2. Kat
two
Kat
The knock lands three times, even and unhurried, and I'm already moving because I have been waiting all morning for exactly this.
I know what a legal threat sounds like through two inches of steel.
My coffee goes on the console table. My phone goes in my back pocket with the recorder app running, because I am not stupid, and I pull the door open hard enough that the hinges complain.
"Whatever's in the envelope, my lawyer's going to enjoy it more than you did."
There is no envelope.
There is a wall.
Six foot three of it, black jacket, black everything, filling the hallway like the building put him there for structural support. Buzzed dark hair. Scarred hands hanging loose at his sides. Honey-brown eyes that have already been all the way through me and out the other side.
My body reacts before my brain gets a vote. Heat spreads fast through my veins, low, stupid and immediate, and I have exactly one second of pure animalistic appreciation before my politics come sprinting around the corner with a clipboard.
Absolutely not. He is a corporate boot. He is the thing my whole wall is about. Stand down.
The beat at my throat does not stand down. Noted. Filed. Denied under oath.
And this is the exact shape of the humiliation, cross-referenced and filed: he is the machine that ground my parents down into a consent decree, corporate muscle in a better jacket, the living argument for every inch of the wall behind me, one look at him and the animal in me voted, unanimous, to climb him.
I would rather be caught doing almost anything else in my own doorway.
He hasn't spoken. He hasn't moved. But his eyes move to the door frame, the deadbolt, the hallway behind him, the window at the end of it, then back to me, and the whole sweep took less time than my heart needed to get itself under control.
He measured my home in under three seconds and me in one.
He clocked what my pulse did, too. I know he did, it was in the sweep, one more soft point in the room he catalogued, filed somewhere with better locks than mine.
And he gives me nothing back. No smirk, no flick of the eyes to let me know he knows.
Just the not-doing, already under my skin like a splinter I'll be working at for weeks.
"You're not a lawyer."
Nothing. Not a flicker.
"That's usually where people say a name."
His eyes drop to my hand on the door, then back up.
"Great. A mime. Look, I've had a busy twenty-four hours. Somebody posted my face on a message board with a caption about burning, so if you're here to explain that your employer is deeply concerned about the accuracy of my reporting, you can do it from the hallway."
He shifts his weight. That's all. One small movement, and somehow the hallway gets smaller.
"You're aware of the post."
"I'm aware I'm photogenic. Yes, I saw it."
"When."
What's up with this guy and his twenty-one questions? Actually, it's not how normal people ask questions. He's deadpan, a slot waiting to be filled.
"Ten minutes after the piece went live. Are we doing an interview? Because I usually charge."
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. Barely a smirk, gone before I can prove it existed.
I fold my arms. Drawbridge up. Behind me, the wall waits with its red thread, its shipping manifests and fourteen months of my life pinned to brick, and I am suddenly aware of every single window at my back.
He is not looking past me at the wall.
He is looking at the windows.
"Your building has two entrances. Both are unmonitored. Your north face is glass from the second floor up, and the roofline across the street sits eleven feet higher than your bed."
My arms come down.
That is not a lawyer's line.
Higher than your bed. He said it flat - a measurement, a threat read off a floor plan and my whole traitorous body heard the word bed in that gravel and lit up like struck flint, I had to look at the deadbolt so it wouldn't cross my face. I could die. I could genuinely die.
He steps past me. Not asking, just a shift of mass through the doorway, and then he is inside my loft and I am standing there with my hand still on the door like an usher.
"Sure. Come in."
He doesn't answer. He walks the room the way a building inspector does a condemned property.
My sofa, my rugs, the mugs on the table with yesterday's coffee gone cold in them, the pendant light over the worktable, the stack of marked-up drafts.
His eyes travel the length of my apartment, to the ceiling, the floor, the far corner where the brick meets the window frame.
"Fire escape drops into an unlit courtyard. Your bedroom shares a wall with a stairwell. The lock on that door is original to the conversion."
"It's charming."
"It's decorative."
I follow him because I cannot make myself stop. That's the part that grates. My whole body has decided he's the most interesting object in the room and keeps swiveling to track him. I have to physically turn my shoulders away to look at my own wall instead.
He is a hired shield for a company with its name in my article. He is a source with legs. Behave.
"You published a photograph of a waterfront explosion and a list of shell companies," he says, finally still, in front of the wall now, reading the red thread. "Your name's printed right underneath the headline."
"That's how journalism works. It's not anonymous. That's the whole point of it."
"You painted a target on yourself."
"I painted a target on them." Too much heat on it. He takes the hit without moving, which is how I hear, a half-second too late, exactly how loud I got.
"Six people died in that fire. Nobody printed their names for a week. So yes, I put my face on it, because somebody has to be findable, and it wasn't going to be the men who lit the match."
He turns his head. Just his head, and something small, stupid, and warm rolls through my stomach. I want to throw it out the window.
You want a man built like a bunker to stand between you and the dark. Congratulations, you're a Victorian orphan. Get over it.
"So what's the offer. Bodyguard? Consultant? A very large friend who happens to be free this month?"
Nothing.
"Because here's my problem." I pick up a mug, put it down, need my hands busy.
"Powerful men don't protect reporters. They manage them.
You stand in my kitchen for three weeks and suddenly I'm checking my copy against what makes your employer comfortable.
So thank you, genuinely, for the window audit, but you can shove the protection somewhere structurally sound. "
He doesn't move, not so much as a blink. My heart is pitching like a snare drum and I hate that too.
"You could at least pretend to be offended. I workshopped that."
The corner of his mouth twitches. An almost smile. He shuts it down so fast I think I imagined it.
Then he looks away from the wall, at the window, at the eleven feet of roofline he already measured.
"You shouldn't be alone in this room."
It isn't a tactic. At least it doesn't sound like one.
"I'm not here to argue with you," he deadpans. "I'm here to make sure you survive long enough to finish what you started."
My stomach drops out from under me. I open my mouth to swat it away, because that is what I do, but nothing comes out. A little scrape of breath that doesn't turn into a word.
When I get my voice back, I reach for the only thing I can hold. "A name. You owe me that much for the window tour."
He pauses long enough that I brace for another stretch of nothing.
"Naveed."
No last name. No company, no badge, nothing laminated I can pin to the fridge and believe in. Two syllables he sets down like he's already decided he'll regret them.
Finish what you started.
My editor called it thin. She said the connective tissue wasn't there and gave me nine hundred words when I brought him four thousand.
Fourteen months of manifests, customs filings and Mara, my editor, who wouldn't say her own last name on any recording.
The note I got back said tighten the speculation.
Nobody has ever framed it as work worth finishing. They frame it as a risk I keep choosing. They frame it as Kat being Kat again, chasing something too big for her bridges, and here is a stranger built like a load-bearing beam telling me the thing I made is a thing that should be completed.
I have no defense built for that. Twelve years of hostile press officers, I built a wall for every angle, but he came in through a door I never installed a lock on.
"That's a good line," I manage. "Did you rehearse it in the elevator?"
"No."
Of course not.
He hasn't moved. That gets under my skin. I live in motion, pace when I think, talk over people, rearrange the pins on that wall at two in the morning because a name looks wrong or is in the wrong cluster. My whole apartment hums with a woman who cannot sit down.
Yet he stands in the middle of it like a dropped anchor and the room goes quiet around him.
My shoulders deflate a little. I feel them do it.
Traitor. My entire body, a traitor.
Warmth spreads slow under my ribs, not the good harmless kind. This one says put down the mug, stop performing, somebody is holding the perimeter and you could sleep for six hours.
I have not slept six hours since I started this story in March.
"You've been in my apartment nine minutes," I hear myself say, "and you've insulted my locks, my windows, my building, and my career choices. Most men need a second date for that."
"I didn't insult your career."
"You said I painted a target on myself."
"You did."
"See, that's an insult with extra steps."
He looks at me, level and unhurried. My heart rate spikes hard enough that I turn away and pretend to straighten a stack of drafts that does not need straightening.
He didn't take the bait.
My hands are not entirely steady on the paper.
Then my phone buzzes against the desk, rattling beside the recorder. The screen lights the whole dim corner white.
I pick up the phone.
Unknown sender. No message. Just an image thumbnail, gray and small, my thumb opens it before I've decided anything.
My hands turn to ice. It starts at my scalp first, then down, cold sweeping me heel to crown in one pass. My fingers grip the phone as if it's the last solid thing in the room, because they have not received any new orders.
It's my door.
'The Loft'. The brass lettering I polished because the tarnish bothered me. The chip in the paint near the hinge from when I moved the bookshelf in alone and refused to admit I needed help.
Photographed straight on from inside the hallway. So close, the grain of the steel shows.
Somebody stood on the other side of my door, lifted a phone, and took their time framing it.
The loft rearranges itself around me while I stand there.
It happens fast and silent. The windows go from beautiful to open.
The fire escape goes from charming to a ladder somebody could climb.
The stairwell behind my bedroom wall is suddenly a room with a person in it.
The door six feet from where I'm standing is a piece of decorative hardware over a lock that came with the building.
Every way in registers at once, and none of them belong to me anymore.
He said it twenty minutes ago and I made a joke about a second date.
He moves toward the door. Silent, fast, and he's already there with one hand flat against it, head tilted, listening, before I've turned the screen around.
He didn't see the photo. He read it off my face.
That lands harder than the picture does. His attention comes across the room, settles on me with the total weight of a hand at the back of my neck, and my breath goes thin and useless.
Nobody has ever looked at me and gotten it in under a second. Editors need three paragraphs. Sources need a drink. He needed my face going pale and he was already moving.
And here is the confession I will take to my grave beside the wanting: the second his attention landed on me, some animal in me eased like the predator had crossed to my side of the glass and the rest of the dark could no longer have me.
I am more ashamed of that relief than of the heat.
The heat is just biology. The relief is a door I bricked up at nineteen, and he found the seam in it in under a second and didn't even knock.
I hate what it does to me. I hate that some part of me eases while the rest of me freezes.
He comes back, holds out his hand. Not asking for the phone. Waiting.
I turn the screen toward him instead.
He looks for maybe two seconds. His jaw sets, his hands close into fists at his sides, then open again.
"Was that door locked all night?"
"Yes."
"Deadbolt?"
I open and close my mouth like a goldfish.
"I don't know."
Something moves behind his eyes and gets locked down in an instant.
My eyes bounce between him and the door, and the words that emerge are small and nothing like my voice.
"He was standing right there."
"Yes."
That's all he gives me. No I warned you about the roofline and the stairwell and the lock. He just says yes and lets it be true.
He was right, but I can't make my mouth form it.