4. Kat
four
Kat
"Asset."
The word sits in the middle of my kitchen like a crate someone delivered to the wrong address.
"That's the language Al-Mansour used." Naveed stands near my counter with a coffee I made him that he hasn't touched. "Echelon-protected asset. It moves resources. It moves them fast."
"I'm a person."
"You're both."
"No." I set my mug down hard enough that coffee jumps the rim. "Assets get insured, relocated. Assets don't write stories."
Two full seconds pass. He doesn't blink, and something about that makes me want to throw the mug instead of the words.
So, I give him the list.
"I'm not relocating. I'm not going into a safehouse with a view of a parking structure and a man in the hallway who counts my exits.
I'm not handing over my notebooks, not to legal, not to you, not to anybody who's ever signed a nondisclosure.
And I'm not stopping. Not one paragraph.
If your boss wants a version of me that stops, he hired the wrong asset. "
"Understood."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Say a military word at me like it's an answer."
The corner of his mouth doesn't move, but something behind his eyes does.
I look past him at the wall. Fourteen months of it.
Manifests taped in clusters, red thread routing anomalies through eleven shell names, Mara's handwriting on three index cards I will never throw away.
It's not decoration. It's the only working model of the thing that exists anywhere, and it lives in the geometry of that wall, in which card sits above which, in the space between stamped manifest and the insurance filing where the answer is hiding.
Take it down and I lose a week rebuilding it from memory.
I don't have a week. The mirror said so.
Here it comes. Men with this much money behind them do not ask. They arrange and tell you what has been decided for your own good, and then they say your name gently so it sounds like care.
I set my jaw and wait for it.
"I'm not moving you."
My eyebrows climb before I can stop them.
"You seem to think I'm here to dismantle your life." His voice is quieter now, matter-of-fact. "I'm not. I'm here to protect it. That's the only aim."
The simplicity of it catches me off guard. No corporate spin, no management speak. Just a statement delivered like fact.
"Protect it how?"
"By making sure you wake up tomorrow to keep working on it." He gestures toward the wall without looking at it. "Whatever you're building there, you can't finish it if you're dead."
The bluntness should offend me. Instead, it lands with the weight of someone who has seen what dead looks like and doesn't use the word casually.
"I'm not taking your work. I'm not reading your notes." He shifts his weight, and the whole kitchen seems to reorganize around it. "You don't stay alone."
"That's it?"
"That's it. Everything else you win."
"And if I say no to that one?"
"Then we have a problem, because that one isn't yours to say no to."
He's too close. He crossed the tile at some point during my list and I didn't detect the motion, which is going to keep happening, apparently, unless I put a stop to it.
But my body has decided to notice him at the worst possible moment.
Heat crawls up my nape while I'm still mid-fury.
My breath stutters for a reason that has nothing to do with the man who came in with a grease pencil.
I hate that it's happening in my own kitchen.
It is a specific kind of humiliation, this…
wanting the make and model of type of man my parents' killers would have kept on retainer.
My body heard he decides what happens to you and you cannot stop him and came back with a verdict of pure heat, I would almost rather he had found the letters than ever learn that about me.
"Fine," I manage. "Provisionally. I reserve the right to revisit."
He's already crouched at my front door with a drill case open on the floor and my deadbolt in pieces.
"Excuse me. Did I say yes to that?"
"No."
The screw goes in.
The old deadbolt comes out in one piece and lands in his palm like something he's putting out of its misery.
"That lock cost me two hundred dollars."
"It cost you two hundred dollars to feel better." He sets it aside and lifts a new one out of the case, heavier, ugly, matte. "This one works."
"That's aesthetically offensive."
"Noted."
He drives the first screw with three turns of his wrist and no wasted motion. That gets me. His hands know exactly how much force to use. Scarred knuckles, a thin white line across the back of one hand, big hands moving small and careful over my hardware, like the door is worth being gentle with.
I should be scanning my notes for the manifest date I flagged. Instead I'm standing in my kitchen doorway with my arms crossed, tracking a man's forearms.
Warmth gathers low in my belly. I file a formal complaint with myself about the timing.
The complaint is denied. I stand in my own doorway and watch those scarred hands be careful with my hardware and feel it low and liquid, the ugly truth of it is that the carefulness is what does it, that a man who could put a fist through this door is using those hands to make it hold.
He glances up once, catches whatever my face is doing, says nothing, does nothing, and goes back to the screw.
It is the nothing I feel an hour later, still, low in my body, like a thumbprint.
"I don't need a babysitter."
"Good." The second screw goes in. "I don't babysit."
"Then what would you call this?"
"Work."
"Wow."
"You asked."
I laugh before I decide to, one short scrape of a sound. He doesn't look up, but the pause in his hands is about half a beat too long to be nothing.
Don't enjoy that. Do not enjoy that. Oh. Dear God, what is wrong with me? This man is making me forget my principles. I need a man. If I don't, I'm going to jump my protector like a horny dog.
He moves to the window frame next, runs two fingers along the sash where the wood swells, testing it.
My windows. The tall black ones I fell in love with at the second showing, the ones that made me sign a lease I could barely afford because the light came through them at four in the afternoon like something being poured.
He's touching them like a mechanic checking a chassis.
"You're not putting bars on those."
"No."
"Good."
"Film on the glass. Nobody sees it. Slows a brick down by about nine seconds." He crouches to check the lower latch. "Nine seconds is a lot."
"Nine seconds is nothing."
"It's a huge difference."
He doesn't say between what. He doesn't have to. That's my problem with this man. He leaves the ending of a sentence sitting in the room and lets you carry it yourself.
My throat goes dry. I go to the fridge for water I don't want, mostly to have somewhere to put my hands. When I turn, he's already at the fire escape window, marking on the frame in a code I can't read.
My space, reorganizing itself around him. Quietly. Without asking. The infuriating part is that it's working. The loft feels tighter than it did an hour ago. Contained. Like something waiting to exhale.
I don't know what to do with the fact that I like it.
The front door bangs open hard enough to rattle the console table, and my keys jump in the ceramic bowl.
"Katarina Romero, you have not answered a text in eleven hours."
Cami is halfway across my floor before the door finishes swinging.
Then she stops.
Naveed rises from the crouch at the window frame in one movement, pencil still in his hand, and turns to face her. All six foot three of him, filling the space between my sofa and my brick wall like something the building was constructed around.
Cami's whole body registers it. Head to boots. She takes a long look like an architect would at a facade she has decided to admire, then makes a sound in her throat that a stranger might mistake for a cough.
Behind his shoulder, she mouths at me: OH MY GOD!
"Cami Duval." She puts her hand out. "I have known Kat since she was twenty-one and unbearable. You are new."
He takes her hand. Once. Releases it.
"Naveed Safar."
So he tells her his full name but to me he just gives Naveed. I'll think about that later.
"Naveed Safar." She repeats. "And you are here because?"
"Security."
"Security." Cami's eyebrows do not move, which is somehow worse. "Excellent. I have never once felt Kat was over-supervised."
She sets her bag on my console table, walks past him, and hooks two fingers into my elbow. Steers me the four feet into the kitchen with the ease of my BFF.
She leans in.
"You have a problem." A volume that is technically a whisper. "Your problem is six foot three and standing at parade rest next to your refrigerator."
Heat floods my face so fast I feel it in my ears.
"Cami."
"I am simply describing the room."
"He can hear you."
"I certainly hope so."
She leans closer, delighted and merciless.
"You want to climb that man like emergency scaffolding," she breathes, "and what is undoing you is that the scaffolding is polite.
He has not once looked at you wrong. It is going to be the end of you, because you have no armor built for a dangerous thing with manners.
" She pats my cheek. "Sixteen years I have known you.
I have never watched you come apart over a locksmith. "
The worst part is the accuracy. I could survive him wanting me, I have a whole personality for men who want me.
It is the withholding that has my thighs pressed together in my own kitchen: a thing built to take, choosing, visibly, at some cost to himself, not to.
I did not know that was a hunger my body kept until it stood up tonight and started making demands.
"I'm working," I tell her.
"You are radiating."
"I am furious."
"Those are compatible states, darling. In my experience they are frequently the same state wearing different shoes."
Behind me, the pencil scratches against my window frame. Steady. Unhurried. He has not looked up once.