Her Bodyguard’s Rules

The photograph was the wrong size.

That was the first thing my brain decided to fixate on, standing in my own bedroom at two in the afternoon with four people watching me not fall apart. Not the fact that someone had been in here. Not the fact that they’d stood close enough to my bed to frame the shot. Just that the print was four-by-six, glossy, the kind you got from a drugstore kiosk, and someone had propped it against the lamp on my nightstand like a get-well card.

In it, I was asleep. On my side, one bare shoulder showing above the duvet, mouth slightly open. Vulnerable in the specific way you only are when you think no one is looking.

Someone had been looking.

“Don’t touch it,” Renata said, for the third time, even though I hadn’t moved. She had her phone pressed to her chest like she was protecting it. “The firm wants it left exactly where it is.”

“The firm,” I repeated.

“Security. I told you. I’ve handled it.” Renata crossed the room and put her hand on my arm, and her rings were cold through my sleeve, and her face arranged itself into the expression she used in deposition photos and charity galas — concern, beautifully lit. “Lila. Sweetheart. Look at me. You’re safe. That’s the whole point of what I’ve set up. You will not have a single moment from now on where you are alone and unprotected. Okay? I promise you that.”

I looked at the photo instead.

I’d been performing some version of calm for forty minutes, ever since Theo found the print on his morning sweep and made a sound I’d never heard him make. I was good at it. I’d been performing some version of something since I was seventeen — calm, delight, heartbreak, gratitude, whatever the room needed, whatever sold. My whole career was a list of expressions I could produce on demand. Right now the room needed me composed, so I was composed, and underneath the composed thing my skin was crawling so badly I wanted to peel it off.

Theo hovered near the door, arms crossed, chewing the inside of his cheek. My assistant looked worse than I felt. “I checked the alarm logs,” he said. “There’s nothing. No forced entry, no tripped sensors, nothing on the cameras. It’s like he—” He stopped. “Like whoever. Walked in. Walked out. Didn’t trip anything.”

“Which means it’s somebody with access,” I said.

“Or somebody good.” A new voice.

I turned.

She’d come in without anyone announcing her, which should have been impossible, because the house was full of people and a literal locked gate, and I have a sense for movement in a room — I can feel an audience shift its weight from forty yards out, that’s a skill they don’t teach you, it just gets beaten into you. I hadn’t felt her arrive. She was just there, in the doorway, taking up more of it than seemed fair.

Tall. Taller than me by a head, and I’m not short. Built like the architecture had been designed around the muscle rather than the other way around — shoulders, forearms, a stillness that read less like calm and more like a thing deciding whether to move. Dark hair scraped back hard off her face. No jewelry. No softness anywhere. She wore a plain charcoal henley and tactical pants and boots that had clearly walked through worse rooms than mine, and she was looking at the photograph on my nightstand with an expression of total, clinical attention, like the rest of us — like me — had not yet entered her field of relevant data.

“Mara Vance,” Renata said, brightening into hostess mode. “Sable Group. She’s the principal protection agent I told you ab—”

“Don’t stand there,” Vance said.

It took me a second to realize she was talking to me.

“What?”

“You’re in the sightline of the window.” She still hadn’t looked at me. She crossed the room — and she moved like she’d been deleted and re-rendered three feet closer, no transition — and she stepped between me and the glass, and her hand came up and pressed flat against my sternum and walked me backward two steps without my permission. Just like that. A door closing.

I am touched constantly. By stylists, by makeup artists, by choreographers, by fans who grab, by costars who are contractually warm. I have not been surprised by a touch in years. Hands are part of the job; they stop registering.

Hers registered.

It was nothing — a flat, impersonal palm, the same way you’d reposition a lamp. It lasted under a second. But it landed right in the center of me and I felt it go down through my body like the floor had dropped two inches, and then she’d already let go and stepped back and the moment was over before I’d decided how to feel about it.

“There,” she said. “Anyone with a rifle and a parking spot down the hill has been able to watch this conversation since I walked in. You should assume from now on that someone is always watching, and behave accordingly. That’s not paranoia. That’s the photo.” She nodded once at my nightstand.

“Right,” I said. I hate how I sounded. Breathless. I’m never breathless; breath control is the first thing they teach you. “Hi. Thanks. Lila.”

“I know who you are.”

She said it without weight. Not impressed, not unimpressed. The way you’d confirm a name on a delivery. And then she turned away from me — away from me, while I was still standing there with my hand half-raised — and crouched down to look at the photo from the angle it had been taken.

I have walked into rooms my entire adult life and watched them tilt toward me. It’s not vanity to say it; it’s physics, it’s the thing I’m paid for. People orient. They lean. Their voices go up half a register. I can clear a hallway just by being beautiful in it.

She had looked at me for a total of maybe four seconds and then filed me somewhere and moved on to the more interesting problem of who wanted me dead.

I wanted, with a suddenness that alarmed me, to make her look again.

“Here’s what you should understand,” she said, quietly, near the end of that first day, “because it’ll make the next few weeks easier on you. I’m not going to be charmed. It’s not a challenge, it’s not me playing hard to get, it’s not something you can fix by being a little more interesting at me. It’s a load-bearing wall. The day I start finding you delightful is the day I start hesitating, and the day I hesitate is the day you end up in worse photographs than that one.” She nodded at the nightstand. “So flirt if it passes the time. I won’t take it personally. But I want you to know it’s hitting nothing. Are we clear?”

We were not clear. We were the opposite of clear. Because what she’d just done — and I don’t think she knew she’d done it — was tell me, in detail, exactly how to wreck her.

The day I start finding you delightful is the day I start hesitating.

She’d handed me the rule and the price of breaking it in the same breath, and some old, starving, contrary thing in me that had spent twelve years being adored by strangers and seen by no one sat up and went: I am going to make you hesitate.

“Crystal,” I said, and gave her the billboard smile, the real one, the one I save, and watched it hit the wall and slide off — and felt, God help me, felt the floor drop two inches all over again, that same drop from when her palm landed on my chest, except this time she hadn’t touched me at all.

I have never in my life been able to leave a thing like that alone.