I drink my tea and fall asleep with the cup still on the mattress beside me, and my last thought is of the sculpture. The ribs reaching. The gap at the top, open and unresolved.
Waiting for me to decide what it means.
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 keep a log. Not written—I'm not stupid enough to create a paper trail—but mental, catalogd with the same precision I bring to operational planning. Friday: first sighting. Saturday: initial research, returned at 10 PM, watched for one hour and twelve minutes. Sunday: had the latch replaced, returned at 9:40 PM, watched for fifty-three minutes. Monday: returned at 10:15 PM, varied position to the north side of the street, watched for forty-seven minutes. Tuesday: returned at 11 PM and observed her leave the studio, lock the new latch—which she tested twice, my careful girl—and walk home.
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 iscontrolled, 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 violatessix 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.
