Chapter 2 - Damien
Five days. That's how long it's been since the street in Brooklyn, and I have been back every night.
I followed her home.
I should clarify. I maintained a distance of roughly two blocks and tracked her route, which I'd already mapped from public records showing her apartment address.
She walks fast, shoulders hunched against the cold, scanning the street the way she probably doesn't realize she does—quick sweeps left and right, checking doorways and parked cars.
When she reached her building, she pulled her keys from her jacket and held them between her fingers as she climbed the front steps.
An improvised weapon. The habit of a woman who's been navigating unsafe territory her whole life and has long since internalized the calculus of self-protection.
She didn't look back. Not once on the entire walk. She's not afraid of being followed—the possibility simply doesn't register, because nobody has ever cared enough about Jess Rowe to follow her anywhere.
That's going to change.
I watched the light come on in a fourth-floor window and stood there in the shadow of a fire escape, and I felt—for the first time in twenty years—like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
That feeling is the most dangerous thing that's ever happened to me.
It's Wednesday now. Early morning. I'm in my apartment in Manhattan, sitting at my desk in the study that overlooks the park, and I should be preparing for today's Council call. Instead, I'm looking at her art.
The two pieces arrived yesterday. I purchased them through a broker I've used before for legitimate acquisitions—a woman named Lena who handles transactions for collectors who prefer anonymity.
She didn't ask why I wanted two small sculptures from an artist with no profile and no market value.
Lena doesn't ask questions. That's why I use her.
The first piece is welded steel and broken mirror—fragments of reflective glass set into a framework of twisted metal, arranged so that you see yourself in pieces when you stand in front of it.
Your face fractured. Your body cut into strips and scattered.
It's violent and intimate and deeply uncomfortable, and I've been staring at it for twenty minutes.
The second is smaller. Rusted iron shaped into something organic—almost a flower, almost a fist. The ambiguity is deliberate. You can't decide if it's opening or closing, reaching or withdrawing. It sits on my desk, next to my laptop, and every time I glance at it, I see something different.
I don't collect art. I own art—expensive pieces selected by consultants to fill walls in apartments I barely inhabit. Status objects. Signals of taste I don't actually possess. I've never looked at any of them the way I'm looking at these.
These pieces do something to the room. They disrupt it.
The careful, curated emptiness of my apartment—the designer furniture, the neutral palette, the aggressive good taste—all of it feels false next to her work.
Her sculptures are the only honest things in this space.
They sit among my possessions like wild animals brought indoors—untamed, slightly dangerous, refusing to match anything.
I keep looking at the mirror piece. At my own face, fractured and rearranged in the broken glass.
She made this. Her hands shaped this steel, cut this glass, decided exactly where each fragment should go to produce maximum disorientation.
She looked at the concept of a reflection and decided to destroy it.
My phone buzzes. The Council call is in fifteen minutes. I pull my attention away from the art with physical effort, like peeling tape from skin, and open my laptop.
The call is routine. Abraham chairs, as always—measured, diplomatic, the kind of man who delivers threats in the syntax of invitations.
Victoria Saal reports on the Asian markets.
Blackwood drones about regulatory concerns.
I give my update on the East Coast expansion—commercial real estate acquisitions, two new shell corporations established, preliminary contact with a port authority official who will be useful later.
My delivery is crisp, thorough. Nobody on this call would guess that the man briefing them on multimillion-dollar operations spent last night standing in a doorway in Brooklyn, watching a woman lock up her studio.
Nathan Hale is on the call. I hear his voice briefly—a question about a zoning issue, directed at Abraham. His tone is controlled, precise. The tone of a man who runs the world from behind a curtain and prefers it that way.
I think about what I know of his history.
The Order's files on him are extensive—childhood abuse, the car accident that killed his best friend, the years-long surveillance of the dead friend's sister that eventually became something else entirely.
The woman, Eve Sinclair, is now his partner.
She sat beside him at the dinner where I was introduced, and I remember watching her with professional interest. Poised, intelligent, clearly aware that she was being evaluated and clearly not intimidated by it.
What interested me more was him. The way he tracked her every movement with his eyes.
The way his hand found her back, her arm, her shoulder—constant contact, as if she might vanish if he stopped touching her.
The way the most powerful man in the room became, in her presence, entirely subordinate to his need for her.
I'd filed it away as a weakness. A cautionary tale. This is what happens when a man with unlimited resources and no emotional regulation fixates on a woman: he builds a cage and calls it love. Sloppy. Predictable. The kind of vulnerability that gets exploited by anyone paying attention.
I still believe that. Intellectually, I still believe every word of that assessment.
The problem is that I'm now standing in the exact same place he stood, at the beginning of the exact same road, and I can see the destination clearly and I'm walking toward it anyway.
The call ends. I close my laptop and sit in the silence, looking at the rusted-iron sculpture on my desk. The one that might be a flower or might be a fist.
I think about Jess Rowe eating ramen in a warehouse with a broken chair and a space heater that probably violates six fire codes.
I think about her bank balance—$341.22, as of Monday, because I've accessed her financial records through a skip-tracing service that is technically legal and ethically indefensible.
I think about the cargo door latch and the way she ran her thumb over it. The small frown. The shrug.
She noticed. But she didn't feel threatened. She processed it as an anomaly and moved on, because her life has taught her that small unexplained things are usually nothing, and the real dangers don't announce themselves with new hardware.
She's right about that, generally. She's wrong about it now. Because the real danger is me, and I announced myself with exactly that—a fixed latch, a minor improvement, a quiet correction to the security of her world that she didn't ask for and doesn't need to know about.
It's Wednesday, and I should be planning the port authority approach or reviewing the shell corporation filings or doing anything other than what I'm actually doing, which is thinking about her.
The research over the weekend was unsatisfying.
Not because I couldn't find anything—I have access to the same databases and skip-tracing tools that any well-funded investigation firm uses, plus contacts from my years in London who can dig deeper when the standard channels run dry.
The problem is that there's almost nothing to find.
Jess Rowe. Twenty-eight. Born in Queens.
Mother deceased—overdose, she was seven.
No father listed on the birth certificate.
Ward of the state of New York from age seven to eighteen.
Six foster placements. A partial scholarship to an art program she didn't finish.
Then a string of expired sublets, odd jobs, and the warehouse lease she's held for four years, paid monthly to Calvin Tyree.
No social media. No credit cards—just a debit account with a balance that fluctuates between desperate and merely grim. No vehicle registration. No insurance. No memberships, subscriptions, or recurring payments of any kind except the phone bill, which is past due.
She lives almost entirely off the grid. Not deliberately, the way people with secrets do—I know that pattern, I've exploited it professionally.
This is different. She's not hiding. She simply doesn't have enough of a life to leave traces.
No family to call, no institutions to belong to, no financial trail worth following.
She moves through the world like water through sand.
It should make her easy. A person with nothing is a person with no leverage, no protection, no one who would notice if something in her life shifted.
In my professional experience, people like Jess Rowe are the most vulnerable kind—isolated, under-resourced, invisible to every system that might shield them.
The thought doesn't satisfy me. It produces a sensation in my chest that I identify, after some analysis, as discomfort. Her vulnerability doesn't feel like an advantage. It feels like an exposure. A wound left open.
I think about my mother. I try not to—I've spent two decades building walls around that particular room in my mind—but sometimes the door swings open without warning.
She had a studio, too. Not a warehouse—a small room at the back of our house in Hampshire that my father permitted her to use because it kept her quiet and occupied and out of his way.
She painted watercolors. Birds, mostly. Small, delicate things that she'd work on for hours, her face soft with concentration, her hands steady despite everything else in her life being unsteady.