Chapter 9
Ivan
I should have left when the hour ended.
That was the first thought that raced through my head when the lock started turning.
I didn’t panic. Panic was for men who didn’t know where the exits were. I knew every exit in Kit Calloway’s apartment. I knew the distance from her bedroom to the fire escape window, the angle of the latch, the height of the sill, the sound the old frame made if lifted too quickly.
I knew too much.
That was the problem.
The lock turned all the way and then the door opened.
My body moved before the thought finished assembling itself.
I was off her bed, pillow restored, sheet tension corrected as much as time allowed.
It wasn’t perfect. There was no perfect now.
Her pen was still in my inside pocket, a ridiculous hard line against my ribs, as though a stolen blue ballpoint could accuse me more loudly than the fact that I had been lying in her bed with her pillow held to my chest like a man who had forgotten what restraint looked like.
The front door shut.
Her keys hit the small dish near the entry.
I had eleven seconds.
Maybe nine.
Kit did not move through her apartment like a normal person coming home.
Normal people shed the outside world in layers.
They put their bag down, took their shoes off, turned on the lights, maybe even went to the kitchen if hunger managed to win a vote.
Kit entered like a system check. She closed the door, locked it, and scanned the room.
She took one step left, not right. She paused by the entry table.
Her bag touched the floor with a muted sound, set down rather than dropped.
She had not turned on the light.
Good.
I crossed the bedroom without touching the chair, the books, the boots lined near the closet.
I unlocked the window and eased it up by the frame, controlling the pressure with both hands.
She was in the kitchen before I had both feet through the window.
I froze halfway out with one foot on the fire escape, one inside her bedroom.
One hand braced against the old frame. My breathing stopped so hard my chest burned.
Her kitchen was visible through the narrow gap between the bedroom door and the hall.
Only a slice of her, reflected in the dark glass above the sink.
She was wearing the black coat I’d seen her in before.
Her hair was pinned up badly, strands loose at her neck.
She was still, almost as if she knew that she wasn’t alone.
She knew I was there.
I slid the rest of the way onto the fire escape. The metal took my weight with a low, treacherous complaint. It wasn’t loud, but it was loud enough.
Inside, Kit spun.
I crouched beside the window, close enough that my shoulder nearly touched the brick. The fire escape was old, cold, and damp from evening mist, the metal biting through the fabric of my trousers.
I did not move.
Not when she came down the hall.
Not when she entered the bedroom.
She moved without turning on the light, which was either bravery or discipline. With Kit, the distinction was useless. Her hand was at her side, and I saw the small glint of metal before she tucked it behind her thigh.
She had a knife.
Such a clever girl. Good girl.
The praise rose in me before I could stop it, and this time I did not correct myself.
She stood in the bedroom doorway first, letting her eyes adjust. She did not rush in.
She did not whisper some foolish question into the dark, as though an intruder might feel socially obligated to answer.
She waited. Listened. Then she checked the closet first, then the blind angle beside the dresser, then the space behind the door.
My place on the fire escape gave me only pieces of her through the narrow edge of the window. Her hand on the closet door. Her shoulder turning. The shadow of her profile. Her mouth pressed into a flat line that made my chest tighten.
She reached the bed and for one terrible second, she stopped.
I went perfectly still. She stared at the bed for so long that my jaw began to ache. Then she crouched and checked beneath it.
Practical girl.
Mine, said the thing inside me that had stopped asking permission.
She left the bedroom. I stayed where I was, one hand wrapped around the cold railing, listening.
The bathroom door opened. The shower curtain rings rasped softly.
She walked back into the kitchen. Then the living room.
The quiet little sounds of a woman disassembling her own safety one piece at a time because she trusted nothing, not even the absence of proof.
I had done that to her.
I should have felt guilty about that, but I didn’t.
I heard a cabinet open. The clink of a glass. The opening of a bottle. The soft glug of liquor poured too generously. She sat on the couch with her back to the brick wall.
I could see her from the fire escape if I shifted two inches left. I did not at first. Then, because restraint had already become a burned-out structure in the distance, I shifted.
She had not opened her laptop. It sat on the coffee table within arm’s reach, closed.
Her hand rested near it once, fingers hovering over the lid, then withdrew as if the machine had become something alive and untrustworthy.
She took a drink instead, whiskey apparently, grimaced faintly at the burn, and stared at nothing.
Two hours passed.
I knew because I counted every minute.
I remained on the fire escape, half-hidden in the dark, body locked into stillness until discomfort became irrelevant.
Boston moved below us in wet flashes of light and sound.
Cars hissed through puddles. A car horn wailed somewhere in the distance.
Wind came between the buildings in narrow cold streams, pulling at my coat.
I watched her not work.
That should not have affected me as much as it did.
Kit Calloway worked the way other people breathed.
Every pattern I had built of her depended on that one constant.
When she was afraid, she worked. When she was tired, she worked.
When a threat moved closer, she documented, analyzed, trapped, and mapped it out.
Her laptop was a weapon, shield, confession, and escape all at once.
For two hours, she did not touch it.
She sat with her drink in one hand and her back to the wall, staring into the dim apartment as though every object had betrayed her by remaining where it belonged.
I wanted to go back inside.
Sit across from her.
Take the glass from her hand.
Tell her to breathe normally before she made herself dizzy. Tell her the apartment was clear. Tell her I had already checked. Tell her she was not alone in this anymore, whether she liked it or not.
Then she would ask how I knew.
And the whole thing would burn.
She finished the drink eventually but did not pour another.
Her restraint pleased me, which was another sign that I had lost any claim to sanity.
She stood, checked the door, checked the windows, checked the bedroom again.
When she returned to the living room, she picked up the laptop.
She carried it to her desk, set it down, and walked away.
Kit turned off the kitchen light first. Then the living room lamp.
The apartment fell into layers of shadow until only the weak city glow remained.
She stood near the bedroom for a long moment, silhouetted by the window, one hand resting against the doorframe.
Then she went into the bedroom and closed the door halfway.
I waited.
I waited long after the apartment went quiet. Long after the first shift of her mattress, and the controlled stillness that followed.
I stayed until her breathing changed.
Only then did I move slowly. Quietly. The fire escape gave one small complaint as I rose, and I froze for a full sixty seconds before continuing. The window slid up beneath my hands with less sound than the wind. I entered through the kitchen because the bedroom was not an option anymore.
The apartment was dark now. I stood inside it for exactly three seconds and listened.
She did not stir.
I crossed to the front door. The door was locked. She had locked it when she came in. She always locked it. Kit was not careless about thresholds, but the deadbolt had not been thrown.
I turned it for her.
The sound was small. Final.
I stayed motionless after, waiting for movement from the bedroom.
Nothing.
I went back out onto the fire escape and left. Outside, the night had gone colder. I descended three floors before stepping across to the neighboring landing and taking the route down that no camera would see. My car waited three blocks over.
Sergei would have called this reckless. Maxim would have called it unacceptable. Nikolai would have laughed first and judged second. Aleksei would have understood too much, which was why I intended not to mention it to any of them.
At the corner, I stopped and looked back.
Her window was dark, but I watched it anyway.
For twenty-three minutes, I stood across the street in the shadow of a closed shop and looked up at the fourth floor like a man waiting for judgment.
None came.
There was no light. No shadow moving behind the glass. Eventually, I walked away.
The pen remained in my pocket.
The scent of her pillow remained in my lungs.
And the sound of her breathing followed me all the way back to the car.