Maelstrom

Chapter 50: Not Everyone's Happy

Monday morning

Sharp knocking on the front door was not how I expected to be awakened, and from the tension radiating from Ivan's strong arms, still wrapped around me, it was a surprise to him as well.

"Who ...?" I started to ask, but he quickly shh'ed me as the knocking fell silent. He rolled off the bed and snatched up his underwear, pulling them on quickly as the pounding began again. I pulled myself up and started looking for clothes, then froze as I heard the scrape of metal on the front door's lock.

Ivan's face was an unreadable mask. He yanked open the bedside drawer, pulling out a SIG Sauer GSR with – alarmingly – a silencer attachment locked in place, and suddenly the reality of our situation came crashing in on me. Ivan was a high-level employee of a Mexican drug cartel, and someone was trying to enter his apartment. He hastily chambered a round and headed out of the bedroom.

"Stay here," he ordered, and closed the door behind him.

Fuck that. My initial reaction was to suit up and charge out, guns blazing. Of course, I had no guns, and no body armor or suit or even a decent set of clothing, for that matter. The Miami T-shirt was still on the floor of the office, but I pulled on the lace boyshort – again – and grabbed another T-shirt from Ivan's open closet before heading over to the bedroom door, listening carefully as I pulled the soft cotton over my head.

I heard the two deadbolts flip back in their housing and the front door open.

"I see you are here," a deep voice boomed. The speaker sounded extremely pissed off, if not exactly murderous.

The door closed. "Jesus, Mateo," Ivan cursed. "You scared the shit out of me. Next time text, or call, before you just start letting yourself in." I heard the click of the safety sliding back into the gun, and the thud of the piece being dropped onto the kitchen counter.

"I did," Mateo responded. "Repeatedly. You didn't answer."

I remembered Ivan's smartphone lying on the floor of the home office next to the desk, not too far from that T-shirt. He must have remembered then as well, as I heard a mumbled apology.

"I was starting to think you had somehow slipped out without us noticing, even though Marsh kept insisting you would have had to have been bitten by a radioactive spider to do it. ... Is she still here?" he demanded suddenly.

There was a cold silence for a moment. "Do you think that she was perhaps bitten by a radioactive spider?" Ivan asked. "Of course, she's still here. You would know if either of us had left."

"Logically, that's true, but it's been going on 40 hours since either of us laid eyes on you, so I was starting to think we mighta missed something. The only way we knew you had made it home at all was the trail of women's clothing scattered down the hallway, and Marsh recognizing it as the shit the bartender was wearing," Mateo snapped. I had completely forgotten about the cape, and the shoes, and the stockings that we had carelessly thrown out of the elevator in our impassioned frenzy. "What the fuck is going on?"

I started. I had never heard the bodyguard be anything other than professional, even deferential, to his boss, but now he was actually admonishing Ivan for his behavior?

"What's going on is my personal business," Ivan spat out. "And therefore none of your fucking business. I understand that it's sometimes difficult to find the line between where one of those begins and the other ends, but trust me – you're definitely on the wrong side of it right now." Ivan's voice was positively arctic; I actually began to feel sorry for the hulking security guard.

There was a moment of silence when I was afraid to breathe. "I'm sorry," Mateo apologized reluctantly. "It's just ... this isn't like you – I mean, evading police tails, slipping off to who knows where with no security, sending us off to lay down a false trail while you go home alone with some bimbo, not checking in at all. You have to admit – this is new territory."