As always, Baz beat Gwen to the diner. Curious how that kept happening, despite the fact Baz had to call an Uber to get there. Was it a deliberate power play or just a side effect of an utter lack of concern for anyone else? Did it matter either way?
Baz carefully stacked another coffee creamer onto his pyramid, a teetering tower of anxiety kept waiting. It gave his agitation something to do, a productive show for the nervous itch in his fingers.
It also got him concerned glances from the waitress, a clear reminder that he'd been waiting twenty minutes, sipping orange juice by himself. His smile grew weaker and weaker each time he had to insist to the uniformed woman that he was waiting for someone.
The more time he waited, the more he wasted. The duffle bag sat at his feet and Baz was as painfully aware of that as he was of his waitress looking at him like he might be a sad puppy in a window. She wouldn't be so sympathetic if a swath of police officers came in and tackled him to the ground, confiscating his bag of priceless stolen artifacts.
Funny how he never worried so much when he was actually stealing them. That was before he had a motive or an identity. Who would catch him when he had no personal stake in the crime?
Funny how he'd gone from faceless man-in-black to disgruntled employee and accomplice of Rei Collingwood.
A bell jangled above the door and Baz looked up, his nerves fraying a little more each time it tolled. The creamer pyramid collapsed on itself. Baz drained his orange juice.
The second he considered getting up and walking out, Gwen strutted in. It was as if she could sense it. She could probably smell fear, too. Unfortunate.
As always, she was too well-dressed for the venue, for the time of day. Even in a high-collared dress, a plunging keyhole revealed the kind of cleavage that belonged on a red carpet and was jarringly unexpected in a breakfast diner.
She slid into the booth, facing him across the table. "I thought I better check up on you," Gwen said, "make sure that hangover didn't kill you."
"I lived," Baz said, using the scattered coffee creamers as an excuse to avoid eye contact, putting them all back in their metal rack.
"I see that."
Maybe she did care about his well-being, but only because he could still be useful. He could be very useful, which only served to frazzle him more. Half-truths couldn't serve him against Gwen and he didn't trust himself to lie. Not well, at least.
"You look good," Baz reached for the words, immediately finding them obtuse to say out loud to a model, "considering..."
"Paparazzi would love me disheveled." Gwen waved a dismissive hand. She always looked good, even while her father was dying and her supposed friend was supposedly missing. "I want to talk about our manhunt."
The waitress mercifully interrupted, sliding Gwen a menu, a glass of water, and a genial smile. Gwen pasted one on in return.
Baz's heart pounded in his ears. Maybe the waitress would hear his telepathic SOS signals, stick around to keep the talk of anything serious at bay. Let her try to make small talk for a bigger tip.
She didn't. She whisked off to serve other customers.
"Well?" Gwen raised a feline eyebrow. It was a dare. Worse, it might have been truth, a middle school girl at his first boy-girl party asking him to repeat the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him. Gwen reminded him entirely too much of middle school, daring him to say the wrong thing in front of her, trying to trick him into it at every turn just to use it against him later. Start a vicious rumor.
Except, rumors now would lead to a lot more than an unfortunate nickname. If he slipped, she could get him arrested.
"I've been a little preoccupied. Trouble at work," Baz said. "Did the police track down that phone number? The one the hospital had listed?" He let his gaze flick up to her for a second. Not making eye contact probably said just as much as meeting her eye.
"You know, I managed to track it down myself. I remembered you telling me something about an apartment," Gwen said, tilting her head.
Baz stiffened, as if pulling from some ancient instinct that said if he didn't move, Gwen wouldn't see him. Shit. He had said that in a red wine haze. He told Gwen what he knew before he even figured it out for himself. The whole night had been a mistake, and if Baz hadn't seen the softer, undone side of Gwen, he might've believed that the entire invitation had been a power play. Maybe it was, but there had been a certain vulnerability there. Gwen was not an actress, but perhaps she was not beyond capitalizing on her own self-doubt.
Gwen could piece together the clues Baz cluelessly led her to; Baz had to reverse engineer a photograph in Rei's penthouse bedroom. All Gwen had to do was remember that her father owned an apartment building.
"Yeah. I guess I did," Baz said stiffly, "and still no Rei?"
This was just cross-examination under the guise of a chat. Why? Even Jasper had the decency to come straight out and threaten Baz. Gwen smiled.
"And still no Rei," Gwen mimicked back to him. "How long have you known, Baz?" She folded her hands in front of her. Her manicured nails suddenly looked more like deadly claws: blood red and fully prepared to sink into his chest and yank out his heart.
"Less than 48 hours," Baz said. What good would it do him to lie? Gwen was setting him up for failure, ready to extort fumbling deception from him when she already knew the truth. How was still unclear, but she undoubtedly did and Baz was rather disinterested in making the encounter worse by denying it.
"Did you tell her about wine night?" Gwen said, delicately jabbing at a weakness she'd already uncovered, both Baz's and maybe Rei's as well.
"What do you need from her, exactly?" Baz asked, sitting up a little bit straighter. Gwen wasn't the only one in possession of certain facts. Baz had his own up his sleeve and as long as he wasn't playing innocent bystander anymore, he might as well use Gwen's confrontation to seek out his own answers.
The waitress swooped back in, looking between them with a customer service smile pasted over her own clear instincts. There was no way she couldn't feel the tension.
Gwen ordered a fruit cup, sending the waitress away again, menu in hand. Gwen didn't look at him. Validation flooded in. Baz wasn't the only one who stooped to such a tactic. She couldn't deny that Rei mattered. Every conversation they had circled back to Rei.
"You trashed her room, didn't you?" The moment he said it, it seemed terribly obvious. Had she used him as an excuse to escape up to the second level of the apartment? Was that why she offered to give him a tour, so she had an alibi to search for the box? Then Baz beat her to it.
They had both been after the same thing, colliding conveniently together, but they couldn't both have it.
How would life have gone if Gwen found the box first? Found it empty? Would Baz have still been tasked with the same job of finding Rei? Would he still have run into Gwen at the museum? In any alteration of events, did Baz get off scot-free?
There was something so deeply relieving and simultaneously upsetting about imagining that he was destined for these circumstances that there was no way around it. He was both freed from responsibility of changing something in the past, and cursed by the inevitable clawing, desperate escape from it.
"I always thought it was too personal. All the flipped furniture and broken glass," Baz pressed.
Gwen rolled her eyes, but in a way that suggested she was attempting to hide a deeper emotion than disdain. Finally, a nerve Baz could hit.
"Do you think you're clever?" she asked.
No. If Baz truly was, he would've thought of a good excuse not to come. Instead of avoiding this conversation, Baz was stuck in the middle of it. How smart could he be?
"Do you think I am?" Baz replied, for lack of a better answer.
Gwen didn't have a chance to answer before the waitress reappeared, starkly cheerful, bringing Baz back out of the tension under his skin and bringing Gwen a fruit cup. In a yellow-diner-dress flash, she was gone again, not realizing the time she had given Gwen to consider an answer.
Gwen toyed with her spoon, swirling peach slices around the bowl. Baz considered just getting up and leaving. How hard could it be? How could leaving Gwen sitting in the booth by herself be more difficult than his graceful exit from Rei's penthouse?
"Too personal... you think trashing a room was too personal?" She looked up.
He'd misstepped.
"Too personal, for what exactly?" Gwen said.
Baz hadn't considered his language, the implication he put out. She'd been waiting for it. Maybe she already suspected and was just waiting for him to unwittingly confirm.
"It's very personal to break someone's mirror," Baz replied. He kept his hands under the table, letting them shake out of sight. She knew. She knew she knew she knew.
"As opposed to... someone else being in that room and approaching it from a de-personal perspective?" Gwen said.
Baz wished the most nerve-wracking thing about that sentence was that de-personal was not a word. How did he continue without backpedalling and without handing over a written and signed confession of guilt?
"What do you think I was doing in there? Smashing mirrors?" Gwen pressed, leaning over the table. If whatever came out of his mouth next didn't betray him, surely the bass drum beat of his heart did.
"I don't hear a denial," Baz said.
Gwen smiled and it felt like he'd been stabbed somewhere between his fourth and fifth ribs. "Baz, the thing is, if I'm wrong and you didn't disappear from Rei's apartment with a box, I can still point out every one of your fingerprints all over her library. I can seed the idea into that doorman's head. I can vouch for you vanishing partway through the party. Between the two of us, who do you think is more persuasive?"
Her accusation did have the added weight of being accurate. Rei was still missing as far as the police were concerned. If Gwen dialed three little numbers, she could have him in handcuffs within the hour.
"But you haven't yet..." Baz said. There was a catch and his stomach twisted. There was the familiar smell of extortion and pancakes in the air.
"I just want to know where she is," Gwen said, "that's it."
"At this very moment, I can't tell you," he said.
"Well, maybe you know where the match to this is?" Gwen reached over into her purse, producing a single black glove and tossing it onto the table.
She'd been there, to the Faraday apartment. No Rei in sight, but there was his missing glove. The secret apartment was no longer a secret. Baz knew that feeling, of sanctuary being ripped away.
Baz reached for the glove, but Gwen snatched it back first.
"The police might find their kidnapper after all," Gwen said. She spoke her threats not like they were threats at all, just casual conversation.
"Did you trash that apartment, too?" Baz replied, "and still no will?"
Gwen didn't falter. She didn't need to as long as she had the upper hand. Fingerprints and gloves and the innate ability to get anyone to do as she wanted.
"Pass along a message to her, will you?" Gwen said. "Tell her my father's living will says to pull him off life support today. She's the only one who can save him. If she cares."
Well, shit. It was her last trump card.
Baz could improvise his way out of back gardens and second stories. Finding unnatural ways in and out of places was his strong suit. Not so much for conversations.
"Go on," Gwen said.
"Right now?" Baz said in what was barely more dignified than a squeak.
Gwen nodded. She clutched the glove in her hands. By itself, it was just possibly some DNA recovered from an apartment, but it represented all the power one woman could hold in her manicured hand.
Baz nodded, doing his best impression of a bobblehead as he pulled out his phone with shaking hands. Gwen watched him search his phone for Rei's number. The only message they'd even exchanged was Cheng's security code for later reference.
He thought of the bag of evidence sitting at his feet and Gwen's expectant face.
Rei had to know anyway. Baz couldn't withhold that kind of information from her, even if he wasn't at figurative gunpoint.
He hit call. She picked up on the first ring.
"What did she have to say?" Rei asked.
Baz swallowed. Nothing equipped him for telling anyone bad news. Maybe it was better Rei heard it from him and not a nurse or a doctor calling to confirm her final permission. It was sure as hell better than hearing it directly from Gwen.
"It's Angelo. The doctors are supposed to pull life support today."
His gaze flicked to Gwen, her face stoic and distant, like she was looking past him. That was some kind of model trick right there.
It didn't matter that Rei had ridden in the ambulance with Angelo, or that the hospital had already called once to confirm no more surgeries would be performed. It didn't matter that she had the time and intelligence to come to the inevitable conclusion. How could she prepare to be the one with the last say? How was one person supposed to hold the power between life and death?
"Rei?" Baz asked quietly.
"Thank you," she said.
He wanted to comfort her, but the right words weren't in his vocabulary and perhaps they weren't in anyone's. It was perverse to imagine himself reassuring her right in front of Gwen. It was too close, too intimate.
"Gwen will be there. She's been to your Faraday place," Baz said. That was the point of the meeting. Make Baz choose between going to jail or baiting Rei. Make Rei choose between life and death. At last, Baz served his purpose to Gwen.
"Shit," Rei answered.
"Yeah."
Baz dragged his ring along its chain. The best he could do was warn her. The rest was her decision to make. Rei's sigh was audible.
"Just worry about yourself," Rei said. "I'll be fine. Nothing I haven't been through before."
Baz doubted the validity of that statement. He could say the same thing about breaking into Cheng's. Sure, it wasn't anything he hadn't done before, but the stakes were different and that made everything different.
"I just thought you should know..." he said. Gwen's smile was tight-lipped as she watched him.
"Everything else stays the same," Rei replied. "I'll still see you later."
"Yeah," Baz answered hoarsely, hoping desperately that was true. He hung up.
Gwen looked entirely too pleased and Baz couldn't shake the feeling that he wasn't clean, that he needed to take a shower to wash it away. He hadn't felt so ashamed since he got clean. He hadn't felt such a loss of control since the Percs.
"Happy?" he asked.
"No, but you've done your part," she said, "but you might want to leave before I change my mind."
That made it so much worse. He couldn't even leave of his own accord. The act of getting up and walking out the door was one of obedience. He heaved the duffle bag over his shoulder and tossed a five onto the table anyway.
The faster he got away from Gwen, the better.
________
A/N: Gwen's back! Be honest, did you miss her? At the very least, she always keeps Baz on his toes.