Chapter 109: Run

Chapter 109: Run
Valerie waited twenty minutes after Max stepped out to take another call.
She didn't bolt immediately. She thought it through. She sat on the edge of the chair in that room and ran through her options.
The main lobby would have cameras and staff. The elevators would be worse. But the service corridors—she'd noticed them earlier in the day, when one of the hotel staff had come through a door near the conference room that didn't have a room number on it.
She gave herself thirty seconds to talk herself out of it.
Then she picked up her clutch and walked out.
The service door opened with a firm push. She moved fast once she was through it. The corridor was narrow and fluorescent-lit. She passed a laundry cart and a woman in a uniform who glanced at her but said nothing. She kept going.
She found a stairwell and took it down two floors, pushed through another door, and came out in a different corridor, wider this time, and she could hear the low noise of the lobby ahead—the ambient sound of a large hotel in the middle of the evening.
She came around the corner, and there it was. The main lobby, fifty feet away; the front entrance beyond it; and through the glass doors, the lights and traffic of the street outside.
She walked toward it.
She was twenty feet from the door when Max stepped into her path.
She didn't know where he'd come from. He was just suddenly there, in front of her, and the look on his face was not angry. He was calm.
"Don't," he said quietly.
She went around him.
He moved with her, blocking again, and this time he took her by the arm. Like hitting a wall, she tried to pull free, and his grip didn't change at all.
"You're making a scene,Val," he said.
"Good," she said, and pulled harder.
He turned her, walked her away from the lobby entrance and back toward the corridor they'd come from, and she went because the alternative was screaming in the middle of a hotel lobby, which she calculated for about two seconds before deciding that the staff would defer to him and she'd end up in the same place anyway, just with more people watching.
"Let go of me," she said, once they were back in the corridor.
He didn't let go. He kept walking, moving her ahead of him, turning her toward a different stairwell—going down this time, not up.
"Where are we going?"
"Out of the hotel."
"That's what I was trying to do."
"Not the same way," he said.
She tried again when they hit the stairwell. She twisted hard and got her arm free for about two seconds before he had her again, and this time he just picked her up. He put her over his shoulder and kept walking down the stairs.
"Put me down," she said. "Max. Put me down right now."
He didn't answer.
"I'll scream."
"We're in a stairwell," he said.
She didn't scream. She pushed against his back, grabbed at his jacket, and made herself as difficult as possible, and he navigated three flights of stairs with her across his shoulder like she was a piece of luggage he was mildly inconvenienced by.
The basement parking garage was cold and dim. He pushed through the door, and she lifted her head and saw it—a large black car, idling in the middle of the garage floor. And flanking it, three men in dark suits, standing at even intervals, hands relaxed at their sides, watched Max come through the door without any surprise on their faces.
“They've been there for a while?” She went still for a moment, looking at them.
This was not a hired car and a couple of security staff members. The way these men watched Max — not deferential exactly, but attentive, waiting for instruction — told her everything about what kind of person he actually was.
She renewed her effort to get down, and he tightened his hold without breaking stride.
"Stop," she said. "I said stop—"
He pulled the rear door open, put her inside, got in after her, closed the door, and she immediately went for the other side. He caught her and pulled her back, and she turned and hit him—open hand against his chest, then again—then tried to shove him toward the door.
He let her do it for about five seconds, and then he pulled her back against him, crossed his arms over her, locked her in, and brought his legs around on either side of hers so she had no leverage at all. Her back was against his chest. She couldn't move her arms. She couldn't push off anything.
She struggled anyway, for longer than was probably useful.
He held on and said nothing, and the car pulled out of the garage and started moving, and gradually—because she was furious and breathing hard and running out of ways to be useful about it—she started to go still.
Max’s arms didn't loosen. But they weren't hurting her either, and the way he was holding her was very controlled, and she became aware at some point that the way his chest rose and fell behind her was slow and even when hers was not, and that his arms had shifted almost imperceptibly, with less restraint.
She stared straight ahead.
Neither of them spoke.
By the time the car pulled into another underground garage—a different hotel, from the look of it—she had her breathing back under control and her jaw set.
Max released her when the car stopped. He got out, opened her door, and held out his hand, which she did not take.
He looked at her. "Can you walk, or do I carry you again?"
"Touch me again, and I'll break your nose," she said, and got out on her own.
He almost smiled.
They took a private elevator up from the garage. He had a keycard she didn't recognize for a floor she hadn't been on. He walked her down the corridor, opened a room, and gestured for her to go inside.
She walked in.
He came in after her and held out his hand. "Your phone."
She looked at him.
"Valerie."
She took it out and put it in his hand. He pocketed it. He picked up her clutch from the side table where she'd dropped it, removed her hotel access card, and set the clutch back down.
Then he walked to the door.
"There's food coming in an hour," he said. "The room's clean. Don't try the windows — we're eleven floors up."
He left. The lock turned from the outside.