CHAPTER FOUR
There were three rules Alistair Keaton lived by.
The first: never get attached.
The second: never fully trust anyone.
The third — and arguably the most important, and the one he violated with reliable frequency: never underestimate quiet men.
Octavious Prescott had managed to violate all three in under two weeks, that was either impressive or catastrophic, and increasingly Alistair couldn't find the line between those two things.
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The campus café on Saturday afternoon was the controlled chaos that Alistair found most useful.
Warm light, ambient noise, the constant low-level movement of people pretending to study while performing their social lives for each other.
He knew three baristas by name, two of whom knew his order without asking, and he had spent long enough conducting observation from the corner booth near the back windows to understand the café's rhythms with the intimate precision, treating as an operational space rather than a coffee shop.
He sat across from Naomi Reyes and watched his iced coffee and thought about something that wasn't Tav, with the determined lack of success that had been characterizing most of his thinking lately.
"You vanished for three days," Naomi said.
"I live a mysterious life."
"You live twenty minutes from here and you didn't answer a single text message."
"Still mysterious." He pushed the second coffee across the table. "I brought you one."
"You're deflecting." She said it with calm certainty.
She had watched him deflect often enough to recognize the mechanism regardless of packaging.
Naomi Reyes was a journalism major with the instincts of a human polygraph and the social range of someone who found everyone genuinely interesting, which made her simultaneously one of the most useful and one of the most dangerous people he'd been positioned near. He liked her, its own hazard.
"You look distracted," she added.
"I'm always distracted."
"You look distracted in a new way."
Alistair drank his coffee and watched the café entrance over the rim of the glass, cataloguing arrivals with the automatic efficiency that couldn't stop doing it regardless of context. Two graduate students.
A professor. A group of undergrads with too many bags.
The problem with Tav Prescott — and it was a problem, one Alistair had been systematically cataloguing and failing to resolve for the better part of two weeks — was that he was exactly what Alistair had been told to expect, and also completely nothing like it.
The briefing had said: cold, controlled, highly trained, excellent pattern recognition, likely hostile to proximity.
It had not mentioned the way he made coffee with the same methodical precision he applied to everything else, or the fact that his rare and reluctant expressions of something approaching humor hit with the disproportionate impact of things that had been earned.
It had not mentioned that watching someone that controlled have to actively work to suppress feeling was — and Alistair found this professionally embarrassing — extremely compelling.
He had not expected to find Tav Prescott compelling.
He had expected to find him manageable. That had been the first miscalculation.
"You're doing the thing," Naomi said.
"What thing?"
"The staring-into-the-middle-distance thing that means either murder thoughts or romantic catastrophe."
Alistair considered his coffee. "What if it's both?"
"That concerns me significantly."
His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked it under the table without changing expression.
Unknown number.
SUBJECT SHOWING HEIGHTENED PATTERN RECOGNITION. MAINTAIN COVER.
Pattern recognition. Yes. That was understating it somewhat. Tav Prescott had identified his dominant hand preference by day three, noticed the shoulder compensation by day four, and last
night had looked at him across a dim living room with the focused calm of someone arriving at a conclusion, which suggested he was approximately two to four observations away from a question that would require either a very good lie or a significant recalibration of approach.
Alistair deleted the message and looked up.
And found Tav walking through the café entrance.
He became aware of it as a kind of perceptual shift before he registered the visual — a change in his attention, his body noting a relevant variable before his conscious mind caught up. He'd been trying to analyze that particular response for ten days and hadn't made satisfactory progress.
Dark coat. Grey sweater. The type of walk that commanded space without demanding it — quiet and precise and carrying the unmistakable demeanor of someone accustomed to being watched and entirely indifferent to it.
Several people glanced up as he moved through the café, pulled by something in his bearing that bypassed the usual social calculation.
Alistair watched him and felt, annoyingly, the thing he'd been feeling since approximately the second morning in the apartment: warmth, moving through his chest like light through a window.
Deeply inconvenient.
Naomi's gaze followed his. Then she looked back at him with the expression that had just found something more interesting than she'd anticipated.
"Oh," she said softly. "That's the roommate?"
"I never said I had a roommate."
"You didn't have to." Her smile was gathering into something he recognized as trouble. "You have the face."
"What face?"
"The one people wear when someone is actively dismantling their equilibrium and they can't decide whether to be angry about it."
"That's a very strange face."
"It's a very specific look." She was watching him with the bright-eyed interest of someone who had just identified the story in a room full of noise. "He's coming over."
Tav arrived at the table. He met Naomi's eyes. Then at Alistair. The assessment took approximately two seconds and was, Alistair reflected, entirely mutual.
"Prescott," Naomi said. "Didn't expect to see you voluntarily near human interaction."
"Reyes." Tav's attention returned to Alistair. "You didn't answer your phone."
No greeting. No preamble. Just the direct deployment of the thing he actually meant, stripped of all social padding. Alistair had been cataloguing this characteristic for days and still found it — and this was the professionally embarrassing part — attractive rather than abrasive.
"I was busy," Alistair said.
"With coffee?"
Naomi looked between them with poorly concealed delight.
"I need to absent myself from this conversation immediately before it becomes something I have to witness," she announced, gathering her things with the brisk efficiency of someone exiting a situation on their own terms. "Whatever this divorced-assassin-energy thing is that you've both got happening — figure it out.
" She paused at the edge of the booth. "I'm saying that with love. Mostly."
Then she was gone, disappearing into the café crowd with her coffee and her investigative instincts, leaving Alistair and Tav in the corner booth with a silence that resulted from Naomi's departure and the direct attention Tav was currently directing at him.
Alistair leaned back.
"She's perceptive," he said.
"Most people are, when they're paying attention."
"Most people think they're paying attention and aren't." Alistair tilted his head. "You answered your phone, by the way. The message last night. I saw the notification."
"I'm aware of that."
"You didn't reply to mine."
"You didn't send anything useful."
Alistair smiled. "I asked if you wanted dinner."
"That wasn't useful."
"It was polite."
"I prefer useful."
Something warm moved through Alistair's chest at that, a problem he was going to need to address.
Tav sat across from him with that steady grey regard and the careful, compressed composure. He learned to take up less space then he occupied, and Alistair found himself thinking about the sketchbook in his desk drawer.
The unfinished portrait.
The problem with drawing Tav Prescott was that the interesting part wasn't the perfection of his face — which was, objectively, worth documenting — but his attentive attention, The way concentration looked on someone who treated everything as worth understanding completely or not at all.
"Someone accessed the apartment Thursday," Tav said.
Alistair's focus sharpened.
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
Not I think. Not probably. Yes. Certainty delivered without performance.
Alistair leaned forward slightly. Because this was a problem, if it was someone outside their immediate operational context.
He had entered Tav's room Thursday — briefly, carefully, in his absence — and found almost nothing.
The space had been meticulous in the way of someone who had deliberately constructed its emptiness: a cover identity's room, not a person's room.
Which told him a great deal, but not quite enough.
But if someone else had also entered— "You think it was Ablation?" Alistair said, watching the word leave his mouth like a stone leaving a hand.
The pause that followed was precisely the pause that preceded recalculation.
Tav's eyes locked onto him.
Cold and grey and suddenly very precise.
Alistair smiled — smooth, easy, the professional surface reinstated in the same breath. "Lucky guess?"
The café noise continued around them. Somewhere near the front, someone dropped a cup.
Outside, rain had started against the windows, thin and steady.
Tav leaned forward.
"You know what Ablation is," he said quietly.
Not a question.
Alistair held the look. Held it and held it, the two of them sitting in a café in a city that neither of them actually belonged to, both of them understanding that the conversation had just moved from what they'd been pretending to have to what they were actually having.
"So do you," he said.
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Week two had a different quality from week one.