Chapter Six Charlotte
Six days.
Six motels, two stolen cars, one safe house that turned out to be a storage unit with a cot and a space heater that smelled like burning dust. Six days of highway and silence and the slow, grinding proximity of sharing small spaces with a man who takes up too much room in every one of them.
I'm running out of cigarettes, despite the fact he’s bought me two packs. I'm running out of clothes. I'm running out of whatever fuel Charlotte Richardson runs on, the cold, clean reserves of composure I've been rationing since the night Claudio put me in that car and drove me into the dark.
The farmhouse is better than anything we've had so far.
It sits at the end of a dirt road in the mountains, surrounded by pine trees and silence.
No neighbors for miles. Pineridge Resort, it’s called.
The nearest town is thirty minutes south, a gas station and a general store and a church with a crooked steeple.
Claudio says it belongs to someone who owes Carmelo a debt, and the way he says it tells me I don't want to know what kind of debt buys you a house in the mountains that no one asks questions about.
Inside: wood floors, a kitchen with a gas stove, a living room with a fireplace that's been converted to a wood-burning insert.
One bedroom. One bathroom. Running water that comes out brown for the first thirty seconds and then clears to something drinkable.
The fridge is stocked with the basics, which means someone came here before us and prepared.
It feels almost normal. That's the problem.
Normal is dangerous. Normal makes you soft.
Normal is how you forget that you're running, and forgetting is how you get caught.
I learned that three years ago when I rented my first apartment as Charlotte and bought curtains and a coffee maker and a small plant for the kitchen window, and for two weeks I felt almost human, almost real, and then I caught myself smiling at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and I stopped because the woman smiling back had a split lip that was still healing and a name that was already dead.
I don't do normal anymore.
But the farmhouse has a bathtub. An actual bathtub, not a shower stall the size of a coffin.
And the wood stove throws heat that seeps into the floorboards and radiates up through your feet, and the kitchen has a window that looks out over the tree line, and the light that comes through it in the late afternoon is gold and soft and quiet.
I hate it. I hate how much I want to stay.
Claudio is in the kitchen dismantling one of the burner phones.
He's been doing this every other day, swapping SIM cards, rotating numbers, building a communication system from scratch because he doesn't trust any existing infrastructure.
His hands work automatically while his eyes scan the tree line through the window.
He does this constantly. Watches the perimeter the way I count exits.
Compulsive. Necessary. The tic of a person who learned early that the world is full of angles you can't see until it's too late.
We haven't talked about the car. About what I told him.
Because staying would have killed me. Five words, and I've been regretting them for three days because five words is five more than Charlotte Richardson has given anyone in three years, and giving pieces of yourself to a man with a gun is how you end up with nothing left to hold.
He hasn't pushed. That's the thing that keeps me off balance.
Any other man would have pushed. Would have circled back to it, prodded, leveraged the vulnerability into more information.
Claudio heard it, filed it, and moved on.
He hasn't mentioned it once. Hasn't looked at me differently.
Hasn't softened his voice or gentled his tone or done any of the things men do when they think a woman has shown them her wound and they want to prove they're safe by being tender about it.
He just drives. And watches. And hands me the lighter before I ask.
I don't know what to do with a man like that.
I pour myself a glass of water from the tap and stand at the kitchen counter.
He's three feet away, bent over the phone, a screwdriver between his teeth.
In the warm light from the window, I can see the scar on his forearm, the tattoo I still can't read, the way his jaw works when he's concentrating.
He's rolled his sleeves to his elbows. His forearms are thick with muscle and scattered with fine dark hair, and I watch his hands work and hate myself for noticing how big and beautiful they are.
"Stop staring," he says around the screwdriver.
"I'm not staring."
"Your breathing changed. You're either staring or having a medical event, and you look healthy enough."
"My breathing didn't change."
He takes the screwdriver out of his mouth and looks at me. Those pale eyes. Wrong-colored. Unsettling. The eyes of a man who catalogues the world the same way I do, which means he sees me doing it, which means I can't hide from him the way I hide from everyone else.
"It went from twelve breaths per minute to fifteen," he says.
"You count my breathing."
"I notice everything."
He goes back to the phone. I stand at the counter with my water and my racing pulse and the very specific fury of a woman who has just been told that a man has been paying close enough attention to her autonomic functions to notice a three-breath deviation.
That's not romantic, Charlotte. That's surveillance.
Then why does your chest feel like that.
I put the glass down. "We need to talk about what happens now. We can’t keep running."
"What happens next is you tell me what you saw at Marchetti, and I use that information to identify the mole and get us back to the compound."
"That's your plan? Wait for me to talk?"
"It's the only plan that matters. You're the only person who can identify the man you saw. Without that, I've got a theory and no proof."
"So I'm leverage."
"You're a witness."
"Same thing."
He sets the phone down. Turns to face me fully.
He's leaning against the opposite counter, arms crossed, and the kitchen is small enough that our feet are almost touching.
The wood stove crackles in the next room.
Outside, the wind pushes through the pines and the whole house makes a low groaning sound, like a ship on rough water.
Kinda how my insides feel right now… tumultuous.
"It's not the same thing," he says. "Leverage is what you use and throw away. A witness is what you protect."
"Don't pretend there's a difference. The second I give you what I know, I become disposable."
"You're not disposable."
"Everyone is disposable, Claudio. Especially to men like you."
He sucks in a breath and his jaw flexes. One sharp movement. I've learned his tells over six days. The jaw is anger. The hands going still is calculation. The breath through his nose is frustration. Right now I'm getting all three.
"Men like me," he repeats.
"Men who deal with problems. Men who handle things. Men who decide what's useful and what isn't and make the rest disappear."
"You think I'd hurt you."
"I think you'd do whatever the job requires."
He pushes off the counter. One step toward me.
The kitchen shrinks. He's a big man, and this close I can smell the wood smoke and the gun oil and the clean sweat underneath, and my body reacts before my brain can intervene.
Pulse climbing. Skin prickling. The back of my neck tingling like someone's running a finger down my spine.
Oh fuck… fuck… fuuuuuck.
"I killed three men in a corridor to keep you breathing," he says.
His voice is low. Not a whisper. Quieter than a whisper.
The volume of a man who doesn't need to raise his voice because what he's saying does the work.
"I left my brother. I left the compound.
I left every system and structure that keeps me functional, and I drove you into the dark with nothing but cash and a gun and the address of a farmhouse in the mountains.
And you think the job would require me to hurt you. "
"I didn't say that."
"You implied it."
"I said everyone is disposable. That's not the same as saying you'd hurt me."
"It's close enough." Another step. He's in my space now.
I can feel the heat coming off his body, can see the cut on his lip that still hasn't fully healed, can count the flecks of grey in those pale green eyes.
My back is against the counter, my hands are gripping the edge and my knuckles are white.
"You don't know me," I say. "You don't know anything about me."
"I know you notice exits. I know you sleep with one hand under the pillow.
I know you position your shoes for a fast escape every night.
I know you press the back of your neck when you're scared, counting your vertebrae like they're prayer beads.
" His voice drops lower. "I know someone taught you a breathing technique for panic attacks, and I know you didn't learn it from a self-help book.
I know Charlotte Richardson isn't your name.
And I know that whoever you were before, someone broke you badly enough that you built an entire person to hide inside. "
My breath catches as my anxiety spikes. Brutal. Every single one a piece of me that I thought was hidden, dug out by a man who watches the way I breathe and counts the seconds between my exhales.
"Fuck you," I say. My voice breaks on the second word.
"I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to show you that I see you. All of you. Not just the witness. Not just the asset. You."
"I didn't ask you to see me."
"No. You didn't."