Chapter 3
Vivi
Caden tells me he'll be moving in.
Not asks. Tells.
I'm still in my pajamas, standing at the kitchen counter with coffee I haven't touched, when my phone rings and his voice comes down the line flat and low.
"I need to move into the penthouse," he says. "Guest room. Starting tonight."
I set down the coffee. "That's not necessary."
"Someone has been accessing your apartment through that study window.
More than once, before the note. Whoever it is, they'll come back.
They haven't found what they're looking for yet.
" A pause, just long enough to land. "A rotating patrol doesn't cover the hours between two and five in the morning.
Remote monitoring has the same gap. The only option that closes it is a physical presence inside the apartment. "
"There are other people at HPG."
"There are." He lets that sit. “But I’ll be staying.”
The word drops into the kitchen like something cold.
I look at the closed study door and I think about the worn latch, the mark in the dust on the sill, the careful patience of someone who knows how to move through a space without leaving a trace.
Who stands in my apartment in the dark while I sleep thirty feet away, looks for whatever they came for, and leaves. And comes back. And leaves again.
My skin crawls.
"Fine," I say.
"Four o'clock," he says. "I'll need a key." He hangs up before I can change my mind.
I stand in the kitchen and look at the study door for a long moment.
Then I cross the hall and open the guest room and stand in the doorway looking at the anonymous king bed, the housekeeper's precise corners, the room I've been planning to repaint, to strip off every trace of the people who've slept in it at Dominic's invitation over the years.
I leave it exactly as it is.
***
He arrives at four with a duffel bag and two cases of equipment that he carries like they weigh nothing, Garza behind him with the second load.
In no time, he has everything set up: a monitor on the kitchen counter angled toward the door feed, a motion sensor mounted high on the study wall, a second lock on the window he fits himself in under three minutes with a drill he's apparently anticipated needing.
I watch from the hallway with my arms crossed.
When he finishes the study he comes out and looks at me, and there's something in his expression that isn't quite checking in and isn't quite an apology. More like acknowledgment. That he understands this is my space and that he's here anyway.
"The sensor will chirp if the window moves," he says. "Don't be alarmed."
"I'm not alarmed by much."
He chuckles. "I figured."
He picks up his duffel and walks to the guest room without being shown. The guest room door closes.
I stand in the hall and breathe and tell myself this is practical. Operational. A man doing his job.
Nothing more.
***
I manage to survive the first four days until the incident.
I come out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, hair loose and damp, turning for the bedroom, and walk directly into Caden coming out of the guest room.
He stops. I stop.
He's shirtless, barefoot, dark sweatpants sitting low on his hips, his hair not yet pulled into its usual controlled state.
I've understood intellectually that the suit is concealing something significant.
I'm not prepared for the reality of it — the breadth of his chest, the clean line of his stomach, the dark tattoo that runs from his left shoulder the length of his arm in something dense and geometric that I badly want to look at for longer than is reasonable.
He looks like someone built for the world he actually occupies, not the conference rooms and foundation galas he moves through on my behalf.
I'm in a towel. My hair is down. There's six feet of hallway between us and nothing else.
He looks at me.
Not the dart-and-correct of a man startled into seeing something he's going to pretend he hasn't.
Steadily. With that full unhurried attention he gives to everything moving over me slowly from the damp ends of my hair to the edge of the towel to my bare feet on the floor, and then back up to my face, and staying.
The heat that moves through me is immediate and total and I have nowhere to put it. It starts low and spreads and I stand very still in the hallway and breathe through it and do not move, because if I move I don't know which direction I go.
He doesn't move either.
I count the seconds. The apartment holds completely still around us, the city muffled behind the glass, the only sound is my own pulse which I'm suddenly and acutely aware of.
Then his eyes come back to mine and what's in them is not subtle.
Dark and deliberate and certain, the look of a man who has already decided something and is simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
It says what he hasn't said out loud and I understand it with complete clarity — the same way I understand the grammar of warnings, the language of men who mean exactly what they don't say.
I see you. I've been seeing you. I'm not going to stop.
"Morning," he says. Low and even. And moves past me toward the bathroom, close enough that I feel the warmth radiating off his skin as he passes, close enough that I catch cedar and clean skin and something underneath it that is just him, and then he's gone and the bathroom door is closed.
I go to my room and close the door and sit on the edge of the bed and have a very direct conversation with myself about the precise foolishness of wanting a man who is living in my apartment because someone wants me dead.
About professional distance and grief timelines and the vulnerability of a woman who hasn't been looked at like that in, well, possibly ever.
Dominic looked at me the way you look at an investment. Appraising. Satisfied or dissatisfied based on return.
Caden looks at me like I'm something he's decided on.
I tell myself, with almost no conviction at all, that I'm absolutely fine.
I'm not even close to fine.