Chapter 9 #2
“Then we’ll have a conversation.”
For the next two hours, I try to focus on what’s important, but my mind is playing tricks on me, because every thirty minutes, sometimes ten, sometimes five, I open the security feed for a moment. Just to check.
On Thursday afternoon, camera fifteen reveals Elizabeth sitting on the window seat in the sunroom with a cup of tea and a book, which means the lessons must be over. Anya is on the floor nearby, drawing in her sketchbook.
The distance between them is shrinking.
I zoom in on Elizabeth and observe the way she tucks her hair behind her ear when she reads, the way her mouth moves slightly when she’s absorbed in a page, the small crease between her eyebrows that appears when she concentrates.
The curve of her neck where it meets her shoulder.
The hollow of her throat where I almost see her pulse.
I’m running her through the same lens I use for targets. Studying her patterns, her habits, her unguarded moments. Learning her the way I learn the layout of a building before I enter it. Every exit, every blind spot, every vulnerability.
The difference is that I study buildings to take them. I don’t know what I’m studying her for.
I close the feed, only to reopen it nineteen minutes later, telling myself it’s a security check.
It’s not a fucking security check.
Friday.
I need to leave for a meeting with Yuri at the port about Albanian countermeasures. On my way out, I pass the sunroom. The door is partially open. I hear a voice — Elizabeth’s voice — reading aloud.
I stop, lurking in the corridor, out of sight, and listen.
I can’t make out the words, just the melody of her voice, rising and falling, pausing in the places where stories pause. And then a sound so small I almost miss it. A giggle. High-pitched. Caught and released in the space between one sentence and the next.
Anya.
My daughter giggled at a stranger .
For the first time in I don’t know how long.
Walking toward the car, I call Mikhail.
“How are things?” I ask. Which really means: How is she? Is she okay? Is she still retreating? Has she smiled?
“Things are good. The new one is different.”
“Different how?”
“Patient. She doesn’t push it. Anya is not hiding from her.”
“And Elizabeth?”
“Professional. Quiet when she needs to be, which is rare. The woman talks to everyone. She’s been trying to befriend Dmitri.” A pause. “Dmitri is not responding well to this.”
“Dmitri doesn’t respond well to anything.”
“She asked him about his favorite food. He acted like she’d asked him to disarm a bomb.”
My mouth twitches before I can stop it.
“I’ll introduce myself tomorrow,” I say.
“About time. She probably thinks her employer is a ghost.”
“Better a ghost than a threat.”
“You’re not a threat to her, Rolan.”
I don’t answer. Because I am. I’m a threat to everyone in my proximity.
Tomorrow. I’ll meet her tomorrow.
Tomorrow doesn’t go as planned.
The meeting with Yuri runs long. The Albanian shell company network is deeper than we thought. It layers through six states and two offshore jurisdictions, each one nested inside the last like a set of matryoshka dolls designed by a forensic accountant.
Dushku isn’t only competing for city contracts. He’s building a parallel infrastructure with legitimate businesses, political connections, and community programs .
He’s doing what I did ten years ago. Building from the inside. And that makes him more dangerous than any man with a gun.
By the time we finish mapping the first tier of shell companies, it’s past midnight. I drive home in silence, my mind turning over corporate filings and construction bids and the way Besnik Dushku smiled at me across a charity gala two years ago.
I need a drink.
The house is dark when I enter. I move through the foyer, heading toward the private kitchen on the residential floor. The staff kitchen is downstairs. My private kitchen is closer and has better vodka.
The corridor is dimmed. But ahead, from behind the kitchen door, I catch light. A thin, amber line beneath the frame. The under-cabinet LEDs.
Is there someone in my kitchen?
I don’t announce myself. My footsteps are silent on the hardwood.
I reach the doorway and time stops.
She’s there.
Elizabeth Calloway.
She’s standing by the refrigerator with the door open, the white light spilling across the floor and onto her, wearing a pink-and-blue cartoon pajama set.
Her hair is down and loose, the dark waves falling past her shoulders and catching the amber of the under-cabinet fixtures. She’s barefoot on the marble floor — her feet are so small — holding a bottle of milk against her chest, and there’s a crumb at the corner of her mouth.
The cameras lied.
She’s somehow even more beautiful in person.
She hasn’t spotted me yet. She closes the refrigerator, turning toward the counter, and she’s humming — barely audible, a fragment of a melody I don’t recognize. The sound is so small and domestic that it stops me in the doorway.
I could leave. I should leave. I should turn around, go to my office, pour the drink there, and come back tomorrow. That would be the smart play. First impressions are architecture, and you don’t build foundations on a midnight kitchen rendezvous.
But I’ve been watching this woman on screens for seven days, and the screens weren’t enough. Standing here now, six feet from the real thing, I understand why.
You can watch someone on a camera and learn their patterns. Their schedule. The way they move, the way they sit, the way they push hair behind their ears. But you can’t learn how they smell or the sound of their voice when they think they’re alone.
No file prepares you for how their skin holds the light when they’re standing barefoot in your kitchen, unaware of you, unperformed, completely and devastatingly themselves.
She looks up from the counter.
The milk bottle jerks against her chest. Her eyes go wide, catching the light, the gold flecks in them bright with adrenaline. Her lips part and she makes a sound, a small intake of breath that isn’t a gasp but the precursor to one, and every muscle in her body goes taut.
This is the reaction I recognize from years of watching people register my presence for the first time.
Fear, the primal kind.
She’s afraid of me. She should be.
We stand frozen for three long seconds. The kitchen hums. The refrigerator, the clock, the distant murmur of the house doing whatever the house does at night.
She’s gripping the milk bottle with both hands, knuckles white, and her chest is rising and falling with breaths that are too fast and too shallow. I see her pulse in her throat in a rapid, visible flutter that the cameras never showed me.
I should speak. Whatever a normal employer would say to a normal employee.
I’ve been watching you, but you’re even better in person.
No, obviously not that. So, instead I go with the obvious.
“You must be the tutor.”