Page 21 of Edge of Control

I got off at Canal Street.

I should have gone home.

The python wrapped tighter. My mouth was bone-dry. I swallowed what felt like a handful of glass.

The streets were slightly more populated here. There were a few bars down the corner that were popular, patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk, half stumbling as they looked around for their Ubers or headed toward the subway. A gay bar had music blasting through the windows of a second-floor building. A drag queen leaned out of the fire escape, her sequined blue dress catching the fluorescent light from the streetlamp as she lip-synced to a Lady Gaga song.

“Marry the Night,” it was called.

How romantic.

This night called for a divorce.

I continued down the street. Took a left. Then a right. Walked past a well-lit corner store where a homeless man sat on a bed of cardboard boxes. Trash bags were piled up like stinking towers of black nylon. A rat scurried into one of the towers, shuffling through the bags on the hunt for food.

There. It was Jace’s building.

I shouldn’t be here.

I should be home.

Jace…

My thoughts resembled a window that had been shot.So many threads, so many shards, not a single one making sense. None. My panic increased. I tiptoed toward a full-blown panic attack. Dread weighed on my chest like an invisible anchor, pulling me under. Drowning. This was wrong.

I continued forward past Jace’s building. I stopped at the offices next door. I looked around the street. It was empty. Not for long, though. I had to be quick. I hurried into the narrow alley that created a thin gap between the two structures. It reeked of rotten milk and mildew. There should have been… yes. There. A door.

One I had scouted out a week earlier. I had lifted the key from a maintenance worker when I was “interviewing” a few days ago. I didn’t think I’d be using it so soon.

But, well, here we were.

I took the key from my pocket and pushed it into the lock. It opened. I let go of the breath I’d been holding since this night had started. The python eased up. Only by a little bit.

I entered the office building. It was owned by an accounting firm. Everyone here worked strict hours with very little overtime. I had watched them all leave at around the same time every day. Like ants following each other in neat little rows toward the closest happy-hour spot. Sometimes a few stayed, but they were mostly located on the topmost floors.

I just had to go to the fourth.

There was no alarm, either. Not with the security stationed at the front lobby.

A lobby I didn’t have to walk past. The door in the alleyled me directly into the bottom of the trash chutes. The stench of spoiled milk encased me. A cockroach ran past me as the light automatically clicked on. I walked past the trash bins and out into a narrow—and empty—hallway.

I’d made it inside.

Next was getting upstairs. I walked as if I worked here. Like I was just putting in my overtime hours. That was a secret I’d learned over the years of pretending, of acting the part. If you carried your shoulders high and kept a quick pace, people rarely asked you questions, always assuming you were someone they just hadn’t interacted with yet. That was the magic of this city. You could disappear in plain sight. Everyone else had something to worry about, something to distract them. Or they simply just didn’t care enough to think twice about a random NPC walking past them.

That’s what I tried to embody. A character in a side quest. Barely important.

No one stepped out of an office, no security bumped into me.

I reached the fourth floor and walked past empty cubicles. The main lights remained off, but ambient lighting from the outside gave me more than enough to maneuver with. I went directly to the floor-to-ceiling window that gave me a direct view into the apartment building next door.

Right into Jace’s apartment.

I’d made it. And there he was.

Jace Holloway. Sitting on his couch. The curtains were drawn open, a floor lamp casting his living room in a warm orange glow. He had his bare feet propped up on the coffee table. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of green boxers. He lazily scrolled through his phone with one hand, the other resting on his chest. His foot tapped to some unknown beat. The television flickered different-colored lights in front of him.

The invisible python uncoiled itself from my ribs. I could breathe normally again.

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