He nodded.
“You’re low profile?” I said.
“I attempt to be, at least in the outside world,” he said.
“What’s the outside world?” I asked, momentarily thrown off course.
“Do you know my business, Milan?” he said.
“I’m guessing you’re not a florist,” I replied, to which he laughed as richly as I had heard him.
“No, I’m not. I’ll spare you details, but I think it’s enough to say that some of my activities fall outside of legal boundaries.”
“So you’re a criminal?” I asked.
A useless question that didn’t need to be spoken and needed an answer even less, though Priest supplied it anyway.
“Yes,” he said.
He’d just confessed to being a criminal, one of the least revealing revelations I’d ever heard. I waited for some reaction, anger, disgust, something, but there was none. Priest was a criminal. I glanced down at his sleeve and centered my eyes on the dark weave of his suit jacket.
Priest also had an excellent tailor. That fact held more weight than the revelation he was a criminal. It was something that should have mattered, something that should have made me recoil, at least should have made me question the trust I had in him.
I didn’t question that trust, though. Not for a single second.
“So a criminal, huh?” I finally said.
He nodded.
“And an important one?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t draw attention to yourself?”
“Exactly.”
“So…” I trailed off, trying think of the best way to ask my question. “So why come to the police station?”
He looked at me again, and then back to the street, but I’d seen something in his eyes. “Would you believe me if I told you I came back for you?”
I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t sure if he saw it, but something told me he didn’t miss much. “Well obviously. It would be far too coincidental for you to have happened to be there at exactly the same time as me,” I said.
His lips crinkled ever so slightly, but for him, it was close enough to a smile that I had to return it.
“Maybe I had other business there,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So now that we’ve established you came for me, the question still stands. Why? I mean, going to the police station is not a low-profile thing. You were probably caught on camera at the very least. What if I hadn’t been outside?”
I spat my questions rapid-fire, my mind now churning as I considered the possibilities.
“I would have come in,” he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Okay, but that doesn’t answer my question. Why?”
Again, his eyes turned to me and then back. “I had concerns about your safety. And I owe you,” he said.
“For Tiffany?” I whispered, the levity that had been building as the conversation had continued wiped away within the space of those two words.
“For everything.” He glanced at me yet again, a look I couldn’t label anything but regret in his eyes. “There’s no reason for you to believe me, Milan, but I am regretful that I had to involve you in this. There are things I can’t change, things I can’t give you back, but I owe you this, and I will see that you come through it unharmed,” he said.
I believed him.
As unbelievable at it was, as terrified as I should have been, I believed him.
There was a certain logic to it, I supposed. Sure, it was possible that this was some nefarious plan that involved him ending up in my car, sparking the attraction that I knew wasn’t one-sided, and ended with him luring me away from the police station, only for me to end up in a shallow grave or meet some worse fate.
That logic was flawed, at least from my admittedly skewed point of view. I was no one, a dreamer with no specific dream, one who would have never crossed paths with Priest in ordinary circumstances. Besides, if Priest had intended me harm, he’d had every opportunity to do so. He hadn’t, so the only conclusion was that he hadn’t wanted to.
Warmth bloomed in my chest and settled in my stomach, a comfortable weight that helped chase away some of the sadness. Maybe the explanation was convenient, one I was falling back on because it made me as happy as I could be right now.
But I didn’t think so. The explanation was convenient, but it was also true.
“So you’re going to put me on a bus or something?” I asked.
“That displeases you?” he said, and it was only after he spoke that I was able to notice that I again had let my emotion bleed through.
“Yes. I can’t go hide while whoever killed Tiffany gets away with it.”