Chapter 6
Angela
The car was a black Mercedes with nothing on the dash.
No dealership tag, no ornament. I sat in the passenger seat with both hands in my lap, watching the city smudge past. We went north.
The streets got wider, less angry. River North somewhere, I guessed, but I’d lost my sense of direction three turns ago.
He didn’t talk, except once to ask if I wanted the radio, which I said no to, which he seemed grateful for.
He drove like a man who had learned to be careful.
One hand on the wheel, eyes always scanning, never taking a light yellow.
At every intersection, he let the world move first. If there was a tail, I never saw it, but I knew he was watching for one.
I tried not to look at him, but in the glass I caught pieces: the set of his mouth, the length of his fingers on the wheel, the way his right arm, bandaged at the knuckles, rested between us with the suggestion of what it could do if asked.
We pulled up to a building I didn’t register.
White stone, black glass, a doorman in a dark coat.
The kind of building you didn’t look twice at if you didn’t already know who owned it.
He got out first, circled to my side, opened the door and offered a hand.
I didn’t take it. He waited, then withdrew.
The doorman looked only at him, not me. “Signore,” he said, and held the lobby door open with the soft deference of a man who understood what you were. We walked through a lobby as bright as a surgical suite and as empty, floor polished so clean I could see my own boots reflected in it.
The elevator was waiting. The doorman keyed it.
I had never been in an elevator that required a key.
I had been in plenty of buildings that should have, but never one that did.
He stood at the back of the cab, hands loose at his sides, watching the floor display count up.
The numbers were white on black, modern, clean. It went straight to the top. No stops.
At the penthouse, he stepped out first. Waited in the hall. Then, “This way.”
The apartment was a corner unit with windows on two sides and a view of the river. The world outside was neon and sodium and the low orange of a city that never got truly dark, but in here it was silent, close, muffled as if the glass was three panes thick. Maybe it was.
He showed me the rooms without touching me or even coming close. Bedroom. Bathroom. Kitchen with an island big enough to sleep on. Living room, where he set his bag down by the couch and turned to me.
“I’ll sleep here,” he said. “For as long as you stay. The couch is fine. You will not see me unless you want to.”
“Why? Why do you need to stay?”
“Because I am responsible for you. I will not risk your safety even for a moment.”
“But—”
“There’s no discussion about this. It is non-negotiable.”
He said it with such flatness that I almost believed it. I did not reply.
Non-negotiable.
Well, I wouldn’t negotiate, then.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking at the marble and the stainless steel and the absence of anything personal—no fridge magnets, no notes, no mess. It looked like no one had ever lived here.
He hesitated, then walked halfway down the hall and opened another door. Stepped back so I could see in.
The light from the hallway fell across a sheepskin rug, the back of a wooden rocking chair, an upright piano against the far wall.
The room was small, cozy, almost childish in its proportions, but there was nothing in it for a child.
No toys, no books, no crib. Just the piano, the rug, the chair, a low basket of throws.
I stayed outside the door. “What is this room?”
He looked at it for a moment. “Whatever you need it to be,” he said.
I did not know what I needed.
We stood in silence, the two of us in the hallway, not quite looking at each other, the door open between us and the smell of polished wood and clean laundry drifting out.
After a while, he said it again: “Whatever you need it to be.”
*
He told me the terms in the kitchen.
“You can leave at any time,” he said. “The door is not locked from your side. If you leave, I cannot keep you safe. The choice is yours every day.”
He said it all at once, a set of bullet points, nothing for me to respond to. Just the rules of the house:
The door was not locked from my side. The panic button by the bed was red, plastic, the kind meant for old people or the very rich.
The second exit was through the laundry, a fire stair that let out to a parking garage two floors down.
His number was to be saved under a name he specified, not his own.
I was to text him when I woke up and when I was turning in for the night.
I was to eat three times a day. I was not to open the front door for anyone.
If someone knocked, I was to go to the interior hall and text him before I did anything else.
I was not to go near the windows after dark.
I was not to use my own phone to call anyone I knew.
I was to tell him if I felt unwell, even a little.
I was to tell him if I felt afraid, even of nothing.
He would not come into my room unless I asked him to.
He would not ask questions I didn’t want to answer. He would not touch me.
“If you need me,” he said, “I am ten feet away.”
I nodded, once. He did not smile, but the side of his mouth did something, a micro-expression I didn’t know how to translate.
“One more thing—while you’re here I don’t want you googling yourself. You understand? Don’t google Halberd, either. No names from the trial—nothing. Understood?”
My heart pounded. I knew that googling myself calmed me down, helped to set my mind at rest during times of panic. But hew was probably right—it was safer not to leave those kind of digital footprints.
“Not through TOR?”
“Not through nothing.”
I sighed. “Fine. I get it.”
“Good.”
With that, he went into the living room and closed the door behind him.
I stood in the kitchen for a long minute, watching the way the light fell in from the windows. The city outside was full of noise and traffic, but in here there was nothing. Triple-glazed silence. I tried to remember if I’d ever been in a place so insulated from the outside.
I did not unpack. I went to the bathroom.
The tile was cold on my feet. I stripped down, folded my clothes on the counter.
I turned on the shower and let the water run until it steamed the mirror.
Then I stepped in and stood under it for a long time, hands at my sides, eyes closed, feeling the hot water erase the last two days from my skin.
Forty minutes, maybe. Long enough that the water ran cold, then back to tepid, then cold again. I did not turn it off until I was sure I had nothing left to scrub away.
I dried off. There was a stack of towels in the linen closet, all white, all new.
A toothbrush in packaging on the sink. He had stocked the place for someone to stay.
I put on the shirt he’d left on the bed.
It was black cotton, soft, hung down to my mid-thigh.
It smelled like nothing, or maybe a little like the detergent from the towels, which was faint and nice and expensive.
I crawled into the bed. The sheets were white and the comforter was heavy, the kind that you could hide under and feel the weight of it press all the noise out of your head. The pillow was cool. I did not remember closing my eyes.
I slept, but once in the night, I woke up. There was a sound—not a loud one, but present. I lay very still, heart going quick, eyes wide open in the dark.
It was his breathing. Through the open door.
Slow, even, like he was lying on the other side of the wall, awake.
I listened for a long time. The city was still silent, the glass making the room feel like it was underwater, but the sound of him, the evidence that he was real and close, did something to my chest. It didn’t feel dangerous. It felt like fire, like magic.
I closed my eyes and let myself drift in it.
I slept again.
*
I woke at three in the afternoon, unsure at first if it was morning or night. The apartment was silent, except for the light hum of the fridge and the faint whine of the river wind against the glass. The world outside was winter grey, the kind of grey that had no beginning and no end.
I stayed in bed for a minute, just breathing. The room was cold, but the bed was warm, and I let myself melt into it a little before I remembered that I was in a stranger’s house and the stranger was probably awake already, watching me through the wall.
When I finally got up, the hall was empty. No sound from the living room. I padded barefoot to the kitchen, the shirt hanging off my frame, and poured myself a glass of water from the tap. There was coffee in a thermos on the counter. Next to it, a note:
eat something. — P.
In the fridge was a tray of food. Chicken and rice, roasted vegetables, a strip of cold steak.
Nothing fancy, but it looked like someone had cooked it themselves, not ordered it in.
I took out the tray and ate standing at the counter, drinking cold black coffee from the thermos.
The food was good, and I realized halfway through the plate that I was starving.
When I finished, I washed the plate and set it upside down in the drying rack. I wiped the counter with a clean towel. I caught myself doing it and stopped, but not before I had gotten every crumb.
I walked the apartment. I did it the way you walked a new rental: slow, methodical, taking in every detail, every possible exit, every sightline from window to street.
There were cameras above both doors. The closets were empty except for a row of hangers, all facing the same way.
In the bathroom was a new bar of soap, still in the wrapper.
In the bedroom closet, on the top shelf, was a stack of folded t-shirts and sweats in three different sizes, tags still on.