Chapter Two - Leon
The shrill, slicing ring of my private line fractures the night in two.
I’m at home, glass of bourbon sweating on my desk, contracts splayed in a neat fan beneath the lamplight. Numbers and signatures blur at the edges—I’ve read the same clause three times—when the phone’s buzz cuts through everything civilized and small.
No one calls this line except trouble, and at this hour, trouble always knows my name.
Caller ID: Head of security. I don’t bother with pleasantries, just thumb the button and wait, tension already spooling tight. I expect a report on the clubs, maybe a minor fire in the warehouse district. Instead, the voice on the other end is clipped, all business.
“Nikola hasn’t come home, sir. Car untouched. His driver says he dismissed him before dinner. Last ping on his phone was downtown. No alarms, no sign of him at the apartment.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Nikola’s made a hobby of pushing limits, but he always makes it home—drunk, belligerent, occasionally bruised, but breathing and accounted for.
The silence this time is worse than any angry call or desperate voicemail.
My brother’s recklessness is predictable. His quiet is not.
“Keep this contained,” I say. “No calls to his friends. I want to see the footage first.”
The city outside is sleepless, but my house feels suddenly airless, rooms too large and cold. I close the contracts, leave the bourbon sweating in the dark, and by the time my car hits the drive at headquarters, dread has gnawed through irritation and made itself at home.
My office is all glass and shadow, the hour pressing against the windows. The security station waits, glowing monitors set in a half circle, the staff at attention. I slide behind the desk, wave them silent, and cue up the relevant feed.
Nikola, in the soft light of the restaurant. That place—velvet banquettes, lights dim enough to flatter, crowd rich enough to keep secrets.
I watch him slide into the frame: jacket off, shirt collar undone, easy grin. He’s always been good at looking harmless. He’s even better at believing in it.
A woman stands beside him, petite and delicately built, her eyes round, posture all sweet uncertainty.
She hesitates at the entrance—just long enough for the camera to catch it—then lets Nikola lead her inside.
Her hand curls in the crook of his arm. She glances up at him with something that could be awe, or nerves, or the practiced choreography of a girl who knows how to play the part.
My jaw ticks. Nikola’s taste in women is dangerously consistent.
“Zoom,” I order, voice low.
They bring up the external shot. Nikola and the girl—Suzy, the host’s reservation confirms—emerge together, laughter caught in a ghost of motion. Suzy’s hand on his sleeve, eyes shining.
She looks young, green, the kind of innocence that men like Nikola think is real. I can see the little tells he’s always fallen for—shy smile, shoulders drawn, a subtle lean toward the warmth of his body.
I scrub back, slow the feed to quarter-speed.
I’ve seen this movie before. Something snags at the edges.
I watch her walk—never faltering, never searching the corners.
When Nikola steps away to tip the ma?tre d’, Suzy’s gaze flicks across the lobby in a quick, surgical sweep.
She doesn’t check for cameras. She knows exactly where they are.
I pause the frame. She looks beautiful in that slimline dress, curves and broad hips on display. Her mouth is soft, a hint of teeth in her smile, but her eyes—her eyes don’t match. There’s calculation there, a careful blankness. It prickles the skin at the back of my neck.
She leans in to whisper something, lips barely moving. Nikola laughs, body loosening; he thinks she’s nervous. He wants to protect her. I see the way her hand never leaves his arm, a subtle steering that keeps him turned away from the front windows.
Irritation curdles. “He always falls for the shy ones,” I mutter, watching my brother tip himself willingly toward the noose. The longer I replay the footage, the less convinced I am that I’m seeing what he saw.
There’s a moment—a minor thing, a tick of her chin as she leads him to the car. She’s deferential, fingers soft on his wrist, but her body’s angled, back straight, no fluttering nerves.
When the valet opens the door, Suzy gives a brief, unreadable look to the side mirror—a habit of awareness, not vanity.
Her name surfaces on the guest list, tidy and unremarkable: Suzy. No surname given, just a scribbled initial and a phone number that’s already gone dark.
I lean in, elbows braced against the console, and run it again. The restaurant’s closing up. Nikola and Suzy slip out, shoes silent on marble. She looks, for all the world, like a girl about to be swept into a story.
Her eyes—when the light catches them—are flat, almost bored. Not a flicker of the nervous energy I expect. No excitement, no anticipation. Just focus, razor-thin.
A different kind of chill settles in. I’ve worn that look before, in the boardroom, at the edge of a negotiation about to turn. The predator’s calm, not the prey’s. I hit pause and let the silence fill the office, cool and thick.
“What the hell are you really after?” I murmur, voice low, the words meant for the glass, the city, the echo of something shifting.
I don’t know what game Suzy’s playing, but she’s not the prize Nikola thinks she is. She’s something else—something that knows how to wear a mask, and when to drop it.
The screen holds her still, eyes fixed forward, lips parted in a perfect imitation of innocence. I don’t trust it for a second. Suddenly, I want to know who taught her to play.
I move like a surgeon through the aftermath. Suzy’s image lingers on the security feed, the ghost of a girl too carefully made. I don’t waste time on anger.
Instead, I signal my tech team—no raised voices, just a clipped, “I want everything on her. Now. Full sweep. Digital, financial, every scrap you can find. I want to know what she eats for breakfast and when she last stubbed her toe.”
They know the drill. Within minutes, three screens glow with her digital life: credit reports, apartment leases, scraps of social media so bland it’s almost artful.
On paper, Suzy is aggressively normal. The kind of girl who posed in a few catalog shoots, left jobs after four months with polite explanations, rented an apartment that’s more IKEA showroom than home.
I watch her history scroll past. No drama, no police reports, no bad breakups that spilled online.
Her last lease is pristine—except for one line: six months paid in cash, the rest in traceable bank transfers. Not a red flag for most people, but for me, the signal is blinding.
Her job history is the same: bright, cheery references, a gap that can’t be explained away by a vacation or hospital stay, and a shift in identity that happens so quietly I almost miss it.
Three months ago, a new phone number. The old one goes dark, and nobody texts her about it.
It smells like a cover story. Like someone with time and money helping her disappear.
I tell my head of security, “Dig deeper. School records, yearbooks, childhood addresses. If she had a dog in third grade, I want to know its name.” They think I’m being dramatic. I’m not. Normal people don’t scrub their lives this clean.
An hour passes. The details pile up, each one more irritating. Suzy’s social media barely exists: a handful of posed photos—her at the park, coffee in hand, a smile that never quite reaches her eyes.
There are no tagged friends, just a rotation of vague acquaintances, people who show up in one photo and vanish forever.
No family. No birthday posts. She isn’t even in her own comments section.
I flip through her likes and find nothing but pet videos and three-day-old memes.
It’s designed to tell a harmless story. Too designed.
“She’s erased herself,” I murmur, half to the screens, half to the room.
My team pretends not to hear the edge in my voice. I order a surveillance team on her apartment. They’re to watch every entrance, track every face that comes and goes, with a warning not to spook her.
Whoever Suzy really is, she knows how to slip through cracks. I want her contained, not scattered.
Head of security, face drawn, reports back with the results from the criminal databases. “Nothing, sir. She’s not in the system. No priors, no aliases, not even a parking ticket. Her fingerprints are clear.”
I should be relieved. Instead, I feel my jaw clench harder. No one that clean is real. The idea that she’s an amateur doesn’t fit—her movements are too crisp, too controlled. I look at her photo, the unremarkable beauty, the perfect mask of someone with nothing to hide. She’s not a ghost.
Ghosts leave holes. She’s something sharper—someone who can pass through your house and make you thank her for the privilege.
I pull up the restaurant’s records, running my own checks. There’s another restaurant reservation from two weeks ago. It was made by Nikola, but Suzy arrived alone, ten minutes early. She waited at the bar, ordered a club soda, spoke to no one.
The server notes her as polite, “quiet, didn’t make small talk.”
When Nikola arrives, she stands to greet him—submissive, but not tentative. I slow the security footage, watch her posture, the way she never lets herself be boxed in. She sits at the table facing the door, lets Nikola block her line of sight only when she’s ready to move.
I comb through credit card receipts, cab records, elevator logs. She paid for nothing. Let Nikola play the host. Her movements are deliberate. Practiced. She isn’t here for the experience; she’s here for something, and I can’t see the strings yet.
I push for ties to known rivals. Organized crime, corporate sabotage, old enemies. There’s nothing. If she’s connected, it’s not through any official channel. Still, my mind runs through the possibilities. A decoy? An amateur sent to distract?
That flat-eyed focus haunts me. Suzy doesn’t flinch. She watches.
There’s no way she’s doing this alone.
I lean back, arms folded, and let my mind stretch into the dangerous places. Maybe she’s a pawn—someone with debts, caught in a web, following orders for a chance to buy her freedom.
Or maybe she’s a player, the kind who could eat someone like Nikola alive and leave nothing but a thank-you note. The idea that I might be looking at a real adversary makes something spark behind my ribs, a pulse of danger I haven’t felt in too long.
“Find her.” My voice drops, harder than steel.
My men don’t even pause. They move, quick and silent, the way you do when there’s no room for debate. They know that tone. There’s no margin for error. Nikola’s safety isn’t negotiable.
I remain behind, staring at her photo on the biggest monitor in the room. Suzy’s face, still and unreadable, fills the screen.
Her eyes are wide, mouth relaxed, posture all nerves and grace—but I know better now. She’s not nervous. She’s not here by accident. She’s not afraid.
My mind races: who trained her, who hired her, what the hell does she want? I plan out the next moves: tail her, tap her phone, lean on the building manager for entry, run her face through off-book channels. I want her followed until I can taste the air she breathes.
Under all of it, a wire tightens in my chest—not just tension, but something sharp and electric.
She’s a threat. Not just to Nikola, not just to my family, but to me—my order, my control.
I don’t like surprises. I don’t like ghosts in my city, but this girl…
she might be the most interesting thing I’ve seen in years.
I tap the screen, the glass cold under my finger. “Let’s see what you’re really made of, Suzy.”