CHAPTER 21 Lindsay
Lindsay
Ifeel it on the walk back from the parking garage.
It’s nothing I can name. No sound, no movement, no face I clock as wrong. Just a shift in the air—the particular quality of being observed that I’ve spent the last several weeks becoming uncomfortably familiar with.
Matteo’s surveillance has a specific texture to it. Warm, almost. The feeling of being watched by someone who doesn’t want you to come to harm.
This is not that.
I slow my pace without meaning to. My hand finds my bag strap, adjusting it, buying myself a reason to glance behind me.
The street is normal. Evening foot traffic, a couple walking a dog, a man in a gray coat reading something on his phone outside the pharmacy.
I look at the man in the gray coat.
He isn’t reading. His eyes are on his screen but his body is wrong—angled slightly toward me rather than the pharmacy door, weight forward on his toes. The posture of someone ready to move rather than someone waiting.
I look away immediately. Keep walking. My heart is doing something unpleasant and rapid behind my ribs.
You’re being paranoid, I tell myself. You’ve been living inside a mafia household for two weeks. You’re seeing threats in gray coats. You need to sleep more and catastrophize less.
I reach the corner. The light is red. I wait.
The man in the gray coat is no longer outside the pharmacy.
I don’t look for him. I’ve learned enough from Matteo’s world to know that looking for a threat announces that you’ve seen it, and announcing you’ve seen it changes what happens next.
Instead I pull out my phone with steady hands—steadier than they have any right to be—and I type without looking up.
Me: Are your men on me right now?
The light changes. I cross.
His reply comes before I reach the other side.
Matteo: Crater and Boulder are in the car on your left. Why?
I don’t reply. I find the dark car with my peripheral vision and I walk toward it without hurrying, without running, without doing anything that would tell the man in the gray coat, wherever he is now, that I’ve made him.
I get in the back seat.
“Drive,” I say.
Crater looks at me in the rearview mirror. Something in my face must communicate what my voice isn’t saying because he doesn’t ask questions. He pulls out.
I watch the street behind us as we go. The man in the gray coat is standing at the corner I just left, hands in his pockets, not following. Just watching.
Just noting.
My phone buzzes.
Matteo: Lindsay.
One word. But I know him well enough now to hear everything underneath it—the specific response of a man who has just understood something and doesn’t like what he understands.
Me: I’m in the car. I’m fine. We need to talk when I get home.
I watch the corner until it disappears from view. The man in the gray coat doesn’t move. He doesn’t need to.
He already has what he came for.
He knows what I look like now.
Matteo: I’ll be there.
Matteo is already waiting when I walk through the door. No jacket, sleeves rolled, which means he came straight from his office. He doesn’t say anything when he sees me—just takes me in, the way he does when he’s running an assessment rather than a greeting.
“Tell me what he looked like,” he says.
I do. Gray coat, mid-forties, wrong posture, gone too fast. Matteo listens without interrupting, which is how I know it’s serious. He asks two questions—which corner, which direction the man faced when the car pulled out—and then he’s quiet for a moment.
“Okay,” he says finally.
“Okay?” I repeat.
“You did the right thing.” He crosses to me, tips my chin up briefly, checks my face like he’s confirming I’m still intact. “Go eat something. I’ll be up.”
He excuses himself. The door to his office closes behind him.
I stand in the hallway for a second, listening to the silence on the other side of that door. Thinking about what a man like Matteo does with information like that.
Thinking that the gray coat man has no idea what he just set in motion.