If I Can’t Have You
The travel from confrontation ground to climax arena consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
Jasper made a soft, mocking sound. He lowered the window a fraction, the cold wind whipping into the car, and shouted into the night air—not to her, but to the city itself, to the man he knew was listening through the broken link in her earpiece. “Now I have the one thing you love most. Let’s see how far you’ll chase.”
The window slid shut with a click like a closing door.
The earpiece in Lyra’s ear crackled once, then went dead. She kept her hands flat on her thighs, nails pressing small crescents into her palms, and she breathed in a slow, deliberate rhythm while the car carried her through the dark veins of the city. Jasper watched her from the opposite corner of the back seat. She could feel his attention settling on her skin like a film.
“Milo is safe,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Milo is with two of your husband’s men in a safe house on Foxglove Lane.” Jasper’s voice was mild, accommodating. “I know the address. I know the security rotation. I know the names of the men holding his hand. But I’m not going to touch him.”
The words were a blow, but she’d been training for that blow her whole life; the threat that arrived dressed as a fact. She turned her head and looked at him directly. “Why are you telling me that?”
“Because I want you to know what kind of man I am.” He smiled, and it was the most honest expression she’d seen on his face all night. “I take what I want, but I don’t break what I plan to keep.”
The car swung into an underground garage. The city vanished behind poured concrete, and the ride flattened into silence. Two men in dark suits waited beside a service elevator, their hands folded, their faces slack. Jasper stepped out first, extending his palm toward her.
Lyra walked past him. The elevator swallowed their silence and carried them up the spine of Blackthorn Industries Tower. Sixty-one floors peeled away like cards from a deck—conference rooms with glass tables, executive suites with walls of wood and leather, a laboratory glowing sterile white. Lyra counted the exits as they passed. Ninety seconds, she told herself. That’s the whole climb. Then you’re in a room at the top, and every exit you’ve ever known is behind you.
“You’re memorizing the building,” Jasper said from behind her. “There’s no point.”
“I’m looking at your architecture,” she said. “It tells me things.”
“Such as?”
“People who live at the top of a glass tower are hiding from what they left at the bottom.” She met his reflected gaze in the glass. “What did you leave, Jasper?”
His smile didn’t move, but his eyes did. Something in them banked, like coal shifting in a fire. “I left the version of me that didn’t know you.”
The elevator opened onto a penthouse that was a museum of her own face.
Lyra stopped at the threshold. Photographs covered every wall—institutional frames, thin black metal, some hanging from wires, some mounted on easels. A college quad in autumn. A rooftop party where she was laughing with Miriam, a plastic cup raised. A lecture hall, the back of her head, the line of her shoulder. A coffee shop window, her face bent over a notebook. A photograph of her leaving a hospital, a newborn in her arms, car keys in her teeth, her face a kind of tired she hadn’t known existed. The images didn’t follow the chronology of her life; they followed the logic of an obsession.
In the center of the room, in a glass case on a steel credenza, lay a blue ballpoint pen with a chewed cap.
“I didn’t remember you,” Lyra said. Not an apology; testimony.
“I know.” Jasper circled the case, not watching the pen but watching her. “I remember everything. The lecture hall. The light. The way your hair moved when you turned. You asked me if I had a pen; I said yes; you took it. You said thank you.”
“One moment.”
“It was the first moment I was alive.” He stopped in front of her. “You were the first person who ever actually saw me.”
The terrible thing, Lyra thought, was that he believed it. There was no machinery behind his eyes—no calculation, no performance. He had built a cathedral out of a single atom of kindness, and he had spent nine years polishing the walls with his own attention. She felt the edges of her body anchoring her to the present: the cold air, the hum of the tower, the red emergency alarm station mounted on a pillar beside the terrace door.
She stepped sideways along the glass, one foot sliding over the polished concrete, as if shifting her weight before an unwelcome question. Jasper mirrored her, tracking. She didn’t look at the pillar. She looked at his eyes, his mouth, his hands.
“You’ve planned every second of this,” she said. “What happens tomorrow?”
Jasper blinked. It was a small, honest crack. He opened his mouth and closed it again, searching the script he’d written for an answer that wasn’t there.
“That’s the flaw, isn’t it,” she said softly. “You never thought about afterward. There’s no afterward for you. There’s only the moment you take it.”
His face closed. He crossed the distance in three strides, grabbed her by the hair, and pressed her against the glass of the terrace window. The cold punched through her jacket. A handgun was in his hand before she understood he’d reached for it, and the muzzle found the soft hollow beneath her jaw. “Shut up.”
Lyra shut up. There was nothing left to spend.
Far below, in the guts of the tower, a door opened.
—
Dante hit the Blackthorn lobby at a dead run, Flynn two steps behind him.
They came in through the loading dock, using a security badge lifted from a guard they’d caught at the perimeter. The lobby was a cathedral of marble and glass, and two men were already moving toward them from the security desk. Flynn didn’t break stride. He fired two rounds into the wall above their heads, close enough to make them drop for cover, and the men went flat. Dante reached the maintenance door at the far end of the lobby and pried it open with a crowbar.
“Service shaft,” Flynn said, pulling a tablet from his vest. The schematic glowed blue in the dark. “It runs the western spine and gates at every executive floor. We want the sixty-first.”
“The penthouse?”
“Three entrances. Main door, terrace, and a service corridor off the kitchen. The corridor was sealed in a renovation six years ago, but the space is still in the load calculations.” Flynn’s finger traced a thin grey line. “It’s two feet wide. Single file. We’ll have to work for it.”
Dante took the crowbar and stepped into the dark. The metal was cold, wet with condensation. The shaft smelled of oil and rust and the patient hum of machinery that had been running longer than he’d been alive. He climbed by feel, counting floors through the vents. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty. His hands were aching, his shoulders burning, and the only thing keeping him moving was the image of her face, the way she’d looked at him in the school parking lot when the Blackthorn sedan had cut her off—not fear. Certainty. She had known he would follow.
At the sixty-first floor, the shaft opened into a crawlspace. Flynn went first, checking the blind corners, then waved him through. They crossed a mechanical room and reached a junction. Dante pressed himself against the wall, listening. The main door of the penthouse was around the corner, forty feet away.
“I’ll take the front,” Dante said.
“I’ll take the wall.” Flynn unshouldered a compact carbine, checking the sight. “You’ll get two minutes of his attention. Three if you’re lucky, and if I have to watch you die in there, I’m going to be annoyed.”
“You’re always annoyed.”
Flynn’s mouth barely moved. “Get your woman.”
—
The speaker on the wall clicked, and the silence split. “Jasper.” Dante’s voice—low, carrying the weight of stairs climbed and doors broken. “It’s over. Let her go.”
Jasper’s head turned toward the speaker. The gun against Lyra’s jaw eased by half a pound of pressure. “You’re not in a position to give orders, Blackwood.”
“I’m giving you a way out. Helipad. Fuel. A pilot named Nolan who’s already being paid.” A pause. “That’s the deal, Jasper. There’s no other deal coming.”
“And my father?”
“Your father is in federal custody. He’s been on your news feed for the last seven minutes. Stock’s in freefall. The board cleaned out his office this evening. There’s nothing left.”
Jasper’s eyes cut to the screen mounted near the credenza. Lyra looked too. On the muted feed, a silver-haired man in handcuffs was being walked across a floodlit apron toward a black car. The crawl read: BLACKTHORN INDUSTRIES C.E.O. ARRESTED—FRAUD AND RACKETEERING. In the corner, a timestamp ticked forward.
“Look at it,” Dante said. “Look at the time. You know it’s live.”
Jasper’s mouth worked. His hand on the gun shook. He was a man watching the ground beneath him vanish, clinging to the one piece of his life he had convinced himself he could save.
He never saw Lyra’s hand.
Her shoulder shifted an inch. Her fingers found the red lever on the fire alarm station at the edge of the pillar, within reach because he had dragged her past it without once checking his surroundings. She pulled.
The alarm didn’t scream. It was a deep, building groan that began far below and climbed toward them—steel shutters descending, locks engaging, the tower closing its eyes. The glass behind her began to vibrate as shutters lowered over the terrace.
Jasper whirled. He saw her hand on the lever, saw the drop of the shutters, felt the pressure of the room changing. The rage that crossed his face was raw enough to burn. He grabbed her collar, slammed her against the glass again, and pressed the muzzle to her temple.
“You just locked us in.”
“I locked him out.”
The main door swung open.
Dante stepped through, hands empty, eyes tracking from the lever on the pillar to her face to Jasper. He came in like a man entering a courtroom, slow and deliberate, his pulse visible in his throat. He stopped a safe distance away, shoulder blades nearly touching the shutters that now sealed the terrace.
“Jasper.” His voice was calm. “It’s over. Let her go.”
“You came alone.”
“I did.”
“Then you came to watch her die.”
“If I did that, you’d have nothing left. And you’ve already lost everything else.” Dante gestured with his chin toward the monitor, where the ticker still scrolled. “You’ve got one choice, Jasper. One. Be the man who lets her go, or be the man who drags her down with him. That’s your whole future, right there.”
Something flickered in Jasper’s eyes. The gun didn’t lower, but the pressure eased a fraction. He looked from Dante’s face to the monitor to Lyra, and something in his expression settled into a terrible, quiet certainty. He had never believed he could have her. Only that he could keep her from belonging to anyone else.
Jasper’s finger tightened. “If I can’t have you, no one will—”
The door exploded inward, and the shot that followed wasn’t Jasper’s.