Chapter Five Claudio #2
"That's not how this works. We don't keep things from each other."
"I'm not keeping. I'm confirming. There's a difference."
He exhales hard. "Fine. But when you're ready to talk, you call me first. Not Leone. Me."
"Noted."
"And Claudio?"
"What."
"Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
He hangs up before I can respond. I stare at the phone and resist the urge to throw it at the wall.
The bathroom door opens. Charlotte steps out in yesterday's clothes, hair wet, face scrubbed clean. Without the sharp eyeliner and the careful composure, she looks younger. Softer. The kind of soft that she'd hate me for noticing, so I don't mention it.
"We need to move," I say. "I'll get food on the road."
She nods. Puts on her jacket. Picks up her shoes from their precise position by the bed.
We check out. The clerk doesn't look up from her crossword. I pull onto the highway heading south, and Charlotte settles into the passenger seat with her feet tucked under her and her jacket zipped to her chin and the last cigarette from her crushed pack between her fingers.
I toss her the lighter without being asked.
She catches it. Doesn't say thank you this time. Just lights the cigarette and opens the window, and the smoke drifts between us in a thin grey thread.
She's different on the road. I noticed it last night, but daylight makes it clearer.
She changes. Not dramatically, not a costume or a character.
More like a frequency shift. Her posture loosens.
Her eyes move differently, wider, scanning, the gaze of someone who's been a stranger in public spaces and knows how to adjust the wattage of her presence so that people look past her instead of at her.
She knows how to be invisible. That's not something you learn at a legal assistant's desk.
"You've done this before," I say.
She takes a drag. Exhales. "Done what?"
"Run. Disappeared. Changed cities, changed names, changed whatever needed changing to become someone new."
Her jaw tightens. The cigarette pauses halfway to her mouth.
"Charlotte Richardson isn't the name you were born with," I say.
"Your file is clean. Too clean. No history before three years ago.
No college records, no previous employment, no social media footprint.
You materialized in a new city with a new identity and a new life, and you did it well enough that nobody noticed until four men with automatic weapons kicked down your door. "
She smokes. Doesn't look at me. Her eyes are fixed on the road, and her free hand is on her thigh, fingers pressed flat, nails white against her slacks.
"That's not a question," she says.
"No. It's an observation."
"Then it doesn't require a response."
"It doesn't. But I'd like one."
She finishes the cigarette. Stubs it out in the cupholder, which I'll be annoyed about later but don't mention now. She rolls up the window. The smoke dissipates. The car fills with clean air and the leather smell of Emilio's jacket and the cheap motel soap she used this morning.
"I had a different name," she says. "Before."
I keep my eyes on the road. My hands on the wheel. I don't move, don't react, don't do anything that might spook her into closing back up.
"I left it behind. Along with everything attached to it."
"Why?"
She turns and looks at me. Directly. No mask, no filter, no ice-queen composure. For three seconds, maybe four, I see the woman under the architecture. Tired. Angry. Scared in a way that goes deeper than mafia hit squads and compromised compounds. Scared in a way that has roots.
"Because staying would have killed me," she says. "And I decided I wanted to live."
She turns back to the road. Pulls her jacket tighter. Tucks her chin down.
The conversation is over. She's given me exactly one piece, and she's locked the rest behind a door I don't have the key to yet.
But I heard it. The fear under those words.
The history compacted into a single sentence.
Staying would have killed her. Not the job, not the finances, not the inconvenience of a life she'd outgrown.
Something with teeth. Something that left marks she's been covering with nice clothes and good posture and a name that belongs to a woman who only exists because the woman before her couldn't survive.
I drive. She watches the road. I don't push.
But my hands are tight on the wheel, and there's a heat in my chest that has nothing to do with the car's shitty heating system and everything to do with the four words she didn't say.
Someone hurt me. Before.
I'm going to find out who.
And when I do, I'm going to handle it the way I handle everything.
Quietly.
And with a brutal vengeance.
Until then, we keep moving because while Leone sorts out shit at the compound, the harder we can make it to track Charlotte’s movements, the better. The last fucking thing we need is someone finding her, grabbing her and flipping our progress on the mole on it’s head.
So, we keep moving. According to Emilio’s texts, Alexandra is getting closer to tracking the security company that set up the internal surveillance and Leo is right on the tail of figuring out who the fuck is pulling the strings.
Hopefully they get it done, before shit hits the fan.