18. Chapter 18
Isla
Tuesday evening I'm at the soup kitchen on the Lower East Side, which is where I have been nearly every Tuesday evening for four years. I chop vegetables, ladle soup, talk to the regulars. I don't think about Matt. I am good at compartmentalizing. I have been doing it my entire life.
One of the other volunteers finds me in the hallway near the back entrance after the dinner rush. There is a donor outside, she says. Asked for me by name. Wants to discuss a contribution.
This isn't an unusual thing to happen. I go out the back door.
Martin Frey is standing in the alley.
He has his hands in his pockets. He is smiling in the way he smiles when there is no one watching who he needs to manage — not the smooth professional smile from the estate corridor, something different. Something that does not reach anything above his mouth.
I go very still.
Four years of Tuesdays. I know this alley — the dumpster, the loose brick at the base of the wall, the security light that takes eleven seconds to click on once it senses movement.
I have stood here in the cold a hundred times waiting for a ride or finishing a phone call, and none of those hundred times has this alley felt like anything other than the back of a building.
It feels different now. The brick is the same brick.
The light is the same light. I am the thing that's different, and I hate that, and I file the feeling away because there isn't room for it right now.
"You're a hard woman to get alone," he says. "I've been trying for a while." He tilts his head. "You're even prettier up close than in the photographs."
He says the last word with a weight that makes my stomach drop.
I think about which photographs he means.
I think about a bedroom window and a burner number and a timestamp.
I think about the fact that I knew he saw it, that we all knew he saw it, and I have not yet fully reckoned with what it means to have been seen.
I take a step back. My shoulders meet the brick wall behind me.
He steps forward. Unhurried. He is not rushing because he does not think he needs to.
"You were so beautiful," he says, conversationally, like we are discussing something pleasant.
"The way you — you didn't know anyone was watching.
That's the version of you most people never get to see.
" He pauses. "But now I have. I've seen it. "
"Martin." I say his name clearly. Not loudly.
The way Matt showed me — not when he was trying to show me anything, just when he was talking through threat scenarios at my kitchen table and I was listening with the part of my brain that retains operational information.
Like I am not afraid. Like I'm simply addressing a person. "Take a step back."
He doesn't move.
This is the part no one sees. The part where I am very calm on the outside and counting, on the inside, every single thing about him — the distance to the door, the angle of his shoulders, whether his hands are visible, how many seconds the light will take.
I have spent my whole life being told I am good in a crisis, and what that actually means, standing here, is that I have gotten very good at being two people at once.
One of them is talking. The other one is doing math.
"You've been wasting yourself," he says.
His voice has shifted — still low, still conversational, but with an edge now, something that sounds like grievance.
"All these years. That bodyguard, that ridiculous fake engagement your father arranged.
And then last week." Something hardens in his expression.
"Those photographs. Clubs. Men I've never seen before. You're so much better than that, Isla."
My name in his mouth is wrong in a way I cannot fully articulate, like a word used in a context that doesn't fit.
I have heard my name said by a hundred people in a hundred ways — by my father, like an instruction; by Lina, like an exhale; by Matt, like something he is still deciding whether he's allowed to want.
Frey says it like he owns it. Like he has been saying it to himself for eleven years and this is the first time he's said it out loud and gotten to watch what it does to my face.
"You don't know me," I say.
"I know you better than anyone." He says it without heat, like a correction.
Like a simple fact. "I've been paying attention for eleven years.
You think the bodyguard knows you? He was in your life for two months, and gone just as quickly.
It took nothing to dislodge him. I know what you look like when you think you're alone.
I know what you reach for when you're scared.
" A pause. "I know what kind of man you need. "
"What you've been doing is stalking," I say. My voice is level. I am proud of it. "What you saw through my window was taken without my consent and you know that."
Something shifts in his expression. The conversational quality drops. "You were thinking about me," he says. "Don't tell me you weren't."
I look at him. I do not confirm and I do not deny because either response is engagement and engagement is not what I want right now. I want the back door to open. Please, let the back door open.
"You've been throwing yourself at a man who walked out on you," he says. "Club photos with strangers. How many of them did you let touch you, Isla? How many will we have to wash out of your skin?"
"Step back, Martin."
"Did you let the bodyguard fuck you? Does he know what you taste like?
Did you give him all that, and he chose some other woman's brat over you and you just—" He shakes his head.
The grievance is fully present now, the tone of a man who has been building a case for a long time and is finally presenting it.
"You deserve better than that. You've always deserved better than what they give you.
Your father treats you like an asset. That bodyguard treated you like a liability. I have been—"
"Stop."
"—watching you for eleven years and I have never once—"
"I said stop."
I shift my weight and try to move out from between him and the wall.
His hand comes off the wall and wraps around my wrist. Not hard at first — just there, four fingers and a thumb above the bone, a pressure that is meant to hold me in place.
When I pull against it his grip tightens and something cold and absolute moves through me, not quite fear, something older and more clarifying.
"Don't," he says, very quietly. "Don't struggle."
The back door opens.
A kitchen worker comes out with a trash bag, and Frey releases my wrist in one motion, steps back, straightens his jacket.
The worker tosses the bag without looking at us.
Frey turns and walks toward the far end of the alley without another word, like a man who has decided to postpone rather than abandon.
I stand in the alley until his footsteps are gone. Then I go back inside and I finish my shift, because leaving would mean my hands are shaking, and I will not give him that.
They are not shaking when I leave at ten.
I say goodbye to the other volunteers. I pick up my bag from the back shelf and walk out the front door with the even pace of a woman who has nothing pressing on her mind.
They are not shaking on the subway home.
I read something on my phone. I look out the window at the stations.
They start shaking in the elevator of my building, where no one can see them, which I consider a personal victory.
I shower for a long time.
I stand under the hot water and let the kitchen volunteer's Lemon Pine-Sol smell and the cold January air and Martin Frey's voice wash off me.
Now that it's over, I stop fighting the tears.
They come in a torrent, and soon I'm gasping for air.
I sit on the shower bench and breathe carefully in and out, willing the panic down.
After a while I feel something that is not fine but is more removed from what happened than it was an hour ago. This is what I have. I will take it.
After I towel dry my hair and throw on my robe, I do what I always do in situations like these, and I call Lina.
She picks up on the first ring, even though its nearly midnight, which means she was already awake and already worried. I do not ask how she knew to be.
"Tell me," she says.
So I tell her. All of it — the donor at the door, the alley, the photographs reference, the eleven years of watching, every terrifying thing he said about Matt and the clubs and the men he'd never seen before.
I tell her about the bruises on my wrist — she already knows, I can hear it, but I tell her anyway because it needs to be said out loud — and I tell her about the kitchen worker and the way he just adjusted and walked away like a man making a tactical decision rather than being stopped.
Lina is quiet for a moment.
"Isla," she says. "Call Matt."
"No."
"He needs to know—"
"He'll find out. When this is over, he'll know everything. But right now he is not my security detail and I'm not his problem and I'm not calling him tonight because I have a plan and his involvement would complicate it."
I know what this is. I know I am doing it again — deciding what he can handle, on my timeline, before he's had the chance to decide for himself. I know that. I'm doing it anyway.
"What plan?"
"I'm going to set a trap," I say. "Frey monitors my digital calendar through the family office access.
If I plant a false schedule — a private appearance, a location Matt and I choose and control — he'll position himself around it.
Ramirez has enough for a warrant. We just need to put him somewhere she can move on him. "
Lina is quiet again, longer this time.
"I hate this idea," she says.
"I know."
"You'd be the bait."
"I'd be the bait in a location I control with Ramirez's officers already inside. It's not as insane as it sounds."
"It sounds pretty insane."
"Lina."
Another pause. Then: "What do you need me to do?"
I look at the notebook on the kitchen table. I have been thinking about this since the alley, running the shape of it in my head on the subway home, and what I need is someone I trust to help me map the timing window, because the timing is the part I cannot solve alone.
"Come over tomorrow," I say. "I'll walk you through it."
"Okay," she says. "But you need to eat something first. And drink water. And — Isla, are you okay? Really?"
I look at the bruise on my wrist. Four fingers and a thumb, just above the bone.
"I will be," I say.
I pull the notebook toward me. I keep working.
My phone rings.
I look at the screen. Matthew Beckett. As if I summoned him.
I answer on the third ring. Neither of us speaks for a few seconds.
"I need to show you something," he says. "Can I come over?"
"I'm already in bed," I say.
A pause. "Your lights are on."
I go very still. "Are you outside my building?"
"I was in the neighborhood."
"Beckett."
"I wanted to make sure you got home okay." Another pause, shorter. "Your lights are on, Isla."
"Fuck," I say. "Are you stalking me now too?"
He doesn't laugh. That is the thing that gets me — he doesn't laugh, and his voice when he speaks again is careful in a way that means he has heard something in mine that I did not mean to put there.
"I'm coming up," he says.