CHAPTER TWO
His eyes opened in the dark without transition — no disorientation, no lag, simply the clean binary of sleep and its absence, the way it always worked for him.
For half a second he lay still, cataloguing the sounds reaching him through the bedroom door: the soft percussion of cabinet drawers, the particular ring of glass on marble, footsteps moving with the casual weight of someone who wasn't trying to be quiet.
He had always lived alone during assignments.
It wasn't a preference so much as a structural necessity — people complicated routines, people noticed things, people created variables that accumulated until they became liabilities.
He'd explained this to Ablation twice during the placement process and both times the response had been the same bureaucratic non-answer: the unit has been selected for optimal conditions.
He was beginning to revise his definition of optimal.
Another muffled sound from the kitchen. The definitive hiss of something hitting a too-hot pan.
Then, clearly: "You have got to be kidding me."
Tav closed his eyes. Opened them again.
He got out of bed.
· · ·
The apartment was still largely dark when he stepped into the hallway, the skyline through the floor to ceiling windows showing the city in pre-dawn blues and silvers, the streets below reduced to moving headlights and the distant blink of building lights.
He'd always found cities more legible at this hour.
Less noise obscuring the patterns.
The kitchen lights were on.
Alistair stood at the stove wearing grey sweatpants and nothing else, frowning down at a pan with the aggrieved expression of a man who considered himself above being defeated by cookware.
Smoke curled upward in a thin, optimistic spiral. He hadn't heard Tav come in.
Tav stopped in the doorway.
The problem — and it was a problem, practically speaking — was not that Alistair was attractive.
That would have been manageable. Attractive people existed in the world and Tav had spent years learning not to let aesthetics interfere with threat assessment.
The problem was that Alistair somehow looked effortlessly at home everywhere.
He adapted to spaces in real time, occupied them as though they'd been shaped around him, moved through environments with the unconscious comfort of someone who had never seriously entertained the possibility of not belonging somewhere.
Including, apparently, Tav's kitchen at five in the morning.
Alistair glanced over his shoulder. His expression didn't show any surprise.
"Oh good," he said. "You're awake."
Tav's gaze moved to the pan. "What are you doing?"
"Making breakfast."
"You're burning butter."
"I was in the process of noticing that," Alistair said, with the particular dignity. "I feel like you could have opened with good morning, but perhaps that's a personal preference."
Tav crossed the kitchen, reached past him, and turned the burner off.
The smell improved immediately. Alistair watched the whole sequence without moving, tracking Tav with the same sidelong attention he'd employed the night before — never quite direct, never quite absent. Like he was calibrating.
"You walk quietly," Alistair said.
"You don't."
"I wasn't trying to."
"That's obvious."
A beat of silence. Alistair turned from the defunct pan and leaned back against the counter with his arms folded, his posture settling into that particular arrangement of casual interest and careful distance that seemed to be his natural register.
Tav reached around him to remove the ruined pan and run water over it.
"You cook," Alistair observed. Not a question.
"Yes."
"That explains the kitchen rule."
"It exists because of exactly this situation."
"I feel that's slightly unfair given it's only been twelve hours." But the corner of his mouth moved.
"There he is."
"Who?"
"The personality." Alistair gestured vaguely with his reclaimed coffee mug. "You hide it under the serial killer energy. I've been wondering."
Tav looked at him flatly. "It's not yet six in the morning."
"Time is irrelevant to observation." He seemed genuinely pleased with himself. "You glare like that naturally, or is there a warm-up routine?"
Tav dried the pan and put it back. Behind him he was aware of Alistair moving through the kitchen — opening the fridge, retrieving things, navigating the space with the particular efficiency like he had already quietly memorized it.
The movements were light and controlled and fractionally too deliberate in their apparent carelessness.
Then the presence of him shifted: closer.
Tav turned.
Alistair stood directly behind him, close enough that Tav registered warmth before he registered the distance.
He was holding out a fresh cup of coffee, steam rising into the early-morning kitchen air, and he watched Tav with those amber eyes that saw more than they admitted to with an expression that was almost — almost — guileless. Neither of them moved.
"I'm not poisoning you," Alistair said.
"That reassurance came unusually quickly."
"You were giving the mug a very peculiar look."
"I'm naturally suspicious."
"Of everyone?"
"Yes."
Something passed through Alistair's expression — not the amusement Tav had expected, but something quieter. Recognition, or its close relative. Gone almost immediately, replaced by the easy surface he seemed to wear the way other people wore clothing.
"That sounds exhausting," he said. He said it lightly, but lightly in the way things were said when the observation underneath them was real.
Tav took the mug. Careful, deliberate contact, the pads of his fingers brushing the ceramic without touching the hand that held it.
Alistair stepped back.
The space between them expanded. Something in Tav's chest did not correspondingly ease, which he knew and filed away as a variable requiring monitoring.
Annoying.
"Normal roommates ask questions," Alistair said, moving to the island and settling onto a barstool with the proprietary ease that was apparently a fixed characteristic rather than a temporary affectation.
"Basic ones. Where are you from, what are you studying, do you have strong feelings about the dishwasher. That sort of thing."
"I prefer useful questions."
Alistair lifted both eyebrows. "Ask me something useful, then."
Tav regarded him across the kitchen. The morning light was shifting toward the pale grey of early dawn now, the city beginning its gradual lightening outside the windows.
"You're left-handed," Tav said. "But you favor your right shoulder despite that. The tension pattern suggests an old injury — or conditioning against a natural instinct."
Alistair was very still for a beat.
"Okay," he said.
"The left ear is slightly higher. You tilt your head to compensate when you're listening carefully, but only when you think no one is watching."
"Jesus," Alistair said softly. Not upset. Something closer to delighted in an unsettled way, like a man who had just noticed the floor was glass.
"You said you did martial arts."
"I did."
"Maybe."
Alistair smiled at that — slow and sharp. "And what do you move like?"
Tav drank the coffee. It was, again, better than it had any reason to be.
"Quietly," he said.
The word landed and sat there between them. Alistair's gaze stayed on him longer than necessary, something moving behind his eyes that Tav couldn't fully parse — heat, maybe, or its precursor. Then his phone buzzed against the countertop and the moment dissolved.
He checked it quickly. Something in his face changed — the warmth draining, a brief and calculated coldness moving in its place.
His thumb moved across the screen. Then he locked it and looked back up, and the warmth was reinstated so smoothly that someone less attentive might have thought they'd imagined the interruption.
Tav had caught a glimpse of the screen.
Unknown number. A single line of text.
STATUS CONFIRMED.
"You always watch people this closely?" Alistair asked.
"Yes."
"Should I be concerned?"
Tav set the coffee down. "Depends."
"On?"
"Why Ablation assigned me a roommate."
The kitchen went quiet.
Not the ordinary quiet of an early morning.
A abrupt quiet, charged and sudden, like the stillness after a word detonates in conversation.
Alistair's hand was still on his locked phone.
His expression remained perfectly assembled.
But something in the air between them had changed, and they both knew it, and neither of them pretended otherwise.
"No idea what Ablation is," Alistair said easily.
Lie.
Clean, immediate, practiced. The kind that came from repetition rather than performance — a lie that had been ready before the question was asked.
Tav watched him.
Alistair held the look without wavering, his face composed and pleasant and entirely, deliberately opaque.
Two people standing barefoot in a luxury kitchen before sunrise, each pretending not to study the other like a threat.
Tav refilled his coffee and went to stand at the window.
Outside, the city was lightening slowly toward morning, the skyline resolving itself from dark masses into defined shapes, towers emerging from the grey like something being remembered. Below on the streets, the first taxis of the day were moving, the first pedestrians appearing on corners.
Behind him, he heard Alistair set his mug down. Heard him move toward the hallway. Then pause.
"For what it's worth," Alistair said, "the coffee is better if you let it steep a little longer."
Tav didn't turn around.
"I know," he said.
A soft exhalation that might have been a laugh. Then footsteps retreating toward the left bedroom — the one Alistair had claimed with such cheerful certainty — and the quiet sound of a door closing.
Tav stood at the window and watched the city come back to itself.
He was beginning to think this assignment was going to be significantly more complicated than advertised.
· · ·
· · ·