When I finally pulled into my driveway, the adrenaline drained, leaving only a hollow space inside me. I sat for a long time, staring at my own hands on the wheel, the lines and whorls of my fingerprints. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt safe, and couldn’t.
I thought about what Nitro had said—about not having a side, about survival being the only real currency. I wondered if it was true, or if I was just too far gone to remember what normal looked like.
Inside, I checked every lock, every window. I found the gun I’d bought years ago on a whim, heavy in my palm, its weight a comfort and a threat all at once. I hid it under the bed, knowing it wouldn’t matter if someone really wanted in.
I drank water until my hands stopped shaking, then collapsed onto the futon, still wearing my coat. I stared at the ceiling and waited for sleep, knowing it wouldn’t come. The dark pressed in on all sides, alive with the memory of footsteps and violence.
9
Nitro
Ikilled the engine twenty yards before her driveway, coasting the Softail through the last stretch of sand and loose gravel with the clutch pulled in. The headlight cut a pale tunnel through the pine trunks, and I watched the shadow of her house flicker between them like a mirage—one story, clapboard, windowless on the approach side. Seraphina Dalton did not believe in curb appeal or vulnerability.
I left the Harley behind a stand of ponderosa, rolled it onto the kickstand, and let the night reclaim the noise. The temperature had dropped since sunset, bringing the resin smell of sap and the silent threat of frost. I waited a full minute, letting my eyes adjust, listening for anything out of place. Coyotes bickered somewhere to the west. An owl called. Nothing else.
Seraphina answered my call on the first ring.
“I’m coming up the drive.”
“Okay,” she said, and ended the call.
I walked the last few steps to her porch, boots silent on the dirt. The porch light was off, but the interior lamp glowed behind a narrow slit in the blackout curtain. I imagined her on the other side, pacing, waiting, analyzing my approach the same way she’d analyze a malware payload. I knocked once. A lock disengaged. The door cracked open the width of a vertebra.
“You’re late,” she said.
I shrugged. “Wanted to make sure I didn’t have a tail.”
She peered past me, saw only the empty woods, then stepped aside.
I slipped through, keeping my body angled in case she’d decided to arm the perimeter with something less predictable. The house was small but dense. There was a desk to the left, computers stacked two high, a couch, and a battered coffee table to the right, a kitchen just a galley cut behind the main room. No décor, unless you counted the books and the strings of cat-5 cable that hung from the ceiling like industrial tinsel.
“Nice place,” I said.
“It’s a rental,” she replied. “I rotate every six months. This one was supposed to be unlisted.”
“You trust the realtor?”
She gave a snort. “I trust nobody, especially not the people who own houses.”
That made me smile, so I let it. “You want me to sweep the perimeter?”
She bristled, as if the question was an insult. “Already did. Twice.”
I didn’t answer. I just started my circuit because that was the only way I could get comfortable. She trailed me at a distance, arms folded, the shape of her frame lost in a hoodie two sizes too large. At each window, I pressed the sash, tested for give. I checked the seams of the door, the hinges, and the deadbolt.My hands worked out of habit—left for fine, right for force. Scar tissue snagged on the wood, but I ignored it.
When I finished, I stood in the center of the room and let my eyes roam. Only one approach made sense—the front, straight up the gravel. No basement. No attic. The roof was too steep for easy access. She’d picked well, but I’d have done it better.
She hovered near the couch, watching me with the look of a woman running calculations she didn’t want to share. I pointed to the desk. “You want to sit there, or on the floor?”
“Couch is fine,” she said, and dropped onto it, pulling her knees up like she was bracing for recoil. She reached for a blanket, hesitated, then left it where it was.
I crossed the room, dropped beside her, making sure my back was to the wall and my eyes had a full sweep of the windows. I set my piece on the coffee table—Glock, slide locked, one in the chamber—and let it sit there, a mute statement. She eyed it but said nothing.
We sat in silence. She fiddled with her hair, then her glasses, then nothing. The only sound was the house settling, the wind through the needles, the muffled thump of my own pulse. I watched the front window, every fifteen seconds shifting my gaze to the left, then back. Old habit from a thousand nights in watchtowers and OPs, where forgetting a quadrant meant dying.
“You’re tense,” she said.
“Always am.”
