my fucking keys, don’t I?” Angie snapped. “I must have dropped them in your bedroom.”
She pushed past him. Mason scrubbed his face roughly, wishing her a million miles away.
He put his hands down, his stomach sinking when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
Laila stood by the elevator, holding a paper bag of groceries to her chest. She blinked at him, turned her head, and shook it as if nodding to herself. Suddenly, Mason was very aware he was shirtless, his fly still partially unzipped.
Fuck. Laila didn’t say anything. She just hunched her shoulders down before hurrying to her door.
Angie brushed past him, shifting to face him briefly. “Thanks for nothing,” she snapped in a low voice.
Wild-eyed, he tried to sidestep around her. “Laila.”
But it was too late. Her door clicked shut. The unmistakable sound of the deadbolt sliding home like the fucking nail on the coffin.
Making a disgusted noise, Angie pivoted on her heel and stalked off.
Ignoring her, Mason knocked on the door. “Laila, open up. It’s not what you think. Please, let me explain.”
But it was no use. He kept knocking, calling to her, but she didn’t answer. And there was no way she could avoid hearing him. Her place was too small.
“Laila, please.”
Silence.
“Shit,” he swore under his breath.
I can’t even take the door off its hinges. They were on the inside. He also couldn’t scale the fire escape because Laila didn’t have one. Short of breaking down her door, there was nothing he could do.
The mission-alert ringtone on his phone sounded. “Fuck! Not now,” he grumbled, turning the alert off.
But that did no good since it just repeated in a loop, worse than the world’s most annoying morning alarm. With one last regretful glance at Laila’s closed door, he stepped into his apartment to call Dominic.
“Are we really getting called up?” Mason asked.
“Yeah, sorry if I caught you hungover, but we have a situation in Columbia—one of our regular contractors needs extraction ASAP,” Dom said, sounding a bit surprised to hear from him. “I would have preferred to give you a day to sleep off the celebrating, but when the shit hits the fan, we gotta move and do it fast. The good news is you’ll have time to sober up on the way.”
Mason’s hand tightened reflexively into a fist. “I have a problem. How much time do we have before wheels up?”
“An hour.”
Mason gritted his teeth. With traffic, that was barely enough time to grab his gear and get out to the airport.
He was quiet so long that Dominic got suspicious. “Are you thinking of sitting this one out?” his team leader asked, a slight hint of warning in his tone.
Technically, it was an option. Missing an op wasn’t ideal, but contractually Auric gave them a couple of hall passes, allowing them to miss up to two missions a year. No one ever used them unless they were down with the flu, or there was a death in the family.
“How bad would that look?”
Mason could almost hear Dom shrugging across the line. “Unless you’re dying, don’t do it,” his boss advised.
Mason swore under his breath. He’d hadn’t even gotten used to the idea of the promotion, but jeopardizing it less than twenty-four hours later seemed like a stupid idea.
“I’ll grab my gear and head out now,” he said.
“Good man,” Dominic said, clearly relieved. Noises resumed in the background, signaling the team leader had already moved on and was continuing to prep for their mission.
Mason murmured a distracted goodbye before clicking off. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chanted.
Grinding his teeth, he grabbed a sheet of paper off his desk. He scribbled a note to Laila, explaining what had happened in the plainest terms possible.
He paused, vacillating between adding something else. In the end, he just wrote down his cell number, even though she had it already.
I’m going to call you, he added in a postscript. Please pick up.
Grabbing his go bag, Mason locked up his apartment.
Shit, the plants.
He groaned aloud. Would she even bother watering them after this? He wouldn’t be surprised if Laila poured boiling hot water on his orchids, but what else could he do?
“Laila,” he tried one more time, knocking plaintively. Closing his eyes, he rested his forehead against the wood, willing it to open.
But it didn’t. He slipped his spare key underneath the gap at the bottom, pushing his note in behind it.
Vung Tran shuffled down the hall, shaking his head when he saw the crumpled piece of paper his neighbor