The suit was charcoal. Single-breasted, slim cut, from a tailor in Midtown whose name Felicia had texted him along with the words "tell him Cat sent you" and nothing else. The tailor hadn't asked for ID or credit. He'd measured Troy in silence, disappeared into a back room, and come out with a suit that fit better than anything Troy had owned in either life.
Troy checked himself in the bathroom mirror at the flophouse. The mirror had a crack down the left side and a toothpaste stain he'd stopped trying to clean. The suit looked wrong in this room. Too good. A charcoal suit in a room with rust-stained porcelain and a mattress he could feel every spring through.
He straightened the collar. Rolled his shoulders. The fabric moved with him. Expensive fabric did that.
His phone buzzed. Cat emoji.
"Roof in 20. Don't be late."
He wasn't late.
Thursday night. Jazz night.
The line outside the club was fifteen people deep. Troy walked past it. The bouncer on the left, the bigger one, looked up from his clipboard.
"Name."
"Marcus Webb. I called ahead about the investment portfolio."
The name was Felicia's idea. A real person, a real investor, currently on a flight to Singapore and unreachable for the next fourteen hours. The portfolio meeting was a standing invitation Silvermane extended to anyone with enough money to launder.
The bouncer scanned the list. Found the name. Looked at Troy.
Charisma seven. Troy held the look. Relaxed posture, easy expression. He'd practiced it in the flophouse mirror for an hour, which was embarrassing, but it worked because the bouncer's shoulders dropped a fraction and he stepped aside and the red door opened.
Inside: dark wood, low lighting. A bar along the left wall, polished brass, bottles backlit in amber. Tables with candles. A stage in the back where a quartet was playing something slow, a trumpet and a standup bass doing most of the work. The crowd was suits and dresses and the smell of cologne and money and underneath it, faintly, cigar smoke from the private rooms upstairs.
He went to the bar. Ordered a whiskey he couldn't afford with a card Felicia had given him that belonged to Marcus Webb. The bartender poured without comment. Troy sipped and watched the room.
The coat check girl was young, bored, texting under the counter. Felicia had been right about her. She watched every face that came through the door and her eyes went to the stairs more often than someone checking coats needed to.
The stairs were in the back, past the restrooms. One guard, standing, arms crossed. Big enough to block the staircase with his body. A camera above the landing pointed down at the bottom step.
Troy finished his whiskey. Checked his watch. Felicia should be on the roof by now.
He walked to the men's room. Second floor access was through the staircase, but the junction box was here, on the ground floor, behind the mirror. The men's room had two stalls, a urinal, and a mirror that ran the full length of the wall. Marble counter. The place put more money into its bathrooms than Troy's entire building was worth.
The mirror was mounted with clips. He pulled the bottom edge forward. Behind it: a metal panel, screwed shut, with cables running into the wall. The junction box.
He didn't have a screwdriver. He had a fork from the bar, palmed on the way past. The screws were Phillips head. The fork's tine fit loosely, slipping twice, and the third screw stripped halfway and he had to grip it with his fingers and twist and his new strength made the difference between a stripped screw staying put and a stripped screw coming out.
The panel opened. Cables. Color-coded, labeled, running to different floors. Third from the left. He pinched it, pulled. The cable popped free.
Ninety seconds.
The guard at the staircase was gone.
The guard was supposed to be there. Troy had a name and a story ready. Empty staircase meant the guard was somewhere else in the building and that was worse than knowing where he was.
He went up the stairs. Fast. The camera above the landing was dark, a dead red light where the active one should have been. Sixty seconds left. Maybe less.
Second floor. Hallway. Private rooms on either side, doors closed. Music and voices from behind two of them. The carpet was thick enough to muffle his steps. He moved to the next staircase.
A door opened halfway down the hall.
The guard. Stepping out of a private room with a glass in his hand, mid-conversation with someone inside, and he turned and saw Troy in the hallway and the glass stopped moving.
"Hey. You're not supposed to be up here."
He ran. Speed six put him down the hallway and around the corner before the guard finished his sentence. He heard the glass hit carpet behind him and footsteps, heavy, fast, and the guard was big but big didn't mean fast and Troy was faster. He reached the staircase to the third floor. Took the stairs three at a time. His heart was in his throat and his hands were shaking but his legs were steady, the speed holding.
Third floor. One hallway. Three doors. The one at the end had a keycard reader with a green light, which meant it was unlocked, which meant someone had already been through it.
Felicia was already inside.
He pushed the door open. Silvermane's office. Dark wood, leather chairs, a desk the size of a pool table. A painting on the wall, a seascape, hung crooked. Behind it, the wall safe, door open, and Felicia crouched in front of it with her hands inside.
Green eyes looked up at him. She'd done this before.
"You're early," she said. "The camera went out faster than I expected."
"The guard was off-schedule."
"I know. I heard him on the stairs. You're fast." She pulled stacks of cash from the safe. Banded hundreds. She counted by weight, not by number, tossing bundles into a bag. Between the cash: folders. Manila, unlabeled, thick with paper.
"Documents," she said. "Silvermane's network. Connections, accounts, names. These are worth more than the money if you know who to sell them to."
She kept the cash. He palmed a folder while she counted and slipped it inside his jacket. She saw him do it. Her eyes tracked the folder from the safe to his hand to his jacket and she said nothing and he noticed.
The alarm went off.
Loud. A flat electronic scream that filled the building. Red lights in the hallway, strobing. Felicia closed the safe, spun the dial, stood.
"That wasn't ninety seconds."
"Someone found the cable."
She went for the window. Not the hallway, not the stairs. She crossed Silvermane's office in four steps, shoved the window up, and was on the fire escape in the time it took Troy to reach the desk.
He followed. The fire escape was narrow, rusted, three stories up with a drop to the alley that would break both legs if the landing went wrong. Felicia was already climbing. Up, not down. Toward the roof.
He climbed. His hands gripped the cold metal and his arms pulled his weight up the ladder and his new strength pulling him up fast, one rung two rungs three and he was on the roof and Felicia was twenty feet ahead, running.
He ran.
The gap between buildings was six feet. She cleared it without slowing, a leap that took her from one rooftop to the next in a motion that looked casual and covered a distance that would have killed him a month ago. He hit the edge and jumped and the gap opened below him, the alley three stories down, and his speed carried him across and his feet hit gravel and he kept running.
She looked back over her shoulder, mid-stride, and she was grinning. Wide, wild, her hair streaming behind her.
Another gap. Wider. She cleared it. He cleared it. Barely. His trailing foot caught the far edge and gravel scattered and he stumbled forward two steps and caught his balance and she was still running and he was still behind her but he was behind her by fifteen feet instead of thirty and the gap was closing.
He was keeping up. His legs burning, his lungs working, his heart hammering, but his speed was holding and her lead wasn't growing and the buildings were blurring past and he could hear her laughing ahead of him in the dark.
They ran for six blocks. Seven. The alarm faded behind them. No pursuit on the rooftops. The Maggia had guns, not parkour. By the eighth block she slowed to a jog and then a walk and then she stopped at the edge of a building and put her hands on her knees and breathed.
He stopped beside her. His chest was heaving. His suit was ruined, gravel dust and sweat and a tear in the left knee from the bad landing. His hands were scraped from the fire escape.
"You kept up," she said. Still breathing hard. Looking at him sideways.
"I kept up."
"That's new."
Her safehouse was four blocks south. A walk-up above a dry cleaner, different from her apartment, a place she kept for after jobs. One room. A bed, a table, a chair. The window had curtains.
She dumped the bag on the bed. Cash spilled across the sheets. She sat in the middle of it and started counting. Her fingers moving through the bills, sorting, stacking, and the catsuit was unzipped to her sternum and her hair was wrecked from the run and she was sitting in a pile of stolen money on a bare mattress and the lamplight caught the hollow of her throat and the skin between her breasts where the zipper ended.
Troy stood in the doorway.
She looked up. Stopped counting. Her hands went still on the cash. Her eyes went from his face to his chest to his hands hanging at his sides and back to his face.
The documents were in his jacket. The cash was on her bed. The alarm was still ringing eight blocks north.
"Door's right there," she said.
Her voice was steady but her pupils were wide and her chest was still rising fast from the run and the zipper was down to her sternum and the lamplight was warm on the skin between her breasts.
He stepped inside. Closed the door. Locked it.