"Do it," she says. "Handle it. And then you're going to tell me everything. Every single thing. No more doors. No more rooms I'm not allowed to see. You're going to open every door in your life and let me look inside and if I find one more locked room I'm gone. For good. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"And the cameras come down. Tonight."
"Yes."
She pulls her hand away from my face. She presses both palms against the concrete floor and pushes herself up—slowly, her legs unsteady, one hand going back to her throat. She stands. She looks down at me, still kneeling on the floor beside the body of the man I killed.
"Get up," she says. "Do what you need to do. I'll be at Tess's."
She walks to the cargo door. She doesn't look at Kyle on the floor. She doesn't look at the sculpture or the tools or the studio she's spent years building into the only safe space she has. She walks straight to the door and she ducks under it and the sound of her boots on the pavement fades and then there's silence.
I kneel on the concrete floor beside the body of Kyle Purcell and the silence is total.
Then I stand. I take out my phone. I make the call.
The Order has protocols for this. Disposal, sanitation, the systematic erasure of events that cannot be permitted to have officially occurred. I've never used them for a personal matter. The voice on the other end of the line asks no questions. Namesno names. Takes the address and the details and the timeline and says forty minutes.
I hang up. I stand in the studio and wait. The sculpture watches from the center of the room—the yielding forms. Jess's work. The piece she was making while I watched through a camera, while she fell for a man who was lying to her, while the world she was building was being quietly shaped by hands she couldn't see.
The gap is still open. After everything—the closet, the confrontation, the knife, the killing. After the worst thing that could happen in this room has happened on this floor.
I don't know what that means. I don't know if it means anything. But I look at it—the light coming through the space between the forms, the air moving in the gap—and I hold on to it the way a drowning man holds on to the last solid thing.
Forty minutes. The team arrives. They work quickly, silently, with the professional efficiency of people who do this and don't discuss it. I stand outside the cargo door and watch the street and the blood on the concrete dries and is cleaned and the body is wrapped and removed and the studio is scrubbed and by the time they leave, the only evidence that Kyle Purcell was ever here is a scratch on the wall where the knife pressed and a thin line of dried blood on Jess Rowe's throat, four miles away in a friend's apartment.
I lock the cargo door. The latch I installed. The hardware that started everything.
I stand on the dark street and I look at the unit across the street—the empty room, the window, the camera I'm going to remove tonight because she told me to and because it's the first thing she's asked me to do and I'm going to do every single thing she asks me to do for as long as she lets me.
I remove the camera. The pinhole mount leaves a small mark in the window frame—barely visible, a shadow the size of a thumbtack. I put the camera in my pocket and lock the unit and stand on the sidewalk.
The cargo door across the street is closed. The studio is dark. The street is empty.
For the first time since a rainy night in Brooklyn, I'm not watching.
The absence of it is enormous. A phantom limb. The space where the feed used to be—the constant, low-grade connection to her life, the knowledge of where she was and what she was doing—gone. Replaced by darkness and silence and the terrible, necessary freedom of not knowing.
She's at Tess's. She's alive. She has a cut on her throat and a dead man's blood on her hands and the knowledge of who I am and what I've done.
And she saidopen every door.
Notgoodbye.NotI never want to see you again.Open every door. Let me see.
I get in the car. I drive to Manhattan. I go to my apartment and I shower and the water runs over my bruised hands and I press them flat against the tile and I breathe.
Open every door.
I can do that. I can do that because the alternative is the apartment without her in it, the silence without her voice in it, the bed without the smell of vanilla and metal. The alternative is the rest of my life in the mausoleum, and I would rather open every door in it and let her see every room—the Order, the operations, Montreal, the wine cellar, my mother'spaintings, the boy in the dark—than spend one more night in this apartment alone.
I turn off the water. I dry my hands. I sit at the desk where I've spent weeks watching a woman through a camera that is now in my pocket, dismantled, dark.
The screen is blank. No feed. No footage. No carefully maintained illusion of proximity.
Just the silence. And the waiting. And the open doors.
Chapter 29 - Damien
