5. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
He was gone before hospital security reached the stairwell door.
I ran the tape back in my head anyway, frame by frame, the way I always did when a job went sideways.
He had not looked at me directly. He had not looked at anyone directly, which was its own kind of information.
His hands stayed loose and visible the entire walk. There was no bulge at the waistband, no hesitation at the corner, no wasted motion anywhere in his stride.
A frightened man ran. An amateur panicked and knocked something over on his way out.
This man had simply left, the way a professional leaves a room he has already finished with.
That told me more than a name would have. Somebody had sent a person who knew exactly how to disappear in a building full of witnesses, and that kind of training did not come cheap or careless.
Reyes was fine, shaken but untouched, the intruder never having gotten near enough to the bed to do anything but look. I checked that first, before anything else, and only let the rest of it in once I knew.
"He just stood there," Reyes said, still gripping the blanket with his bandaged hand. "He didn't say a word to me. He looked at the chart, looked at me, and left like he had somewhere better to be."
"That is exactly what he wanted you to think."
"It doesn't feel like nothing."
"It was not nothing," I said. "It was reconnaissance. He came to see how many people would stop him, not to touch you."
Reyes did not look reassured, and I did not blame him for it.
I thought of the gray sedan I had clocked outside the entrance three mornings running, engine off, nobody getting out. This felt like the same patience wearing a different face, a second probe from whoever was still deciding how to finish what the fire had started.
Patient men rarely worked alone. If the car outside was one set of eyes, the man in the badge had just proven there was at least one more pair working the inside.
Ortiz caught up to me by the elevator bank, breathing hard, radio already crackling with a description too generic to be useful.
Medium build. Dark jacket. Already gone.
"Cameras?" I asked.
"We're pulling them now."
"And?"
"He knew where they were. He kept his head down in every angle I've already looked at, like he'd walked the route before."
Ortiz wiped a hand across his mouth, the color still not fully back in his face. "Whoever trained that guy trained him well."
That did not surprise me either.
"He did not learn that from a manual. That kind of habit takes years, and someone patient enough to drill it into him."
"Nobody stops him at the door," I said. "Nobody even asks him for a name."
"He had a badge."
"A badge anyone could print in an afternoon." I kept my voice level, because raising it would not undo the last four minutes.
"Your system checked a piece of laminated plastic instead of a face. That is the part somebody is going to have to answer for."
Ortiz did not argue the point, mostly because there was nothing in it to argue with.
"I'll get the front desk locking down badge checks by tonight," he said. "Real ones this time, not the laminated kind."
"Tonight is not soon enough, but it is a start."
He nodded, already moving toward the security office, radio still muttering at his hip about a man nobody had managed to stop.
I turned back toward Reyes's room and found Isla already there, standing just inside the doorway with her arms crossed tight over her chest, watching the empty hallway where the man had been standing not two minutes earlier.
"You saw him," I said. It was not a question.
"I saw him." Her voice came out steadier than her hands looked. "He walked right past me."
"What did he say?"
"Something about a transfer order, calm as anything. I almost believed him."
"Describe him."
"He was about six feet, maybe. His hair was dark, going gray at the temples." She pressed her palms flat against her scrubs like she could smooth the shake out of them that way.
"He had a scar through one eyebrow, small and old." She stopped, replaying it.
"He looked at me for maybe two seconds. That's it."
Two seconds was enough. I had learned that the hard way, more than once, in more than one country.
"That is a problem," I said.
"What does that mean?"
"It means he has your face now. It means you are no longer just a nurse who happened to be assigned to his target's floor."
I made myself keep going. Leaving her only half of it would only let her imagination fill in something worse. "You are a witness who can identify him, which makes you a loose end in whatever plan put him in this hallway in the first place."
She went very still, the same stillness I recognized in myself when something landed harder than expected.
"So I'm a loose end," she repeated.
"Yes."
"That's a nice way to describe a person."
"It is an accurate way." I had never seen the point in softening a fact simply because it was unpleasant. Facts did not change just because a man said them gently.
"I am not saying it to be cruel," I added. "I am saying it because you need to understand what it means before you decide what to do about it."
"What I do about it isn't yours to decide."
"I did not say it was."
"You said it like it was." She uncrossed her arms, and I watched her hands come alive the way they always did when the rest of her ran out of room to hold something in.
"You walked in here and reduced the last five minutes of my life to a math problem. A variable. Something to be solved instead of a person standing in a hallway who just had a stranger look at her like she was already dead."
"That is not what I meant."
"Then say what you mean, instead of talking like you're briefing someone on a case file."
I considered that for a moment longer than the conversation strictly allowed. She was not entirely wrong, and I disliked how rarely anyone told me that to my face and made me believe it.
It was the same mercy I offered almost everyone, control instead of comfort, and I had never once stopped to ask whether it actually felt like mercy from the other side of it.
"I meant that I am not going to let anything happen to you," I said. "I used the wrong words to say it."
That landed differently than I expected. Some of the fight went out of her shoulders, though not all of it, and not fast.
"You have a strange way of showing concern," she said.
"I have had very little practice."
She almost laughed at that, the sound catching somewhere before it fully arrived, and for a moment the hallway felt less like the scene of a break-in and more like the two of us standing in the wreckage of an argument neither of us had actually wanted to finish.
"I still don't like being talked about like I'm a problem to manage," she said, quieter now.
"You are not a problem. You are a person I am trying to keep alive, and I am not always skilled at making that sound like the second thing instead of the first."
She looked at me for a long moment, like she was deciding whether that qualified as an apology.
"Understood. I will try to say it better next time."
"Is there going to be a next time?"
"I would prefer there not be. I am not confident of that yet."
She went quiet, something shifting in her face like she had just remembered something she should have said a long time before now.
"There's something I never told you." She rubbed absently at her wrist.
"A few nights ago, Reyes grabbed my wrist in his sleep. For about ten seconds he was completely lucid."
"He looked right at me and said, 'He'll come back to finish it.' Then he was gone again, like it never happened."
Something in my chest went tight and quiet at once.
"Why did you not tell me that when it happened?"
"Because I wasn't sure what I'd actually heard, and by the time I was sure, it felt strange to bring it up out of nowhere." She met my eyes.
"I'm telling you now."
"Now is better than never. It would have been better then."
"I know. You don't have to say it like that."
"I am not scolding you. I am recalibrating."
And I was, already weighing the sentence against a fake orderly and a gray sedan and a woman who had just become a witness herself.
Reyes had not been confused that night. He had been warning her, the one lucid moment his body allowed him, and she had carried it alone because she had not known yet who to trust with it.
"You believe me," she said. It was not quite a question.
"I believe every word of it. It fits."
She studied me a moment, the anger cooling into something closer to exhaustion. For the first time since I had met her, I saw the full weight of a job that never let anyone rest long enough to feel what had just happened to them.
Her phone rang before either of us could say anything else.
She answered it on the second ring, out of habit more than urgency, already half turning away from me toward the window. I watched her face while she listened, the same flat attention I gave anything that might matter later, and I saw the exact moment her expression changed.
"I'm sorry, say that again," she said. "Slower."
I could not hear the other half of the call, only the low, unhurried cadence of a man who thought he was delivering unremarkable news. Isla's knuckles had gone white around the phone.
"Nobody scheduled a gas inspection," she said. "I've lived there three years. There's never been one."
She went quiet, longer this time.
"You let someone into my apartment on a work order I never filed?"
She said nothing for a beat. I watched her jaw tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the man who had already come through this floor once today.
"When," she said. It was not a question so much as a demand dressed up as one.
She listened another few seconds, then asked who had signed the work order, and went quiet again at whatever answer she got back.
"That name means nothing to me," she said. "I've never heard of that company."
A shorter pause this time.
"No, don't apologize. You didn't do anything wrong." Her voice had gone gentle out of pure habit, the same reflex I had watched her use on frightened patients, even now, even with her own hands still not quite steady.
She said a flat, distracted thank-you that clearly meant nothing to her, and lowered the phone slowly, like it had gotten heavier in her hand.
"That was my building super," she said. "He wanted to let me know the gas company came by this afternoon to check a reported leak on my floor."
"And there was no leak?"
"There wasn't. There was no inspection I scheduled." Her voice had gone flat in a way I recognized, the particular calm people found right before the real fear caught up with them.
"There's no record of anyone in my building requesting one," she said.
"Someone used a fake work order to get into my apartment, Nikolai."
I felt something in my chest go cold and still, the same stillness that used to mean I was about to do something I could not take back later.
My left hand found the cuff of my jacket before I noticed I was doing it, an old habit surfacing exactly when I needed my hands to stay useful instead of anxious. I made myself let go of the fabric.
Whoever had sent a man through this hospital with a stolen badge had not stopped there. They had gone straight to the one place Isla still thought of as safe, quietly, efficiently, without ever needing to break a window or force a lock.
That kind of patience did not belong to an amateur. Whoever this was had already decided how it would end and was only waiting for the right moment to make it happen.
"Today," I said.
"Today." She looked up at me, and whatever had been left of our argument a few minutes earlier had evaporated entirely, replaced by something closer to the look she had given the man in the hallway.
"Someone was already inside my building," she said, "and it wasn't the gas company."