Page 30 of The Company We Keep

It was a bad plan to allow himself to be plied with alcoholon the first night there. But Dust felt as if he hadn’t let his guard down in years — maybe not in a decade. Maybe the last time had been with Gordon.

You didn’t make friends at the top of your class. Even Caroline Leiby had not been Dust’sfriend.A confidante, a mentor — yes. But not someone who asked him questions about his personal life, not someone who shared stupid stories or loaned you his swim trunks.

Against all odds, Vashvi and Wayles acted like they wanted a friend in him. (And,some half-forgotten part of his brain told him in the background of his consciousness,infiltrating The Company means gaining their acceptance as much as it does Carrow’s, Wright’s, and Dent’s.)

So he allowed himself to be swept in the current of the evening as midnight dissolved to the morning hours and Wayles outdid himself with stranger and stranger drink requests.

The scenery was intoxicating, too: the generous lap-pool washed in lights that cycled through colors, lilac to aqua to pale yellow, the breeze off the Pacific Ocean, the sounds of Las Abras at night barely reaching them at the 45th floor.

It was easy to feel invincible in the penthouse, looking down on the rest of the city. Dust could certainly see the appeal.

The night only began to wind down when Vashvi was yawning. Herron suggested that they all turn in. Dust dried off with a plush towel, following Wayles’ lead as the young man tossed his own towel down what Dust assume was a laundry shoot before padding barefoot to the stairwell.

He had paced himself and the ground only swelled a little bit as he walked. Too buzzed to drive, but not falling down drunk.

His face hurt from smiling so much.

They reached the penthouse proper, Vashvi and Herronbreaking off and heading in the direction of the bedrooms.

“You’re not headed to bed?” Dust asked when Wayles turned to pad through the kitchen to the corridor where he assumed most of the storage and work rooms were housed.

“Not tired,” Wayles said. “Think I’m going to tap into the museum’s security cameras — see if there’s anything else interesting to steal. You wanna come with?”

Dust shook his head.

“Suit yourself. Sleep well.”

Dust turned towards the long hallway that housed the suites before realizing that he had no idea which room was his own.

Walking down between Vashvi and Wayles, trying to keep track of the conversation flying between the two of them, Dust had neglected to make much of a mental note as to which room was his own. At the time, most of the suite doors had been cracked or open completely — and so Dust hadn’t realized that the doors looked practically identical.

He tried to retrace his steps from earlier that evening. His brain was uncomfortably foggy. Maybe hehadhad more to drink than he realized.

Third on the left. That had to be it.

He opened the door and the room inside was pitch black. Dust fumbled along the wall, reaching for a light switch. Not finding one, he willed his eyes to adjust faster and sighed audibly. It was going to take him for goddamned ever to get his bearings in this place.

Several things happened at once, then, and Dust’s exhausted and liquor-addled mind failed to follow.

Someone grabbed him around the chest from behind — someone taller than him, wider — and he felt the unmistakable sensation of a knife’s edge against his throat.

He should have been scared, but in his haze, all he could think was “God, I just wanted to go to sleep.”

“What are you doing, Wrenshall?”

Carrow. Of course. He was breathing hard, his bare chest against Dust’s back.

“Wrong room,” he said quickly, the pieces falling together. “I got lost.”

Dust let his weight sag back against Carrow, as if to communicate that he meant no threat by the intrusion, as if the connection between their bodies could somehow reinforce the statement that it had been an innocent mistake.

“Wrong answer,” Carrow growled, pressing the blade harder against his throat.

Dust sighed.

I’m in your room because I’m an undercover federal agent who wasn’t actually trying to gather intelligence about California’s most wanted criminal but ended up stumbling into his bedroom anyway.

“Well, what’dya wanna hear, boss?” Dust said, frustrated. “You can slit my throat now but you’ll have to deal with Wayles crying about how it’s his fault since he plied me with drinks all night.”

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