When the valet opens the door, Suzy gives a brief, unreadable look to the side mirror—a habit of awareness, not vanity.
Her name surfaces on the guest list, tidy and unremarkable: Suzy. No surname given, just a scribbled initial and a phone number that’s already gone dark.
I lean in, elbows braced against the console, and run it again. The restaurant’s closing up. Nikola and Suzy slip out, shoes silent on marble. She looks, for all the world, like a girl about to be swept into a story.
Her eyes—when the light catches them—are flat, almost bored. Not a flicker of the nervous energy I expect. No excitement, no anticipation. Just focus, razor-thin.
A different kind of chill settles in. I’ve worn that look before, in the boardroom, at the edge of a negotiation about to turn. The predator’s calm, not the prey’s. I hit pause and let the silence fill the office, cool and thick.
“What the hell are you really after?” I murmur, voice low, the words meant for the glass, the city, the echo of something shifting.
I don’t know what game Suzy’s playing, but she’s not the prize Nikola thinks she is. She’s something else—something that knows how to wear a mask, and when to drop it.
The screen holds her still, eyes fixed forward, lips parted in a perfect imitation of innocence. I don’t trust it for a second. Suddenly, I want to know who taught her to play.
I move like a surgeon through the aftermath. Suzy’s image lingers on the security feed, the ghost of a girl too carefully made. I don’t waste time on anger.
Instead, I signal my tech team—no raised voices, just a clipped, “I want everything on her. Now. Full sweep. Digital, financial, every scrap you can find. I want to know what she eats for breakfast and when she last stubbed her toe.”
They know the drill. Within minutes, three screens glow with her digital life: credit reports, apartment leases, scraps of social media so bland it’s almost artful.
On paper, Suzy is aggressively normal. The kind of girl who posed in a few catalog shoots, left jobs after four months with polite explanations, rented an apartment that’s more IKEA showroom than home. I watch her history scroll past. No drama, no police reports, no bad breakups that spilled online.
Her last lease is pristine—except for one line: six months paid in cash, the rest in traceable bank transfers. Not a red flag for most people, but for me, the signal is blinding.
Her job history is the same: bright, cheery references, a gap that can’t be explained away by a vacation or hospital stay, and a shift in identity that happens so quietly I almost miss it. Three months ago, a new phone number. The old one goes dark, and nobody texts her about it. It smells like a cover story. Like someone with time and money helping her disappear.
I tell my head of security, “Dig deeper. School records, yearbooks, childhood addresses. If she had a dog in third grade, I want to know its name.” They think I’m being dramatic. I’m not. Normal people don’t scrub their lives this clean.
An hour passes. The details pile up, each one more irritating. Suzy’s social media barely exists: a handful of posed photos—her at the park, coffee in hand, a smile that never quite reaches her eyes.
There are no tagged friends, just a rotation of vague acquaintances, people who show up in one photo and vanish forever. No family. No birthday posts. She isn’t even in her own comments section. I flip through her likes and find nothing but pet videos and three-day-old memes. It’s designed to tell a harmless story. Too designed.
“She’s erased herself,” I murmur, half to the screens, half to the room.
My team pretends not to hear the edge in my voice. I order a surveillance team on her apartment. They’re to watch every entrance, track every face that comes and goes, with a warning not to spook her.
Whoever Suzy really is, she knows how to slip through cracks. I want her contained, not scattered.
Head of security, face drawn, reports back with the results from the criminal databases. “Nothing, sir. She’s not in the system. No priors, no aliases, not even a parking ticket. Her fingerprints are clear.”
I should be relieved. Instead, I feel my jaw clench harder. No one that clean is real. The idea that she’s an amateur doesn’t fit—her movements are too crisp, too controlled. I look at her photo, the unremarkable beauty, the perfect mask of someone with nothing to hide. She’s not a ghost.
Ghosts leave holes. She’s something sharper—someone who can pass through your house and make you thank her for the privilege.
I pull up the restaurant’s records, running my own checks. There’s another restaurant reservation from two weeks ago. It was made by Nikola, but Suzy arrived alone, ten minutes early. She waited at the bar, ordered a club soda, spoke to no one.
The server notes her as polite, “quiet, didn’t make small talk.”
When Nikola arrives, she stands to greet him—submissive, but not tentative. I slow the security footage, watch her posture, the way she never lets herself be boxed in. She sits at the table facing the door, lets Nikola block her line of sight only when she’s ready to move.
I comb through credit card receipts, cab records, elevator logs. She paid for nothing. Let Nikola play the host. Her movements are deliberate. Practiced. She isn’t here for the experience; she’s here for something, and I can’t see the strings yet.
I push for ties to known rivals. Organized crime, corporate sabotage, old enemies. There’s nothing. If she’sconnected, it’s not through any official channel. Still, my mind runs through the possibilities. A decoy? An amateur sent to distract?
That flat-eyed focus haunts me. Suzy doesn’t flinch. She watches.
There’s no way she’s doing this alone.
