Chapter 5 JACE
JACE
I drive to Brooklyn one morning for no reason I’m willing to say out loud.
Garrett’s been doing his check-ins. A few drive-bys a week, nothing heavy. His reports are clean. “No concerns. Routine unchanged. Subject appears comfortable and unaware of monitoring.” Professional language for a professional job, and on paper, everything looks exactly the way it should.
I don’t trust paper.
I haven’t since I flagged a threat ten years ago and got told to stand down. The report was clean. The assessment was wrong. Someone died waiting on it.
So I’m in my car at seven in the morning, parked on a cross street half a block from her shop, with a coffee I’m not drinking and no reason to be here instead of at my desk in Manhattan where I have six client files that need my attention and a meeting with Ryker that Nora has already rescheduled twice.
I tell myself I’m checking Garrett’s work. Verifying the sightlines, the foot traffic patterns, the entry points I mapped on a satellite image days ago. I tell myself this is what I do—trust but verify, the same approach I’d take with any detail on any client.
Except Wren isn’t a client. And I’m not verifying anything. I’m here because something about Garrett’s clean reports doesn’t sit right with me, and I want to see this block with my own eyes.
The shop opens at eight. I know this from Garrett’s reports, but I also know it because I was here last week and she was already inside, already working, already moving through her space with that particular focus she has—hands quick, head down, completely absorbed.
She comes out before opening, two metal buckets in her hands, one in each.
Green apron, hair pulled back, arms braced wide to keep the buckets from knocking together.
She sets them down on the sidewalk and straightens up, pressing both hands into the small of her back, and I make myself look at the street instead of her.
It doesn’t last long.
She’s crouched now, arranging stems, moving one bucket a few inches to the left, stepping back to check, adjusting again. Not satisfied on the first try. One more tilt of the head, one more small correction that nobody but her would notice.
A customer approaches—older woman, tote bag over one shoulder—and Wren stands up and smiles at her and the whole street gets warmer.
I can’t hear what she says through the windshield but I can see the way the woman laughs, the way Wren reaches for a bunch of yellow flowers and holds them out for inspection, the way her whole body leans into the conversation like nobody else exists.
I’m cataloging things that have nothing to do with threat assessment and I know it.
I force myself to check the sightlines instead.
The bench across the street—a clean observation point, partially screened by the tree.
The coffee shop two doors down with window seats facing her storefront.
I clocked all of this last week when I walked the block before going in. None of it has changed.
I’m about to pull out when I see him.
Corner of the block. Gray hoodie. Not moving. Not looking at his phone. Not pretending to be on his way somewhere.
Tyler Vaughn.
He’s standing maybe sixty yards from the shop, angled toward it the same way I’ve been angled toward it since I got here, and the parallel hits before I can stop it.
He’s watching her.
Everything in me goes tight at once—shoulders, jaw, hands on the wheel. The reaction is immediate and has nothing to do with training. It’s older than that. Something that recognizes what he is before my brain finishes processing the details.
He doesn’t approach. Doesn’t cross the street. Just stands there, still and patient, watching a woman arrange flowers on a sidewalk who has no idea he’s there.
My hand goes to the door handle.
I stop myself. If I get out of this car and cross the street, I blow any distance I have. Tyler sees me, knows someone’s paying attention, and adjusts. Right now he thinks nobody’s watching. That’s the only advantage I have.
So I sit there. I watch a man watch her. And I count the minutes—two, almost three—before he turns and walks east.
I don’t think about it. I’m out of the car and on foot before he’s made it half a block.
I keep distance—opposite side of the street, matching his pace without mirroring it. He doesn’t check behind him. Doesn’t scan the sidewalk or pause at any reflective surface. He’s not worried about being followed, which means he’s either careless or confident.
Neither one is good.
He passes the corner and I think he’s heading for the subway, but he doesn’t. He walks straight into the coffee shop—the one two doors down from Wren’s shop, the one with the window seats I flagged the first time I walked this block.
I give it thirty seconds. Then I walk in after him.
The place is small—ten tables, a counter, loud espresso machine.
Tyler is already at the window seat with a coffee in front of him.
He didn’t wait for it. The barista had it ready before he sat down, which means he didn’t order at the counter.
Which means they know him. Which means he’s been here before. More than once. More than a few times.
I order a black coffee and take a table near the back wall where I can see his profile without being in his direct sightline. He doesn’t notice me. He’s not looking at anything inside this shop. He’s looking through the window at hers.
From where he’s sitting, he has a clean view of Wild Tide Florals—the front door, the sidewalk display, the counter where Wren stands and works.
If she looked up right now and across the street and through two panes of glass, she might see him.
But she won’t, because she’s not looking.
She’s inside with her stems and her apron and her music, and she has no idea that the man she left four months ago is sitting thirty feet away watching her through a window with a coffee the barista already knew to make.
Six minutes and he doesn’t move. Doesn’t check his phone, doesn’t look away from the window. His posture is easy, his coffee is going cold, and that’s the part that makes my skin crawl. He’s comfortable. Like a man who’s decided something and has all the time in the world to wait for it.
I pick up someone’s abandoned newspaper from the next table and open it.
Eleven minutes later he stands and walks out. I fold the newspaper, give him thirty seconds, then move to the window. He’s heading east on foot. I watch him until he takes the stairs down to the subway and disappears.
I walk back to my car and call Garrett before I’ve cleared the block.
“Anything unusual in the last week?”
“Nothing flagged. I drove by the last two afternoons. She was at the shop both times, normal hours, nothing out of the ordinary.”
“He was on her block this morning. Sixty yards from the entrance. Stood there for three minutes and then walked into the coffee shop a few doors down and sat at the window.”
Silence. Then, “I wasn’t covering this morning. My check-ins are afternoon and evening, like we discussed.”
“I know.”
“You want me to add mornings?”
“No. I’ll handle the mornings.”
He’s quiet, but I can hear the question he’s not asking—why his boss, who runs a company with two hundred employees and a client list that includes three Fortune 500 CEOs, is personally driving to Brooklyn at seven AM to watch a flower shop.
I don’t answer it. I hang up and pull into traffic and head for the bridge.
The drive back takes twenty-five minutes and I spend every one of them trying to frame what I just saw in professional terms. Tyler Vaughn is escalating his proximity.
His pattern has shifted from incidental contact to deliberate observation.
He has a routine for watching her and it’s been going on long enough that the barista knows his order.
All of that is true. All of that goes in a file.
What doesn’t go in a file is the fact that I sat ten feet from that man while he studied her through the window and had to talk myself out of ending it right there.
Tyler Vaughn is closing distance.
And I just drove to Brooklyn to sit in a parked car and watch her arrange flowers on a sidewalk.
One of those is a problem I know how to solve.
The other one I’m not sure I do.