrifice entirely. But it was too late for that and, anyway, she had no idea how to live.
Despite what she'd told Peter, she had no idea how one lived.
The truth was there in skin that was ghostly even before the fright, an unhealthy pallor that made the blue veins in her hands glow with a strange fluorescence beneath the alley lights. Oh, it was not attractive, not by any means. She was, as Peter had said, the plainest woman he knew. If being wan and pale enhanced some damsels with its presence, it did no such thing with Olive.
Ah, oh, she recognized the man who held her pinned. Yes, it was there in her wide brown eyes, that she remembered. The man outside the front of the studio, the one with the phone and the little girl in the tutu, he had killed Vicente and his family, but he hadn't gotten his hands dirty with the servant girl that held all of Vicente's secrets close to her heart. No, those months of torture had been at the hands of the man with his beefy arm across Olive's neck.
"Running, Miss Olive?" he asked, a mockery of what her Giacoma family had called her before they'd been slaughtered like venison for Leo Giacoma's table.
The smaller of the three bears, seemed to find no challenge in deciding what must be done next, and perhaps it was Silver's voice that roused him from his intentions of renewing his "friendship" with the little miss against the stones.
"Well?" the man barked at the other two with a jerk of his head that indicated Silver should be dealt with. His eyeroll said the girl could be handled by the capo. They'd just keep her until they were done.
Silver looked at the man holding Olive. He looked at the two men closest to him. And then he looked at Olive. He gave her a very long, frowning look that was mostly confusion but held an edge of wariness. He still couldn’t place her, and Silver had an excellent memory. The fact that he couldn’t identify her bothered him more than any of the three guys standing there ready to kill them both. Finally her expression of total resigned terror seemed to sink in. His nostrils flared, and his brown eyes acquired a hint of resignation to them as well. Shit.
Silver was carrying a silenced automatic, but despite the moniker “silent” weapons weren’t really all that silent. Besides, shooting someone would draw way more attention than he really wanted to have. He emptied his left hand of the notebook he’d been using to support his role as uncomfortable journalist, and he brought up the plastic ballpoint pen in his right hand and stabbed it neatly into the side of the closest man’s neck. He was the bear in between, and it was a good thing too, because he was neither trained nor bright. Three more people like the man in Silver’s apartment and he would be dead within a second, and so would Olive.
Olive was, in that way of frightened creatures, unaware of much beyond the arm at her throat. The world did not extend further than that unforgiving pressure. It was a pinpoint thing of great clarity, and every twitch of the large man's arm brought with it the memory of some ache, some agony. Something. And like a frightened and feral thing, her mind broke and she decided (without truly deciding at all) that anything would be better than finding herself in those cellars again. Ah, yes, there were sounds over there, where the other two men were, but over there was very far indeed. No, for the her the world was here.
She did not see the journalist's pen become a weapon. She did not even see the large man turn his head, as if to question some sound over in Silver's vicinity. No, she noticed none of these things. She noticed the droplet of sweat that fell along her brow, and she heard her heart thrum in her ears, and she saw the man's hand twitch, twitch, twitch.
And the world stopped as she sunk her teeth into the fleshy part of the large man's hand. She shook her head, she tried to tear at skin, and she raised her hands and tried to shove her fingers into the large bear's eyes. Oh, she was an unskilled and awkward thing. But, for once, that wasn't a mark against her.
The bear that had not fallen yet, the one near Silver, seemed unsure who to concentrate on. Not very bright, and faced with two threats, he hesitated a moment before pulling up his gun and pointing it at Silver's face, the muzzle at Silver's forehead. And perhaps he was not the mastermind. Perhaps he did not understand what he dealt with, because he grinned a cocksure grin then, as if he'd won. "I'll pull it," he said of the trigger, and he ignored the sounds of the larger bear subduing the woman at the wall anew.
The man Silver had stabbed floundered on the ground to one side, gasping and bleeding and marching toward death even quicker than was absolutely necessary because he insisted on thrashing around. Silver hadn’t gotten any major arteries because of the potential mess, but it didn’t look like that was going to matter all that much. He stepped back after the pen was wrenched out of his hand, dropped his eyes dispassionately toward the bear on the ground, and then focused again on the most immediate threat. Silver made no attempt to catch Olive’s eye, as she was in no danger of dying right in front of him. He was more worried about the man’s trigger finger and the state of his own brains in his head, because he wanted to keep them where they belonged.
Leaning back slightly, he watched the finger and not the muzzle, not wanting to die by some screw-up’s accident, but the man seemed relatively self-possessed and so Silver very deliberately raised both hands in front of him, leading with blunt fingertips toward the sky--not quick, not slow. “I know you will.” He didn’t sound particularly concerned, just serious and perplexed. He waited until the man decided he was going to reply, no doubt something cocky and confident as men with large guns but no brains were wont to be. The trigger finger relaxed, and Silver moved. He yanked his body to one side and simultaneously slapped out a hand and caught the handgun on the slide over the top, rotating it away from him and Olive so it pointed harmlessly toward the wall. The gunman tried to fire, but by that time his finger was snapping in the catch of the triggerguard and there was no escaping it. Silver kept twisting until the man yelled with surprise and pain, shoving the man’s shoulder down by keeping the pressure on his hand and arm taut. Then put a knee in the man’s temple by stretching one thigh up as if it was easy as breathing, and the gunman went down like wet cement.
Now armed, Silver neatly reversed the gun into a hold and rotated to face the man leftover. He said nothing. It tended to be more disturbing.
The largest of the bears was not nearly as stupid or cocksure as the others. The man had easily subdued Olive's attempts at escape and, after watching how Silver disposed of his comrades, had opted to use the woman as a body shield. He said nothing when the gun turned toward him, because men always tried to save women; he looked like he was sure that he had gotten the upper-hand through sheer coincidence. And unlike the others, he knew who Silver was at this distance, even if he knew him by another name and from another time. "Know you," he said, disgust dripping from his voice. "Worked for the old don," he said, clearly not liking the man in question. And click, click, click, his eyes went bright when realization and understanding filtered in. He was a low-level lackey, this man, brawn intended to scare and little more; he hadn't been informed of anything at all regarding the man who stood before him. Now he thought he had the full picture, even though he didn't have the full picture at all.
"Let you pick. You, or her," he said, arm across Olive's throat and his own gun pointed right at Silver's face. "And don't you come getting close," he cautioned, because he wasn't going to get into a hand-to-hand fight, not after seeing the other two men go down. Either way, he didn't intend to lose either of them, but no point in saying that.
"He doesn't know me, you supreme idiot," Olive muttered, her voice carrying further than intended. And, perhaps, she thought it not even true. As soon as the man mentioned the old don, she perked up. Someone who had worked for Vicente, and Stockholm led her to believe this was safety. Surely he would remember her. Surely. She realized, then, that this had nothing to do with her, with her missing phone. That was a wrench, because she'd no doubt Nico would be coming to kill her soon, and Nico wasn't as brutish as this man; he was more lethal by far. "Perhaps you should confer with your capo," she suggested, hating the terms this new Giacoma used. "I work for you, you see," she explained. "I wouldn't run. Why should I?" she asked, defiant in the face of the obvious falsehood and hoping the delay (and warning) would help Vicente's man find an out.
Silver stood still. His cracked rib was killing him; he’d taken it too far with that kick, and now he was holding up his gun-arm, and it was not a particularly pleasant experience. He let none of this show on his face. He just examined the man as if trying to place him, though everything had clicked into place a good half-minute ago. Silver remembered who he had been for Vicente, years, lives ago. It had been a long-term assignment but still not as long as many that came later. His shoulders were far more hunched than the reporters had been, emphasizing the breadth of his shoulders, and though he couldn’t do anything about the length of his hair, he let his voice drop into a muddle of syllables.
“Yeah, I did. I worked for Vicente. Job to job. He wasn’t my family.” Silver definitely didn’t look particularly Italian, or act like it, either. “He employed me. Maybe you wanna reach down in that big memory of yours and remember what he paid me for.” Silver waited. Silver wasn’t supposed to kill anyone in the employ of the US government, but things happened when you were undercover, and Silver had been very good at cleaning up his own messes. And Vicente’s, come to think of it. He looked at Olive but he couldn’t afford to give her any particular sign. “Let’s just say I’m not here for you,” he told the Little Bear.
The Bear seemed to consider the problem of Silver, who the man seemed unwilling to shoot without verifying information on. But how to get to the phone without losing control over his body shield? "Throw it down," he said of Silver's gun, after (obviously) deciding on a plan of action that would allow him to reach the phone in his pocket. "Vicente's dead. We don't work with his people no more. They're all dead. Throw the gun down." He said it more forcefully the second time, as if the mention of the dead don had reminded him not to trust this man that had lied in the first place.
Olive sucked in a deep breath when the man mentioned Vicente's death and, intentionally, she goaded him on, hoping it would accomplish something. After all, she no longer trusted the FBI to do anything of merit when it came to the Giacoma, and this man deserved death as much as the one outside. She was terrified, yes, but she was dreadfully British and good at hiding her feelings about absolutely everything, save her sarcasm, which never went unchecked. "Yes, and now we've a leader who brags about his actions in public forums. All we've to wait on is for is for him to twirl his moustache," she mocked, and she got a gun butt to her temple for her insolence, intended blackness and (unfortunately for the man holding her) dead weight that he had not considered. And, perhaps, she'd turned her head just this much, his blow landing in entirely the wrong place altogether. But she let her body go limp, an intentional thing as her heart beat loudly in her ears.
While the Bear thought, Silver checked his angles. He didn’t like having a gun in his hand that he hadn’t fired; by the weight he knew it was loaded, but who knew whether it was reliable. There was probably one in the chamber but it wasn’t dead certain, and it probably shot straight judging from the make and condition, but he couldn’t be certain of that either. He had a bunch of questions in his right fist and it made him twice as uncomfortable as the armed man staring him down. Fortunately, none of this showed on Silver’s face. He raised an eyebrow, as if the man was stupid for suggesting any such thing. “No,” he said. “You throw yours down.” Really, outside of a body shield that may or may not be effective (it wasn’t like Silver was holding a peashooter) the remaining Bear didn’t have anything Silver didn’t have. The intervening silence was interspersed with the wet gasps of the man with the pen still sticking out of his neck.
The British accent really did it for Silver, and he could see her in his mind’s eye pretty clearly. He made a face of distaste. Her existence was going to cause him problems--or at least so he thought until she got a big mouth and got hit for her trouble. Her mistake made her captor make a mistake too; he lifted his gun away from Silver and hit her with it. This was such a monumentally stupid thing to do that for a second Silver just blinked at the good fortune--but then he acted. He stepped sharply to one side, out of the immediate angle that he’d inhabited before, lowered his own weapon, and fired twice at the man’s thigh. He had a good three inches space between the thigh and the woman, and he was firing from only about six feet difference. Even if there wasn’t one in the chamber, the second shot should do it, and even if it wasn’t perfectly straight, Silver was a good enough shot to manage it.
Pop pop.
Olive, before her well timed fall, wasn't at all surprised that Silver (and she tried to remember what he'd been called when she knew him), refused to throw down his weapon. Her fear had given way to that numbness that came from years of abuse at the hands of these men, and she was thinking rather eerily clearly. It was as if the fear of something coming to pass had broken over her like a wave, and now it was done, and there was nothing left to fear. She thought dying might be like this. Of course, of course dying must be like this. And everything was slow and clear though the unmarred pane of glass that was her vision. And the man's voice, the one whose name she still couldn't recall, despite the clarity, reminded her of safety. The illusion of it, certainly, but safety all the same.
A clear eye might notice the way Olive tensed before the trigger was pulled. Surely, unconscious bodies did not tense? But the man holding her was too caught up in that sharp move to the side and, without Olive's vantage point, he didn't notice the way Silver's finger twitched on the trigger. Olive did notice, and she let her weight drop entirely when the shot rang out, carefully letting her body fall in the opposite direction of where the muzzle was pointed. The bear wailed, and he cursed, and he threw himself at Silver with all the force of a lion with a thorn in his paw. It was, perhaps, loud enough to carry, and Olive looked up, brown hair clinging to her cheeks, waiting for Nico to come and end all of this. She didn't know enough about bullet wounds to know Silver had been aiming as he had done for a reason. She assumed the man would live, and Nico would come, and it would all be in vain. And, well, perhaps it was all the years, but she couldn't stomach that.
She looked around frantically for a discarded weapon, for something, brown eyes finally fearful and ages-angry.There was no weapon, of course, but her fingers closed on a large chunk of black stone, and she hefted it as she stood, coming up behind the man with maddened graceless and tears streaming down her cheeks, intending to bash his bloody head in.
In the end, it wasn’t necessary.
Silver was focusing on the threat, not on Olive, and he dismissed her in favor of the man coming at him full stop. He was almost sure he’d hit the artery in the man’s thigh so he wasn’t all that worried about the man surviving, but it was probably better to make this look like a professional spat among colleagues. Silver pulled the gun off to one side, caught the man with the butt of it along his jaw, and in one neat motion, caught his neck as he fell and turned, slamming the top of the man’s head into the wall at the side of the alley. He bounced off with an ugly, stomach-churning crack and fell flat on his face. He wasn’t likely to get up again. Silver staggered a little as he moved away and finally saw Olive with her chunk of desert rock. He made the same expression he had when the man had asked him to drop his gun, mingled amusement and disbelief.
The gunshots had been plenty loud enough, and if someone in the building hadn’t called the cops, someone would be coming pretty soon. And Silver, Silver cleaned up after himself. “Vicente, huh?” Silver asked her, eying her face. He had turned the gun and crouched to wipe it on the other man’s shirt so it didn’t pick up any forensic fibers from his own. “What are you doing out here?” Like they’d met in the grocery store.
The man with the pen in his neck and finally passed out. Silver finished taking his prints off the gun and went to find the man with the pen, passing Olive and her rock without any apparent worry she’d come after him with it. He put the stabbed man’s hand on the gun in several places, smudging some of the intentional prints. Eying the scene, he repositioned the man’s body a couple times, carefully avoiding a great deal of blood.
Olive dropped the rock with a loud thunk after Silver mentioned Vicente like he was nothing. But then, she very much thought that Silver had worked for Vicente, which led to her very much believing that he'd done this as some great gesture of loyalty. Poor Olive, you see, still couldn't see the forest for trees, could not see her own imprisonment as imprisonment at all. "Nico," she said, as if that explained everything in all the world entirely. She motioned back with a hand, back toward the front of the studio. "He's probably calling Leo," she explained, and she expected Silver to understand everything, somehow, for a moment, before realizing it was likely that he was unaware of anything at all. Ah, yes, that, and the rest came in a rush with increasing frenzy and increasing wringing of hands, now that the job was done - this job, at least. "Nico took my phone, which means he knows, you see, but I was only doing it for Vicente, and I won't turn you in. But he knows, and he'll come to kill me. He'll kill you too."
And, yet, she stood there, very much a homeless dog on a street corner that had no idea where to turn to go home. Home was behind her, but it was nowhere she could be. And for a woman who only knew how to get to the hotel and back again, the world suddenly seemed a very large place. "I don't know what to do," she admitted, and perhaps it could all be mistaken for shock, that not knowing. Though, and if the lights overhead were any indication, she hadn't seen daylight in years. But she had no concerns about the great quantities of blood that Silver was avoiding, or about the things he was doing. She didn't even step away from the blood that was quickly threatening to soak through her Converse from the corpse leaking arterial blood like rain on a London pavement. "I forget what you were called," she admitted; she'd had little contact with anyone but Vicente in those days. None, actually, in truth. She'd followed him like a quiet little shadow, speaking to no one, and not realizing it at all.
Silver hadn’t the faintest idea of what she was talking about. The first two names didn’t mean much at all to him, and he shrugged, not really needing to reassure her with his understanding. He stored them away, but it was habit and training. He wasn’t here for her, at least not initially. He’d achieved his goal, and that was the three dead men on the floor of the alley. It was an accomplishment, really. Silver wasn’t army, he wasn’t special forces. He was a damn spook, not an assassin. He dealt in information, not bludgeoning people. But he was also effective, and he wanted to keep it that way. Three dead men, and no more ties to the man who came for him in the night. Like he never was. Like he never could be again. Poof.
Silver positioned the three bodies to make it look like there had been a brawl. It wouldn’t stand up to serious forensic investigation, but he was counting on the nightmare on the streets and the criminal records of the three men to dismiss calling in anybody that had the kind of nohow to prove other relevant assailants or witnesses. People had to come in and out of this alley all the time. He made sure that his prints were off and the other men had all touched the weapons--pen and gun--before he moved around and looked at Olive in the face. At least she wasn’t in shock. He frowned at her. “Silver.” That was not what he had been called then, but he was trying to make this honesty policy stick. It seemed stupid, but he tried. “You better come with me. No good to get caught here. Look out now and don’t get that on you.” He made a commanding sweeping gesture so she moved her feet away from the blood.
Silver? Silver. But that wasn't right. She would have remembered someone named such a thing. Names were important, Olive knew. They set the tone from early on. She'd been born an unimpressive, tiny fruit, one that had to be pitted and stuffed with brighter colors to make it interesting. And so, unimpressive she became. Rolling this way and that through life, never steady like an orange or cantaloupe might be. And Silver? She wondered if his parents had understood what a hard name like that would do. She wondered it, as she stood there watching him impassionately finish his work. For work, surely, it was to him. "That's rather a hard name," she finally said, not pointing out that he'd clearly not owned it when he worked for Vicente. But it suited him, all the same, so she suspected it to be true and real.
When he suggested she go with him, she gave him a strange look, like someone peeking through a curtained window at an unexpected stranger knocking upon the door. But he mentioned the blood, and she looked down at it without any horror. She'd seen more blood than this, once. "Did you know that blood isn't nearly as liquid as everyone thinks it to be? Not for terribly long, anyway." she commented, remembering thick gobs of it on the hallway and trying to drip onto the main floor of the house. But he'd asked something, hadn't he? It would do no good to become lost in the past then. She looked up again, brown eyes curious and wide. She might not be shocked, but there was little of her usual demeanor there, the one that came the comfort of solitude on the journals. "I've nowhere to go but the hotel," she said, because it was true, and because she could think of nothing else to say. "They'll come for me, you see."
It interested Silver that she had the presence of mind to be empathetic about his name. It had been a very long time since anyone had done more than frown slightly and lean toward him when he said his name, probably to make sure they heard him correctly. In Vegas people rarely thought anything of it, but the Company always tried to find ways around saying it, as if it set him a bit too far apart when he already had enough pseudonyms to be getting on with. He smiled at her, a smile that reached his eyes, and then he stepped up beside her.
The hotel, hm? That could have meant anything, but the way she said it suggested more to him. He decided not to push it right at that moment. “All the more reason you should be with me when they come,” he reasoned, watching her pupils to see if she was likely to have a concussion. “It won’t do you any harm, and I’d rather not leave you here to be questioned.” He put an arm down and took her hand, pulling her out of the way of the blood. The grip expected cooperation, but it wasn’t sharp or tight, and it certainly wasn’t a yank on her arm. “Step this way.” He pulled her around and walked carefully to the end of the alley before stepping confidently out of it as if they’d just taken a detour.
She didn't know if his reassurance meant he knew of the hotel. It would hardly surprise her if he did. Not stepping out into the real world with any frequency meant that she envisioned Las Vegas as being quite small indeed, and everyone she spoke with on any regular basis had a presence in the hotel. Why should he not? For her, Passages and the dance studio were the beginning and end of the world, and everything between was a string of people headed in the same direction and connected by a network of paper and typeface.
Her pupils, when he looked, were perfectly fine. She'd not lost consciousness, and though there would be a bruise from the gun, it was (at this close range) obviously not in the proper place for her to have fallen at all. And it was not any damage or impediment that caused her to nod her agreement when he closed his hand on her hand. It was that stupid trust she still had in the organization that had brought her into all of this in the first place, that undying loyalty that came from isolation. He had been with Vicente. He was here now. He had killed three of Leo's men. She would go to the ends of the earth, should he ask it of her. She stepped when he told her to, a scuff, a skip of rubber sole on the uneven ground, but she did as he said. "I wouldn't betray you," she promised, a residual comment related to the possibility of her being questioned. "But they won't question me. They'll kill me, you see. They aren't terribly bright," she explained, looking back at her home with a sense of loss. She'd no things before the studio. No room of her own, no possessions, no freedom, and now they would all be lost. Her tiny foray into living would be at an end.
She looked back at him, very much a woman nearly thirty then, plain and pale. "Shall we?" she asked politely.