If Damien Cross shows up at that gallery—and something tells me he will, because he saidI'd like towith the certainty of a man who doesn't say things he doesn't mean—I'll be ready. Not with warmth. Not with hostility. With attention.
I'll watch him the way I watch metal before I cut it. Carefully. Patiently. Looking for the place where the surface gives.
Because everyone has a seam. Everyone has a point where the performance breaks and the real thing shows through.
I just have to find his.
I finish my tea. I turn off the light. The dress hangs on the door like armour disguised as silk.
The show is coming. The gap stays open.
And I'll be watching.
Chapter 8 - Damien
I tell myself there's a reason.
The reason is security. Her building is a liability—I've known this since the first night I followed her home. The front door lock is a single-cylinder deadbolt that a teenager with a credit card could defeat. The intercom hasn't functioned in years. The hallway light on the fourth floor has been out for months, which means she walks the last twenty meters to her door in darkness every night.
These are vulnerabilities. Unacceptable vulnerabilities in the environment of a person I'm monitoring. Any competent operative would assess the interior of the space, identify additional risks, and determine whether intervention is warranted.
That's the reason. Security assessment. Due diligence. The same protocol I'd follow for any operational asset.
I'm lying. I know I'm lying. The lie is so transparent that it insults both of us—me for constructing it and her for being its subject. But I need the architecture of a reason the way I need the architecture of everything: as a structure to move through, a framework that gives shape to what would otherwise be formless and terrifying.
The formless, terrifying truth is that I want to be inside her home. I want to stand where she stands. I want to see her life from the inside, not through a camera mounted on a building across the street. I want to know what her apartment smells like at midnight when she's not in it. I want to know what books are on her shelf and what's in her fridge and which side of the bed she sleeps on.
I want to know her the way I know an operation—completely, from every angle, with no detail left unexamined.
Tuesday night. I watch the camera feed until she leaves the apartment at 6:52 PM, heading to the studio for an evening session. She'll be there for hours—her pattern on studio nights is consistent. She won't be home before ten at the earliest.
I have the building's layout from public records. Fourth floor, unit 4C, east-facing windows. Fire escape access on the south side. One entrance, one exit, unless you count the windows.
I dress in dark clothes. No coat—the coat is too recognisable, too much of a signature. A black jacket, unremarkable. I take the subway. I walk the last six blocks with my head down, hands in my pockets, one face among thousands in a city that doesn't look up.
Her building is a pre-war walk-up on a street that's seen better decades. Five storys, brick, the kind of place that was working-class housing in the 1940s and is now whatever comes after neglect but before renovation. The front stoop has a crack running through the second step. The buzzers beside the door are labelled in faded handwriting, except for 4C, which is blank.
The front door is as bad as I expected. The deadbolt is old—a Kwikset from at least the 1990s, single pin tumbler, the kind of lock that exists to create the illusion of security without actually providing it. I have it open in under eight seconds with a tension wrench and a rake pick. The tools go back in my jacket. The door closes behind me.
The hallway smells like cooking—garlic, something fried—and old carpet. Mailboxes on the left wall, most of them dented or hanging open. The stairs are narrow and steep, the banisterloose under my hand. I climb without touching it, staying close to the wall where the steps are less likely to creak.
Second floor. Third floor. The light on the third-floor landing is working—a bare bulb, harsh and yellow. Fourth floor. Dark, as I knew it would be. The hallway stretches ahead of me in near-total blackness, the only light a thin line under one of the doors—not hers.
I stand outside 4C and listen. Silence. No movement, no television, no running water. The apartment is empty.
Her lock is better than the building's—a Medeco, which surprises me. Good taste in hardware, even if she couldn't afford the best version of it. This one is a mid-range model, pin tumbler with a sidebar. It takes me forty seconds, which is longer than I'd like. My hands are steady. They're always steady.
The deadbolt turns. I push the door open six inches and listen again. Nothing. I step inside and close the door behind me.
The apartment is small. Smaller than I expected, even knowing the building's layout. A single room that functions as bedroom and living space, a narrow kitchen along one wall, a door that must lead to the bathroom. The ceiling is high—pre-war proportions—but the floor space is compressed. A person could cross the entire apartment in eight steps.
I stand still and let my eyes adjust. Streetlight comes through the window, amber and dim, giving the room a quality of underwater light. Shapes emerge. The mattress on the floor, made up neatly with a worn quilt—dark blue, the kind of thing you find at a thrift store or inherit from a home you've since left. A pillow, single. A small table beside it with a lamp, a book, a mug.
The mug is the detail that hits me first. It's sitting on the table with a tea bag still in it, a brown ring around the insidewhere the water evaporated. She drank tea in bed last night and forgot to take the mug to the kitchen. A small, human lapse. The kind of imperfection that the camera never shows me.
I don't move for a long time. I stand in the doorway of Jess Rowe's apartment and breathe, and the air smells like chamomile and lavender and something underneath—warm, specific, hers. The scent of a person's home, composed of a thousand unconscious choices: the soap she uses, the tea she drinks, the laundry detergent, the eucalyptus that I know she keeps in the studio but whose ghost lingers here too, carried in on her clothes and hair.
The violation of this moment is not lost on me. I am standing in a woman's home without her knowledge or consent, breathing air that belongs to her, surrounded by the intimate architecture of her private life. This is not a security assessment. This is transgression of the most fundamental kind—an invasion of the space where a person is most vulnerable, most unguarded, most themselves.
