2. Wolfe #2
I don’t make snap decisions. I never go into situations unprepared.
I’ve had eyes on her apartment building for three days.
I know her block, her walking route to Rosario’s, her brother’s restaurant, and the layout of the neighborhood.
I know which entrance she uses, what time she comes and goes, and that she checks the street in both directions before she steps outside every single time.
It’s the kind of habit you develop when you’ve spent time in a place where not checking could get you hurt.
I’ve spent so many hours running scenarios through my head.
Every version where I hand her file to Ronan ends with her tied up in a room she can’t leave, being questioned by men who don’t understand what they’ve got.
Every version where I go to her myself starts with a conversation between two people who speak the same language.
The math isn’t really complicated when you think about it. The decision should be an easy one.
But I’m just not sure the math is what’s actually driving my plan to go to her, and that’s the part that irks the hell out of me. I don’t like not having an answer. And worse, I don’t like not knowing the right question.
I take a quick shower and change. I check the surveillance feeds one last time. And then I pull up the image of her from the gala that I saved over two years ago, and I stare at it the way I’ve stared at it twenty-four times since I matched it to her name.
It’s the same woman from the corridor who told me to go left at the split and walked away without looking back. The same one who also left a unique scent that I can’t forget, no matter how hard I try.
Decision made. I’m doing this.
I pick up my keys and walk out the front door.
Eva’s neighborhood is about twenty minutes from mine, and it might as well be a different planet.
I park down the block from her building at 3:20 in the morning.
My car is nothing flashy, nothing that screams money or danger, so it’s easy for me to fly under the radar.
I kill the engine, but I don’t move. I’ve spent weeks studying this woman through computer screens and data and case files.
And months before that, her name sat in a closed file on my drive that I told myself didn’t matter.
I know everything about her except what it feels like to be in the same room.
And my brain doesn’t have a setting for that.
The building is a three-story walkup that’s seen better decades. There are fire escapes on the front, a bodega on the corner, and a twenty-four-hour dry cleaner next door with a flickering sign. Down the block is Rosario’s restaurant.
I watch her apartment for two hours. The blue-white glow of a computer monitor streams through a second-floor window. She’s working, the way she is almost every day at this hour.
Around 5:15, her light goes off. Five minutes later, she comes out the front door wearing a denim jacket and black boots, keys dangling in her hand.
She walks in the direction of Rosario’s. Once she steps inside, I start my car and drive over there to watch through the front window.
Her brother’s behind the bar. The second she walks in, his face changes.
He flashes a wide smile and says something that makes her laugh.
She drops onto a counter stool and leans on the bar and for a few minutes she looks like a completely different person than the one in the mug shot I saved on my phone.
I stare at her through that window and something curious sparks in my chest. Very different from the analytical interest I’ve developed over the past weeks. Something sharper. Unfamiliar. Something that has no business being in the same space as a surveillance operation.
Two men walk into the restaurant while she’s eating. Heavy builds, gold chain on one of them. They’re not there for the food. I watch the brother’s posture change. His spine straightens, his smile tightens, his hands clenching a glass. They talk for about a minute. Then they leave.
I grab photos from the surveillance cameras set up in the area and run their faces through every database I have access to.
Nothing. They’re not Kozlov. They’re not connected to any network I monitor.
Which means they’re outside my world entirely, and that bothers me because I don’t like variables I can’t account for.
Eva watches them leave. I can see the tension in her body even from here…the suspicious look on her face, the way her hand tightens on her coffee mug. She knows something’s wrong. But from the look of it, she doesn’t push her brother for answers. She just focuses on her coffee.
That pattern. The deliberate not-looking. I’ve seen it in her work, in the way she builds her systems, in the gap she left open for me. She sees things and she chooses to look away, because the last time she looked too close, it destroyed her life.
My brain trips back to her arrest record.
Her case popped up as part of my routing threat scans.
She’d been convicted of corporate data theft and served fourteen months in prison for hacking a company that was an associate of my family’s business network.
Turns out, she took the fall for the whole operation.
But it never sat right with me. The work looked like it was done by two people, not one.
Half of it was clean and careful. The other half was sloppy as hell.
But she was the only one who went to prison.
We’d stopped doing business with this associate before the hack, so I made a note and closed the file because, at the time, she wasn’t my problem.
Now I’m parked outside her brother’s restaurant, watching her eat breakfast through a window, and the gap between who she is and what happened to her is making my pulse thrum in a way I can’t even begin to categorize.
She could have been out if someone had pulled that thread. If someone had looked at her case and pushed instead of filing it away. If someone had cared enough to ask the question that was sitting right there in the data.
Someone like me.
I let out a sigh then turn on the ignition and drive home.
Because I’m not going to her door at this ungodly hour of the morning.
I’ll wait until later. And when I do show up, I’m not going to knock on her apartment door.
I’m going to sit on her stoop and wait, because surprising a woman who spent fourteen months in federal prison is not the first impression I’m going for.
I’ve never not known what someone was going to do next.
I’ve also never wanted to find out this badly, either.