The stairs hum with movement and the faint scent of metal and dust rises to meet me.
Before heading down, I pause at the top of the steps and let my gaze sweep the block one more time. Habit, I tell myself. Awareness. It’s what I’m here to study, after all.
The street looks ordinary. A man unloads boxes from a truck. A couple leans against a lamppost arguing softly. A woman wrangles a stroller over a curb. Life continues, unbothered.
I force a breath out and step onto the first stair.
Something tugs at me: intuition, fear, instinct, I can’t tell. I turn my head slightly, barely enough to look over my shoulder.
Nothing. Of course.
Yet the shiver that rips through me is sharper now, a cold rush that sinks from my throat to my ribs. It feels as if the city itself is holding its breath.
I take one last look across the street, reassuring myself that I’m imagining things, that shock is playing tricks on my senses, that the man in the shadows is long gone and already forgetting I ever existed.
Then I descend into the station, letting the crowd pull me under.
Chapter Two - Simon
I stay in the alley long after the body cools. The blood trickles along the cracked concrete in slow lines, catching on bits of dirt and broken glass, spreading toward the gutter.
My men drag the dead weight toward the wall and cover it with a tarp, but I barely register the movement. I’m still staring at the spot where she hid.
She moved quietly. Most people don’t. Fear makes them clumsy, loud, stupid. They freeze or scream or run without looking where they’re going. This woman didn’t do any of that. She didn’t even breathe wrong. She stayed still. She watched.
I felt her before I saw anything. A shift in the air. A prickle at the edge of my awareness. The faintest impression of someone holding their breath. That’s what made me turn. Not sound. Not sight.Instinct.
And she was there. Pressed behind that dumpster, tense as a wire, but not falling apart. Her fear was real; anyone would be afraid after watching a man get shot. Yet there was something underneath it, something sharper. Curiosity. Focus. She wasn’t only scared. She was studying us.
People don’t study me. They avoid my eyes, or they raise guns, or they start begging. This one… she observed. She kept her head level. She tracked the movements in the alley like she was making notes in her mind.
It unsettles me more than I want to admit.
The shooter snaps his glove off and tosses it aside, waiting for orders. I don’t give any yet. I’m still thinking about her. Women in this world panic before they think. She didn’t. She watched me the way I watch threats.
I don’t like that I can’t see her face clearly. I caught enough to know she’s young and smaller than she thinks she is. Hair a warm shade—brown, maybe auburn—pulled back but loose around her face. Jeans. Sneakers. A notebook clutched to her chest. Not the clothing of someone sent to bait me. Not the posture of someone trained.
Something about her presence was wrong in its own way. Too deliberate.
I finally turn from the alley, leaving the tarp and the body behind. My men follow, keeping a respectful distance. They know when I’m thinking.
We reach the car parked a block down. A black sedan, indistinct and forgettable. I slide into the back seat and lean into the silence. My hands rest on my knees, palms open, relaxed, though my mind keeps circling the same question.
Was she sent here?
If she was, it was sloppy. No backup, and certainly no surveillance equipment I could see. No trained stillness in her muscles. She trembled, yes, but her eyes—what I glimpsed of them—stayed sharp. Observant. Calm in a way I haven’t seen outside people who’ve spent years being forced to be calm.
If she wasn’t sent, then she walked into this by accident. A coincidence. Wrong place, wrong time.
I don’t believe in coincidences.
Sergei slides into the passenger seat and glances at me through the rearview mirror. His voice stays quiet. “You want us to track her down now? Clean it up?”
The urge to say yes rises immediately. That would be easy. Clean. Practical. Witnesses don’t last long in my world. Loose ends strangle people later.
There’s one small thing, though. If she were a threat, she would’ve acted differently. If she were bait, she’d have looked at me the way people look at danger. She looked at me like a puzzle.
“Not yet,” I say.
