24. Zane
ZANE
Roman doesn’t knock.
That’s the first thing I register, before I’ve even looked up from the document in front of me.
Roman knocks on every door in this building, has done for eight years, a habit so consistent that its absence functions as its own alarm.
He comes in fast, closes the door behind him, and sets a single page on my desk without sitting down.
“Intercept came through twenty minutes ago,” he says. “Communication between a Marchetti contact and someone in Zurich.”
I read it once. Then again, slower.
The message is brief. It references a woman by description rather than name. American, mid-twenties, staying at a private medical facility outside the city. Asks about her schedule. Asks about the security around the building.
It’s Lena. There’s no other woman it could be.
“Source,” I say.
“Low-level contact, someone who does occasional surveillance work for hire. Not faction-affiliated directly, which means they’re using cutouts now instead of operating in the open.
” Roman’s voice doesn’t change, but I know him well enough to hear what’s underneath it.
“They’re building a picture. Her routine, her exposure, who’s around her. ”
I’m already standing. Already reaching for my phone before I’ve fully decided what I’m about to do, the way I move when a threat crosses from theoretical into active, and the only acceptable response is speed.
“Move her,” I say. “Today. A different facility, full security detail, no public registration under her real name.”
“Understood.”
Roman is at the door when I stop. I stand there for a second, phone still in my hand, and something surfaces that I don’t have time for and address anyway, because some part of me has learned, slowly and at considerable cost, that not addressing things is exactly how I ended up here in the first place.
I think about the kitchen three weeks ago. Stop deciding for me what I can carry. Her voice, steady despite what it cost her to keep it steady, telling me precisely what she needed from me and precisely what she would not accept again.
I am about to do exactly what she told me not to do.
I know this. I’m not confused about it, not telling myself a story about circumstances being different this time.
I see the shape of what I’m doing with total clarity. Move her sister to a secured location without her knowledge, frame it as something other than what it is, and decide on her behalf because the timeline doesn’t allow for a conversation first.
The honest accounting is this: I could call her right now. I could tell her what the intercept says, give her thirty seconds to understand the danger, then move. It would cost perhaps ten minutes.
Ten minutes, against a contact who is already building a profile of a woman with no security training and no idea she’s being watched.
I choose the ten minutes I don’t have.
“Frame it as a facility upgrade,” I tell Roman. “Covered under the medical account. Better specialists, better security, nothing that requires explaining the actual threat.”
Roman looks at me for a moment longer than the instruction requires. “She told you not to do this,” he says.
“I know what she told me.”
“And you’re doing it anyway.”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t argue. That isn’t what Roman does. He simply holds my gaze for one more second, long enough to make sure I’ve heard myself say it out loud, and then he nods and goes to make the calls that will move a sick woman across a country before sundown without her ever being told why.
The facility transfer takes six hours.
I spend most of them at my desk, moving through the rest of the day’s obligations with the part of my attention that isn’t occupied by Zurich. Calls. A document review. A conversation with Alexei about the succession filing that I answer in shorter sentences than the topic deserves.
Roman gives me updates at intervals. Lena has been told it’s an upgrade, arranged because of her progress, a reward rather than a response to danger. She is, apparently, delighted by the new facility’s garden.
I do not feel good about the delight.
By six o’clock, the transfer is complete. New location, new security, no public record connecting her real name to the address. Priya has been briefed fully, the only person besides Roman and me who understands what this actually is.
I close my laptop. Sit in the quiet of an emptying building.
I think about Celine finding out. Not if.
When. She talks to Lena most days, and Lena, delighted and unsuspecting, is going to mention the garden, the upgrade, the new facility, sometime in the next forty-eight hours without understanding that she’s handing her sister information I haven’t given her myself.
I could call Celine now. Tell her before Lena does.
I don’t call her.
I tell myself I will tell her tomorrow, with the full picture, the way I told her about Gregor.
I tell myself this is different from withholding, that it’s sequencing, that there’s a meaningful distinction between not telling someone something and telling them later once you’ve finished managing the danger on their behalf.
I do not fully believe myself.
Roman comes back at eight with the final security report from Zurich.
“She’s settled,” he says. “Priya stayed the first night. The new facility has perimeter coverage we didn’t have at the last location.” He sets the folder down. Doesn’t sit. “I want to say something.”
“Say it.”
“You told me, in this office, three weeks ago, that you’d learned something from the Gregor situation.
About deciding things for her.” His voice stays level, professional, the same register he uses for operational briefings, which somehow makes it land harder than if he’d raised it.
“You did the same thing today. Knowingly. You said as much yourself.”
“The timeline didn’t allow for the conversation.”
“The timeline never allows for the conversation, Zane. That’s the nature of every threat we’ve ever managed.
There’s always a version of events where speed matters more than her feelings about being informed.
” He looks at me directly, which Roman does rarely enough that it carries weight when he does.
“I’m not telling you the decision was wrong.
The intercept was real, and she’s safer tonight than she was this morning.
I’m telling you that you’re going to have to say all of that to her, exactly the way you just said it to me, and watch what it does. ”
I don’t argue with him. There isn’t an argument that holds up against what he’s said, because he’s right, and the only thing worse than him being right would be me pretending otherwise.
“I know,” I say.
Roman picks up his folder.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, at the door, “I think she’ll understand the threat. I don’t think she’ll forgive how you handled telling her about it. Those aren’t the same thing, and I don’t think you’ve fully separated them yet.”
He leaves before I can respond, which is probably deliberate. Roman has been doing this long enough to know when a man needs the last word taken away from him, so he actually sits with what was said instead of arguing his way out of it.
I sit at my desk with the Zurich report in front of me, Lena safe and delighted and unaware, Celine still in the penthouse with no idea what happened today, and I don’t call her.
Tomorrow, I tell myself again.
It is, I am fully aware, the same sentence I told myself about Gregor. I make it anyway, and I don’t let myself pretend the repetition is a coincidence.