Chapter 4 Charlotte
Chapter Four: Charlotte
I know the time because I've been staring at the digital clock on the nightstand since midnight, watching the minutes change and hating every one of them.
Sleep doesn't come easy in locked rooms. It never has.
Three years ago, I trained myself to sleep in four-hour blocks with one ear open and my shoes next to the bed, and that training is the only reason I'm awake now, sitting up in the dark with my heart hammering and my brain already running the math.
I know what gunfire sounds like.
Two more shots. Close together. Same corridor, maybe one floor down. Then a burst of something automatic, followed by silence, followed by two more suppressed rounds.
I'm already moving.
The shoes go on first. Always the shoes.
That was the rule I made three years ago, the night I left.
Shoes first, because you can run in bare feet, but you can't run far, and far is the only distance that matters when someone is trying to kill you.
I pull on the slacks I draped over the chair before bed.
Button the blouse with fingers that aren't shaking, because Charlotte Richardson's fingers don't shake.
The woman before Charlotte, her fingers shook all the time. Charlotte's don't.
You're not her. You're not her anymore.
I grab the jacket. Fold it over my arm. Check myself in the bathroom mirror for half a second. Pale face, tight jaw, dark hair pulled back because loose hair is a liability, something to grab, something to drag you by. I learned that lesson the hard way. Once.
The alarm goes off. Thirty seconds after the last gunshot, which means the security system is delayed, which means someone tampered with it, which means this isn't random violence. This is planned. Coordinated. Targeted.
Targeted at you, Charlotte. Don't be stupid. You know it's you.
I press my fingers to the back of my neck. The vertebrae are there. Hard ridges under skin, stacked in a line. Still standing. Still intact.
The room is dark except for the red glow of the clock and the thin bleed of emergency lighting under the door.
I can hear boots in the corridor now, running, the compound's guards scrambling.
Shouting. Radio chatter, tinny and frantic through the walls.
Someone yells a name I don't recognize. Someone else yells clear.
I stand by the window and wait.
There's nothing else to do. The door is locked from the outside.
The window doesn't open more than four inches, which I tested my first night because I test every window in every room I sleep in, a habit I'll carry until the day I die.
The walls are solid concrete. I am a woman in a box, and the box is the only thing between me and whatever is happening in that corridor.
If the lock just disengages…
I pull the crushed cigarette from the pack on the nightstand.
Three left. Two, now. I put it between my lips and taste the filter.
Tobacco and paper. The taste of the first morning I was Charlotte Richardson, standing outside a bus station in a city I'd never visited, smoking a cigarette I'd bummed from a stranger because I didn't have enough money for a pack and a meal, and I chose the meal because surviving has always been about deciding which hunger to feed first.
I close my eyes and count.
The shots have stopped. The alarm is still screaming. I can hear the guards reorganizing, their boots finding rhythm, the chaos settling into protocol. Whatever happened in that corridor is over.
I count the seconds since the last shot.
Sixty. Ninety. One-twenty. At two minutes, the adrenaline starts to ebb, and the shaking starts.
Not my hands. My hands are fine. My knees.
A tremor that runs through my thighs and into my calves and makes my feet buzz inside my shoes.
I lock my legs and clench my jaw and breathe through it because I have been here before, in a different room, in a different life, listening to violent sounds through walls and waiting to find out if the violence was going to come through the door.
It didn't come then. He'd put his fist through the drywall instead, and in the morning I'd covered the hole with a picture frame and told the landlord I'd handle the repairs myself.
It didn't come then.
It might come now.
I stand at the window with my unlit cigarette and my jacket over my arm and my shoes on and my spine counted and I wait.
I am very good at waiting. It's the one skill that crosses over between my old life and my new one.
The ability to stand still in a room and breathe and not panic while the world outside that room does things I can't control.
Minutes pass. Five. Ten. The alarm cuts off. The silence after it is worse than the noise, thick and heavy and full of things I can't see. I hear footsteps in the corridor. Not running anymore. Walking. One set, coming this way.
Heavy. Left side favoring slightly.
Not Claudio. Claudio walks evenly, weight distributed, balls of his feet. This is someone else.
The footsteps pass my door without stopping. The compound breathes and settles around me, and I stand in the dark and chew my unlit cigarette and wait for someone to tell me what the fuck just happened.
Nobody comes. Not for a long time.
I sit on the edge of the bed. Then I stand up. Then I sit again.
I think about the conference room at Marchetti Holdings.
The three men at the table. The scar on the left hand of the man I recognized.
The way he looked at me through the slit in the door, and the way my body went cold, the kind of cold that starts in your stomach and radiates outward until your fingers go numb and your vision narrows to a pinpoint.
He saw me. I know he saw me. And now people are dying in corridors because of what I saw, and I'm sitting in a locked room with an unlit cigarette pretending I don't have the one piece of information that could stop all of it.
You're selfish, Charlotte. You're a selfish, scared woman holding a grenade because you're too afraid that letting go of it means you stop mattering.
Maybe. Probably.
But selfish women survive. I've got three years of proof.
The door opens without a knock.
Claudio fills the frame. His eyes are hard, shoulders tense. There's dust on his face. A cut on his lower lip, small, already clotting. Blood on his hands that isn't his.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
I'm standing by the window, dressed, shoes on, jacket over my arm. Ready. I've been ready for forty-five minutes, waiting for something to happen.
His eyes move over me. Not the way men usually look at me, not the slow up-and-down assessment that makes my skin crawl. Quick. Efficient. Checking for injury, checking for panic, checking to see if I'm going to be a problem or an asset in the next five minutes.
"We're leaving," he says.
"Where?"
"Away."
I almost laugh. Away is the destination of every woman who's ever been in danger. Not a city, not an address, not a plan. Just away. I've been away for three years. It doesn't feel as far as it sounds.
"The men in the corridor," I say. "How many?"
"Three."
"Dead?"
"Very."
"And you killed them."
"Yes." He says it without remorse. Without pride or shame or the performative toughness that violent men usually coat their violence in. Just a fact. He killed three men. Now he's here.
"Someone inside gave them access," he says. "Keycards. Codes. Layout. They knew where to find you, and they knew how to get here. The compound isn't safe anymore."
My fingers find my neck. I press. One vertebra. Two. Three.
You're still here.
"Okay," I say.
He blinks. Barely. A micro-movement that tells me he expected more resistance. An argument, maybe. Tears. Questions. The things normal people do when a man covered in someone else's blood tells them to leave everything behind and follow him into the dark.
But I'm not normal people. I've done this before. And the fact that he doesn't know that yet is the only card I've got left.
I pick up my coat and walk past him into the corridor.
I don't look at the walls. I don't look at the floor.
I learned a long time ago that you don't look at the evidence of violence when you're walking through it, because looking makes it real and real makes you freeze and freezing gets you killed.
I look forward. I walk fast. I don't run, because running attracts attention, and attention is the enemy of women who are leaving.
Claudio falls into step behind me. Close. Not touching, but close enough that I can feel the heat of him against my back, and the weight of his presence is both a threat and a shield, and I haven't decided which one I need more.
The garage is underground. Cold, oil-stained concrete, fluorescent lighting that buzzes at a frequency that reverberates in my skull. Four black vehicles. A man leaning against one of them.
I see him and my step falters for half a second.
Same face. Same jaw, same cheekbones, same height.
But everything else is different. This man is looser, warmer, wearing a hoodie and sweats like he rolled out of bed and came straight here.
His hair is messy. His posture is open. He's watching Claudio with an expression that has no business being on the face of a man in a mafia garage at three in the morning.
Worry. Real, naked, unfiltered worry.
A twin. I saw him my first night here, loud and laughing in a corridor, and I'd filed the face away. Same genetics, completely different animal. Claudio is a closed fist. This one is an open hand.
They talk. Low voices, not meant for me, but the garage echoes and I catch pieces.
Cash. Burners. Safe houses. Emilio hands Claudio a duffel bag and a leather jacket.
Claudio puts the jacket on, and the look on his face when he does is the first real expression I've seen him wear.
Not anger, not calculation. Discomfort. The specific discomfort of a man accepting something soft from someone he loves and not knowing where to put the feeling.
Emilio looks at me. Once. Brief. His eyes are the same pale green as Claudio's, but warmer. There's a question in them that he doesn't ask out loud, and I don't know what the question is, but I hold his gaze until he nods. Not at me. To himself. Like he's confirming something he already suspected.
Then he grips Claudio's shoulder, says something I can't hear, and walks back into the dark.
Claudio opens the passenger door. I get in. The seat is cold leather, and the car smells new and, faintly, the cologne from the jacket Emilio gave him. Claudio throws the bags in the trunk, slides behind the wheel, and starts the engine without a word.
We pull out of the garage. Through a gate, past guards who don't ask questions, onto a road that feeds into the highway. The compound shrinks in the side mirror until it's just a cluster of lights behind us, and then it's gone.
I watch the road. Strip malls and gas stations and the amber blur of passing headlights. The highway is empty at this hour, just us and the truckers and the occasional taxi heading somewhere that matters more than where we're going.
I count the exits. I can't help it. Every off-ramp is a possibility, a direction, a way out.
I've been counting exits since the night I left.
Seventeen exits between the apartment and the bus station.
I counted every singly fucking one because counting gave me something to focus on besides the split in my lip and the bruise on my ribs and the shaking in my hands that didn't stop until I was two hundred miles away.
I'm counting again.
Claudio glances at me. I feel it more than see it, the brief turn of his head, the weight of his attention.
"You're counting," he says.
I go still.
"Exits," he says.
My throat tightens. Nobody has ever noticed that. Nobody has ever watched me closely enough to see the pattern, the way my eyes track each green sign, the small movement of my lips as I log the number. Nobody has ever looked at me and seen the thing underneath the thing.
"Habit," I say.
He doesn't push. He turns back to the road. His hands are steady on the wheel, ten and two, and the cut on his lip has stopped bleeding but the blood is still there, dried dark at the corner of his mouth.
Miles pass. Ten. Twenty. The city falls away and the road opens up and the dark gets bigger. I roll down the window an inch and the air that comes in is cold and clean and smells like nothing. Like empty space. Like the absence of walls.
I pull my cigarette from behind my ear.
Claudio reaches into the center console without looking. Pulls out a lighter. Cheap yellow Bic, the kind you buy in packs from a gas station. He holds it out with his eyes on the road.
I take it. Our fingers don't touch, but the space between them is small. An inch, maybe less. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off his hand, close enough that if either of us moved a fraction, skin would meet skin.
Neither of us moves.
I light the cigarette. The flame catches. The first drag fills my lungs with heat and tar and the familiar burn that has been the only constant in Charlotte Richardson's life for three years. I exhale against the windshield, and the smoke curls in the dashboard light.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. You've been chewing that thing unlit for days. It was pissing me off."
I take another drag. The nicotine hits my bloodstream and the shaking in my knees finally stops.
He remembered. The coffee yesterday, black with one sugar. The lighter today. Small things. Practical things. The kind of things a man does when he's paying attention to a woman he's not supposed to be paying attention to.
I don't read into it. I can't afford to. The last man who paid attention to what I needed used that knowledge to figure out exactly how to take it away.
But the lighter is warm in my pocket. And the coffee this morning was good. And he noticed the exits.
Nobody notices the exits.
I smoke and watch the road and count the mile markers instead because mile markers don't mean the same thing as exits. Exits are escape. Mile markers are just distance.
Distance is all I have right now. Distance, and a lit cigarette, and a man with blood on his lip who brought me a lighter because he was paying attention.
Don't, Charlotte. Don't you dare.
I take another drag and blow smoke out the window and press my fingers to the back of my neck and count.