Chapter 3 Locked Out

The security guard couldn't meet her eyes. He was a kind man, Mr. Abernathy, who'd been posted at the Larkin Street lobby for six years and had once sneaked her a sandwich during a three-day deadline. Now he stood holding a cardboard box at arm's length, as if it might bite. "Miss Hale. I'm sorry. I was told to give you this." Inside: her desk plant, her favorite pencils, the framed photo of her mother in front of the first building she'd ever loved. Somebody had thrown it all together in five minutes. Somebody who'd been ready for this. "It's all right, Mr. Abernathy," she said. Her voice sounded polite and dead. "It isn't," he whispered. She walked out through the glass doors into the rain. Her wedding dress dragged in the gutter and drank the street water up to her knees. She didn't notice. She noticed nothing at all until she was two blocks away and her legs simply stopped, and she sat down on the edge of a fountain in front of a bank, the box in her lap, and the sky broke open. People hurried past. A woman in a raincoat looked at her, the ivory silk, the ruined hem, the mascara she could feel running, and quickly looked away. Naomi pulled out her phone. There was one person she could call. Her brother answered on the second ring. "Nay? You're supposed to be at your fitting. Did they hem it too short? Because I told you-" "Theo." It came out as a sob. The teasing in his voice vanished. "Where are you?" "I don't... I don't know. A fountain. There's a bank." "Stay there. Don't move. I'm coming." "Theo, they-" Her breath hitched. "Julian and Vanessa. They took the studio. They took everything." There was a silence on the line, and then a sound she'd never heard from her gentle, bookish younger brother: a chair crashing backward. "Stay where you are," he said. "I'm going to kill them." "Don't." She wiped her face with a wet sleeve. "Just come get me." "Nay-" "Please." He was twenty minutes away. She knew that. She sat in the rain and told herself she could survive twenty minutes. But cold was seeping into her bones now, and the pity in strangers' eyes was worse than the rain. When a gust knocked her hair across her face and thunder cracked overhead, she stood on shaking legs and stumbled toward the nearest lit doorway. It belonged to the Ardent Hotel, a glass-and-marble place she'd never been able to afford, with a doorman who looked at her dress and then, gravely, opened the door without a word. The lobby smelled of cedar and money. A pianist played something soft in the corner. Naomi dripped onto the marble, feeling like a stain. "Ma'am?" A concierge approached, careful and kind. "May I help you?" "I just need somewhere to sit," she managed. "Just for a few minutes." He hesitated, then gestured toward an archway at the end of the lobby. "The private lounge is empty at this hour. It's quiet. You can wait there." She thanked him and walked in. The lounge wasn't empty. At the far end, half in shadow beside a rain-streaked window, a man in a black suit stood with a phone at his ear, his voice low and controlled and furious. "I don't care what the lawyers say. Three weeks isn't enough. Find me another way." Naomi froze in the doorway. He turned. Cold gray eyes met hers across the room.