Hide and Seek
The travel from Valentin’s penthouse office to Motel hideout on Sunset Strip consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The motel room smelled of bleach and stale cigarettes, a combination that clung to the back of Vivian’s throat no matter how many times she swallowed. A single lamp burned on the nightstand between two double beds, casting long shadows across wallpaper patterned with faded roses. The curtains were drawn, the chain lock engaged, and Finn sat cross-legged on the far bed with a cheap coloring book spread across his knees.
He was filling in a giraffe with a brown crayon that had been chewed at the tip. His tongue poked out slightly in concentration. He looked, for a moment, like any other child on any other Tuesday.
Vivian sat on the edge of the mattress, her hands pressed flat against her thighs. She could still feel the vibrations from the drive—Valentin’s knuckles white on the steering wheel, the headlights cutting through the rain, the way he’d checked the rearview mirror every six seconds. They’d taken the back roads out of the city, looping twice through industrial districts before pulling into this lot behind a shuttered auto shop.
Beckett had secured the room in cash. No registrations. No digital footprints.
At least, that was the plan.
Finn looked up from his coloring book. “Mommy?”
She forced her mouth into something resembling a smile. “Yes, baby?”
“Why are we staying here? The other hotel had a pool.”
“This one has a vending machine with those crackers you like,” she said. “Remember the ones with the cheese?”
“The orange ones?”
“Those.”
He considered this, then returned to his giraffe. “Daddy said we’re playing hide and seek.”
Vivian’s chest tightened. Valentin had said exactly that, crouching down to Finn’s level in the car, his voice low and steady even as his hands shook on the drive over. *We’re going to play a game, buddy. A serious one. You have to be very quiet and very brave. Can you do that for me?*
And Finn, in the way of seven-year-olds who still believed their fathers were invincible, had nodded with solemn gravity.
“That’s right,” Vivian said now. “Hide and seek. And you’re doing a very good job.”
“Are the bad men after Daddy?”
The question landed like a stone dropped into still water. Vivian’s hand stilled on her thigh. Across the room, the digital clock on the microwave blinked 9:47 PM.
“Why do you ask that?” she said carefully.
Finn shrugged, still coloring. “You and Daddy whisper a lot. And Beckett had that gun.”
Vivian had hoped the boy hadn’t seen it—the dark shape beneath Beckett’s jacket when he’d leaned into the driver’s window before they left. Stupid. Hoping was stupid. Her son had eyes like his father, sharp and mercilessly observant.
“Daddy has some people who are angry with him about work,” she said. “That’s all. Business stuff.”
“Mr. Sterling’s mean.”
The name hit like a slap. Vivian’s vision went narrow at the edges.
“What do you know about Mr. Sterling?” she asked, and the words came out harder than she intended.
Finn looked up, startled. “He came to the studio once. Daddy told me to stay in the office. But I peeked.”
“When was this?”
“A long time ago. Before summer.”
Three months ago. Silas Sterling had walked into Valentin’s studio, into the space where her husband created the only honest thing in his life, and her son had been in the same building. Vivian felt something cold slide down her spine and settle at the base of her skull.
She stood up. The motion was too fast, and Finn looked at her with worried eyes.
“I’m just getting water,” she said. “Keep coloring. You’re doing that giraffe beautifully.”
The bathroom was small, the tile grouted in a shade that might once have been white. Vivian turned on the faucet to cover the sound of her breathing. She gripped the edge of the sink and watched her reflection in the yellowed mirror. The woman staring back looked thin, stretched, like taffy pulled too far from the knot.
*The boy has an accident.*
Those were Silas Sterling’s words, delivered through a phone call routed through three burners until it reached her husband at four in the morning. The voice had been calm, almost bored, as if discussing the weather.
Valentin had woken her with a hand over her mouth. Dressed her in the dark. Carried Finn to the car still wrapped in his blankets.
And now they were here, in a motel that charged by the hour, playing hide and seek with a man who had killed people for smaller reasons than a debt of three million pounds.
The faucet ran. Vivian counted to thirty. Then she shut it off and walked back into the room.
Finn had abandoned the coloring book. He was under the blanket on her bed, a lumpy shape with only his eyes visible at the edge.
“I’m hiding,” he whispered dramatically.
Vivian’s heart cracked along a fault line she hadn’t known existed. “You’re very good at it.”
“Is Daddy hiding too?”
“Daddy’s making sure the bad men don’t find us.”
She sat down on the bed beside him, and he crawled into her lap without being asked. The weight of him, warm and solid and trusting, pressed against her chest. He smelled like the cheap soap from the last motel, and somehow that was the most awful thing of all—that her son had begun to smell like borrowed rooms and borrowed sheets and borrowed safety.
Her phone buzzed. She snatched it from the nightstand before the sound could finish.
**Valentin:** *Beckett’s running the perimeter. You good?*
She typed back: *Fine. Finn’s asking questions.*
**Valentin:** *What kind?*
*The kind I don’t have answers to.*
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
**Valentin:** *I’m fixing it. Stay dark. Keep the chain on.*
She wanted to scream at him. *Fix it? Fix it with what? You can’t fix a man like Silas Sterling. You can’t negotiate with someone who threatens children. You can’t sign away a studio and expect him to keep his word, because men like that don’t keep their word, they keep leverage.*
But she typed: *I know.*
Because what else was there?
Finn’s breathing had evened out. He was falling asleep in her lap, his body going heavy and slack, his fingers curled loosely around the edge of her sleeve. She ran her hand over his hair, felt the fine strands slip between her fingers.
The room was quiet. The kind of quiet that fills spaces after something terrible has passed through.
Her phone buzzed again.
**Margot:** *Call me. Now.*
Vivian’s throat went dry. She eased Finn onto the bed, tucked the blanket around him, and retreated to the bathroom. The tiles were cold under her bare feet. She pressed the phone to her ear.
“Margot?”
“Viv.” Margot’s voice was ragged, thin, like she’d been crying or screaming or both. “They—they were here. In my apartment. They tore everything apart.”
Vivian’s knees hit the toilet seat before she realized she’d sat down. “When?”
“Tonight. An hour ago. I came home from the diner and the door was just—it was off the hinges. They dumped all my drawers, cut the couch open, broke my mother’s china.” A wet, shuddering breath. “The police said it looked like a random burglary. But Viv. The only thing they took was my laptop. My phone. My address book.”
The address book Margot had handwritten ten years ago, before smartphones, when they were both twenty-two and thought the future was a bright and shining thing. That book had names. Business numbers. And one entry for a rehearsal space in a strip mall that had once been used as a safe house during a strike.
The safe house Valentin had moved them to tonight.
“Margot, listen to me.” Vivian’s voice was steady, which surprised her. “I need you to get out of your apartment. Go to the all-night diner on Wilshire. The one with the cracked sign. Wait there.”
“Viv, what is happening? Who are these people?”
“I will explain everything. But right now, I need you to move.”
A pause. Then Margot’s voice, smaller: “Okay. Okay. I’m going.”
The line went dead.
Vivian sat in the bathroom for a full minute, the phone cold against her ear. The fan hummed overhead, a dull, mechanical drone that seemed to fill her skull.
She walked back into the main room and checked the window. The curtains were closed, but she peeled one corner back with her fingernail, just enough to see the street below.
A black sedan sat across the road. No lights. Engine off.
She couldn’t see the driver. The windows were tinted too dark. But she could feel eyes on the building—a weight, a pressure, a certainty that coiled in her stomach like a live wire.
Her phone buzzed again.
**Valentin:** *Decoy car is rolling west. Should draw their attention. Stay put.*
And then, three minutes later:
**Valentin:** *tracking alert on the safe house. Beckett is moving.*
Vivian stared at the screen. The tracking alert. The safe house.
Margot’s address book.
*Margot only knew the safehouse name.*
The realization hit her like a physical blow, dropping her stomach into freefall. She looked at the door. The chain lock was engaged. The deadbolt turned. But the footsteps she now heard in the hallway were not Beckett’s.
They were slow. Deliberate. Stopping precisely outside her room.
The lamplight flickered.
Finn stirred in his sleep, murmured something, and settled again.
Vivian’s thumb found the dial button. She pressed it before she could think, before she could rationalize, before she could do anything but act.
The phone connected. The footsteps stopped.
Vivian whispered into her phone, “Valentin, they found us. How? Margot only knew the safehouse name.”