She puts my name in the second paragraph. Bold. Careless. Stupid.
My jaw holds tight as I drag in another pull of smoke. The information she has isn’t enough to hurt me. She doesn’t have details, locations, or names of my people. She has threads, nothing more. Threads can be woven if someone feels ambitious enough.
What bothers me isn’t the risk. It’s the audacity.
“Who gave her this?” I ask without looking up.
Nikolai stands across the room. He shifts his weight like the air’s too heavy. “We’re checking. The sources she listed don’t match anything internal.”
“So she guessed.”
“It looks that way.”
A humorless breath leaves me. Guessing about a man like me isn’t bravery. It’s ignorance.
“Trace her,” I say. “Find out who she is, where she lives, who she speaks to.”
Nikolai nods once and taps his phone. He knows better than to ask why. I don’t explain my decisions. I don’t need to.
While he works, I read the article again. It’s written cleanly. Sharp. Confident. Too confident.
She speaks about corruption as if she understands it personally. She hasn’t. Most people twice her age don’tunderstand the world they’re living in. They think justice exists. They think systems are fair. They think their actions matter.
This girl acts like she’s exposing evil. She doesn’t realize she’s poking at a structure older and stronger than anything she’s touched in her short life.
Nikolai steps back to my desk. “Found her.”
I raise a brow. “Show me.”
He turns the screen of his phone toward me. A university directory entry loads. A student ID photo. Dark hair. Warm brown eyes. A subtle tilt to her chin like she’s daring the photographer to ask her to smile.
“Clara Whitmore,” he says. “Journalism student. Twenty-one. No criminal record. Lives alone. Parents out of state.”
Something about it hits me wrong. Not fear. Not annoyance. Almost… insult.
A girl barely old enough to rent a car puts my name online and waits for applause. It feels like mockery.
I swipe the screen from Nikolai’s hand and open a browser. Her name brings up a few university articles, a scholarship announcement, a local interview. I click the video.
She sits outside on campus. Curvy frame tucked into a sweater. Hair pulled back but loose pieces keep falling forward. She keeps brushing them away. Her eyes light up when she talks, sharp and expressive. There’s no hesitation in her voice.
“I think truth matters,” she says. “If we’re afraid to name the things that corrupt our city, then nothing ever changes.”
There’s no tremor. No doubt. She says it like she believes every word.
I lean back in my chair.
She’s not what I expected. I imagined someone older. Someone jaded. Someone who understands danger. This girl sits in the sun and talks about justice like she’s immune to consequences.
I watch her again, slower this time. Her posture. The way she tucks her fingers around her mug. The way she doesn’t look away from the interviewer even once.
She’s soft around the edges, but not weak. She’s stubborn.
Interesting.
I shouldn’t care what she looks like. That isn’t the point. She’s a liability, and liabilities get handled quickly. Contained… silenced if necessary, but something about her pulls at me. Not attraction alone. Something else.
Curiosity.
