The car opens and when I would step forward, Savage holds out a hand in front of me to stop me. He moves ahead of me, searches the hallway, and then motions for us to follow.
The very fact that Savage had to clear our path drives home every reason we’re in this hotel, on the run, and all those reasons lead back to Waters. I step back into the hallway and Adrian’s arm is already on me. They’re all too protective and I’m suddenly reminded of what Adam told me back in Austin. There’s a hit out on me and Adrian, a high-priced hit on each of us, and that hit has them all on edge. They chose to come to New York, but they brought me here, to a hotel. Suddenly that decision doesn’t feel like it’s about me and Adrian. It feels like it’s about Waters. It feels like it’s about an active threat to our lives that may have escalated even further.
Chapter Sixteen
PRI
We reach the end of the hallway and Adrian uses a keycard to open a door. Without a word, Adam and Savage go left and right to separate doors. They’re staying here as well. And yet, they live here in New York. I think. I’m almost certain. Adrian motions me into the room. I enter the fancy room with a living area, and move forward quickly, feeling some odd fight or flight mechanism that shows itself as flight. I’m not sure who I’m running from. Waters? Myself? Adrian?
I step beyond the living area, and behind the couch that faces the foyer. When Adrian emerges from said foyer and enters the room, my fingers curl on the leather back of the couch.
He halts at the line of the living room. “What are you doing, Pri?”
“Don’t Savage and Adam live here in New York City?”
“They do.”
“Don’t you live here, Adrian?”
“I do.”
“What is going on?” I press.
He moves then, rounding the couch, and I turn to face him. He stops a few steps from me—no, a long stride from me—but seems to hesitate. All that drama on the plane between us has now landed right here, in this room. “We’re just being cautious,” he says. “We need to know no one followed us.”
“Do we think we were followed?” I ask, wanting to know exactly where we stand.
“We’re being cautious, Pri,” he reiterates, in what one might say is avoidance.
“I know we’re on a hitlist,” I counter, ensuring he knows that I’m not going to be coddled or left in the dark.
“Nothing has changed,” he says. “You know Waters wants anyone in his path dead.”
“I know he upped the price on our heads. Adam told me.”
His lips thin. “Adam talks too much.”
“We’re here tonight. What about tomorrow?”
“We’ll see what intel says tomorrow,” he replies.
I’m aware of the small space between us that is wider than it seems. And in that space stands Waters and more. Life and death. That space is, in fact, all about life and death and that’s why neither of us has closed it. I take a step backward. “Do I have my own room?”
There’s a sharpening of his mood, a slight stiffening of his spine before he questions, “Why would you need your own room, Pri?”
“The same reason you needed your own space on that plane, Adrian.”
“I came back to you.”
“But you knew you shouldn’t have. And you were right.”
A muscle in his jaw tics. “Right about what, Pri?”
“We don’t know what we feel.”
He steps toward me. “Pri—”
I hold up a hand and take another long step backward. “We don’t know what we feel, Adrian, that much is true. We both know it’s true, but I do know that what I feel for you is nothing like what I felt for Logan. Nothing. That’s what I know. It’s more intense, it’s more, well, for a lack of a better word, deep and—and maybe that’s about the circumstances. I don’t know. But I know you got on that plane tonight, and I know that you took a risk because of me. Knowing I’m bad for you.”
“You’re bad for me? Are you crazy, woman? I got on that plane knowing that I’m bad for you. I’m bad for you. As long as you’re my woman, Waters will come for you. You will never be safe because he will never let me walk away from this. It’s him or me, and I missed the chance to make it him.”
But he doesn’t move toward me.
The space between us just seems to grow.
“So we’re bad for each other,” I say. “That’s what we’re saying. I need to go to bed. I need to rest and think and wake up tomorrow ready to fight Waters.” And because I know he knows what’s right, I try to make it easier on him. “I need to do that alone. That’s what I want, Adrian.”