Chapter Two #2
She paced. I could see the shadow of it—the light changing as she moved through the room, the brief stillness, then the movement again. Back and forth. Back and forth. A person working through something too large to sit still with.
While I reminded myself that I had no reason for investment in her interior state, I didn’t look away from her window.
The pacing slowed. Then it stopped. Then, after a few minutes, the light shifted to what I recognized as the warmer quality of a bedside lamp. Then that, too, went out.
I sat in the dark for another twenty minutes.
I told myself I was ensuring she didn’t contact anyone. That this was threat management: observing the subject during the highest-risk window, the immediate hours when panic most often produces poor decisions and poor decisions produce exposure. This was entirely standard.
I sat in the dark outside her building for another twenty minutes.
*****
She came back to work the next day.
I had expected… well, not fragility but some kind of tiny indication of being shaken. The visible seams of a girl held together poorly. A girl who had watched a man die and carried it on her face.
Sofia Reyes came back to work with her eyeliner sharp, her lipstick red, and her chin at an angle that suggested she was daring someone to say something about it.
I watched her on the floor from the mezzanine level, where I had a sightline over the whole casino without being visible from below.
This was a thing I did regularly and for legitimate professional reasons.
The fact that my attention had narrowed to one person on a floor of several hundred was not something I wanted to think about.
On the second evening, she saw me.
She was crossing below the mezzanine with a loaded tray when she looked up—not accidentally, not a glance. She looked up the way people look at things they have been tracking in their peripheral vision. Directly. Deliberately.
Her eyes found mine.
She held them there for two seconds, three, long enough that it could not be mistaken for an accident. Then she looked away and kept walking, the tray level, her stride unbroken.
My hand tightened on the railing.
I had spent twenty years in rooms with men who were afraid of me. I had learned to read fear the way other people read text—automatically, without effort, the meaning arriving before the conscious mind had finished processing the signal.
She was not afraid of me.
Or she was, and she had made a decision about what she was going to do with the fear, and the decision was this: eyes up, chin level, stride unbroken.
Direct eye contact in a casino where most of the staff had learned, by some form of occupational osmosis, to look slightly to the left of me when I passed.
It was the most destabilizing thing anyone had done to me in recent memory. I did not enjoy that.
She was chaos. That was the word that kept arriving.
It was not a word I used for people, because people were systems and systems could be understood and managed, but chaos implied something outside the ordinary reach of management.
She was loud in ways that had nothing to do with volume.
She was present in a room in a way that pulled attention without appearing to want it.
She argued with the cocktail waitress at the adjacent station about something involving the tip pool and won without raising her voice and smiled at a guest thirty seconds later as if she had been doing nothing else.
She stirred something in me that I did not have a clean word for. Something adjacent to anger and adjacent to hunger and not quite either. Something I had, as I had told myself, spent years managing into silence.
I thought about it plainly.
She is a witness, she is a complication; the clean solution is permanent removal, this is not a difficult calculation.
And then I watched her look up at the mezzanine—she had done it three times now, I had counted—and meet my eyes with that steady, furious, unbroken regard, and the clean solution lost its appeal with a completeness that was itself alarming.
I did not want her removed.
I wanted her where I could see her.
Mikhail would want a rationale. My own standards would want a rationale.
She is a witness.
That was the rationale. Witnesses at a distance were unpredictable.
Witnesses in proximity were observable, controllable, and their choices available for interception before they became problems. The logical approach to a witness who could not be eliminated was containment.
Close containment. The kind that left nothing to chance.
This was a strategy. This was exactly the kind of operational thinking that had made me better than anyone else at my job as the head of casino security.
I believed this.
Or I chose to believe it, which was not the same thing, and I was experienced enough with my own mind to know the difference. I chose it anyway.
Sofia Reyes disappeared into the far section of the floor. I watched her go—the set of her shoulders, the particular way she moved, already known to me with a familiarity I had not earned and had not asked for.
The decision settled into place within me.
I would keep her close.