7. Naveed #2
She is wearing a T-shirt that does not reach far enough, her hair is down, the gauze is off her hand now, and there is a red line across her knuckles I did not see under the lamp earlier.
She says nothing. Neither do I.
The refrigerator hums and cuts off. The radiator ticks. Somewhere out on the avenue a truck downshifts, the sound comes in flattened by distance and glass.
Four steps to her. Three if I take the long ones.
The count is not for exits. The problem is standing in my kitchen at two forty-one in the morning wearing a shirt she took from my drawer without asking, while my body is running numbers it has no business running. I let it, for one second, two, three.
She moves past me to the cabinet. Her shoulder coming within inches of mine. She takes down a glass, fills it at the tap. The sound of the water runs and covers everything for eight seconds and then stops and the quiet is louder than before.
She turns with the glass in both hands, makes eye contact once more then she’s gone.
Bare feet back down the hall, the shirt moving against the backs of her thighs. Sexy as fuck. I hold absolutely still until her door clicks shut.
The count I usually run for exits I do now for the reasons not to follow her down that hall.
Reason one: she is bleeding, running on nothing, a man wrote FIRE on a brick and put it through her window four hours ago.
Reason two: she is Ravelo's, and there is no version of paying what I owe him that ends with me backing his niece into a wall in a shirt she took from my drawer, no matter that the sight of my shirt on her body has quietly rearranged the entire idea I had of this apartment for eight years.
There is no reason three, and the two I have are barely holding.
I stand in the dark, let the arithmetic be the leash, because tonight it is the only one I've got.
Breathe. Regulate.
Four in. Hold four. Four out. It does not work. I run it again, it still does not work. I stand at the counter in the dark with a glass of water I did not drink, listening for any sound she’ll make behind the closed door.
When I learned who she was, I made a vow to keep her safe. Now she’s in my home strolling around in my shirt, leaving me with a walking hard-on.
Stand the fuck down. She’s off-limits.
I give the order and my body files it under suggestions.
The vow was to keep her breathing, and I have kept uglier promises in worse places than this.
But no one warned me the keeping and the wanting would run on the same muscle.
Every hour spent making her safe would also be an hour spent learning the sound of her bare feet on my floor, the shape of her in my clothes, the exact silence she leaves in a room where ever she goes.
A man can stand a flawless watch and be, underneath the discipline, quietly and completely ruined.
I am finding that out at a counter at two forty-one in the morning, there is no protocol for it because I wrote the protocols and never once thought I'd need this one.
Fifteen minutes. That is how long I stay there after she is gone. I count them. I count them because the alternative is not counting them, and I know exactly what happens in this kitchen if I stop counting.
At two fifty-seven I set the glass in the sink, put clothes on, text the detail on the door, and head to the office.
The car takes me over the bridge with the city coming up gray on the left, and by three-twenty I am in the SOC with the wall of screens throwing light on my hands and no one in the room to ask me why I am here.
On my way out, she catches me at the door with my coat half on.
I didn’t hear her come down the hall this time, which is its own piece of data and not a good one.
"You're going somewhere."
"Yes."
"At three in the morning."
"Detail's on the door. Two men. One in the stairwell." I get the second sleeve. "Call the number on the counter if anything changes. Not nine-one-one. The number on the counter."
She leans a shoulder against the frame of the hall arch. Her arms are crossed. The red line across her knuckles has gone darker overnight.
"Where do they go?"
"Who?"
"Your people. You, Tariq, the rest of them." Her chin tips. "You don't run an empire out of a conference room. There's a room somewhere. There's always a room. Where do the men go when they actually need to talk."
Reporter's question dressed as small talk. She does that at three in the morning too. Noted.
"Somewhere you do not."
Her eyes narrow the smallest amount. Not offense. Something quicker than that behind the face that files a thing away for later. It moves across her expression and is gone in less than a second.
"Right," she says.
"Lock this behind me."
"I know how to lock a door, Safar."
"You know how to lock this one. It's a different door."
She reaches past me and puts her hand on the deadbolt and waits, I step out into the cold with the sound of it turning behind me.
The SOC at three-twenty is the only room in the city that makes sense to me.
Screens on three walls. Threat maps in the low glow, port feeds, the routing overlay from the Sienna packet still open where I left it. No windows. No one to talk to. I take the chair in front of the surveillance bank and pull her building again.
Sixth pass.
Lobby camera, the loop where the feed rolls over. Service corridor. Stairwell landing at four. The hallway outside her door, the one that matters, I have watched it until the shapes have stopped meaning anything.
I slow it to a quarter speed and watch it again.
Nothing at the face. Hood, angle, timing that says he knew where the lens sat before he walked into the frame. Whoever briefed him briefed him well.
Then the turn at the end of the hall.
He clears the corner without looking back over his shoulder. He drops his lead foot, pivots on the ball of it, takes the corner wide with his hands empty, low, his head level the whole way through. No bob. No check.
My hand stops on the console.
Run it again.
I run it again.
There’s no change. That is not a habit a man picks up. That is a habit a man is given, in a hangar bay in Bagram, over four days, by an instructor who broke his shoulder-check three hundred times and rebuilt it wide because a check gets you shot in a stairwell.
I taught that turn. I taught it to eight men and I could name every one of them in my sleep.
And under the cold professional part already opening a hunt, a second thing wakes that has no business in an operations center: a low, total certainty that whoever walked that corner to her door put himself within arm's reach of the one life I have decided is mine to keep, in the dark, while she slept and that when I find the hands that did it, the after-action report will be very short.
I will write it myself, and no lawyer will ever read it.
Everything in me quiets. The hollow that opens before a room turns bad.
Impossible.
Except impossible is a word for people who have never watched a friendly frequency come up hot.
Unless the compromised thread is personal.
I sit with that for a count of ten and it doesn’t get better.
I pick up the phone.
Nathan answers on the second ring. He is awake. Nathan is always awake.
"It's me. Kat Romero. She’s at my place. Double her and put eyes on the families. Yours, not Echelon's. Nothing on our paper."
"Done."
The line ends.