"I am prioritizing my sanity," she countered, grabbing a framed degree off the wall. She looked at it for a second, First Class Honours, Law, and then smashed the glass against the corner of the dresser to extract the paper. "Paper is warm. Paper is mobile."
She was terrified.
That was the data point flashing behind her aggression. She was packing the office supplies because they were the only things in her life that she could control. The world outside was hunting her, stripping her name and her face off the internet, turning her into a pariah. But in this room, with her binders and her pens, she was still the manager.
I pushed off the doorframe. The floorboards creaked under my weight.
I walked to the window. I didn't open the blinds; I just angled one slat down with my thumb.
Islington was grey and wet. A delivery van idled three doors down. A woman pushed a stroller. A man in a utility vest was working on a junction box across the street.
My eyes narrowed.
The man in the vest wasn't working. His hands were too still. He was holding a device, angled slightly toward us. A long-range directional mic? Or a telephoto lens hidden in a tool bag?
He shifted his weight. The vest pulled tight. No utility belt. Just a shoulder holster shape printing against the cheap fabric.
Probably a freelancer hired by Vance’s security firm to sit on the address and wait for the rat to come back to the nest.
He tilted the device. I saw the glint. Lens. He was recording the window. He was recording the silhouette of Rowan moving frantically back and forth.
"We have eyes," I said quietly.
Rowan froze, a silk blouse half-folded in her hands. "What?"
"Across the street. Utility worker. He’s tagging the location."
She dropped the shirt. Her scent spiked, sharp, acrid fear cutting through the peppermint. She moved toward the window, her instinct to look, to analyze.
"Stay away from the glass," I barked.
She flinched but stopped. "Is it police?"
"Private," I said. I let the blind snap back. "He’s logging us. If he uploads a location tag to the Vance server, we’ll have a heavy extraction team here in ten minutes."
"Okay," Rowan breathed. She looked pale, her eyes darting around the room. "Okay. I have an exit strategy. We use the service corridor. I have a key to the refuse chute room, it leads to the alley behind the?—"
I wasn't listening to the exit strategy. I was calculating the intercept.
If we ran out the back, he’d see the movement. He’d follow. He’d log the vehicle. The trail would be fresh, and we’d be burning fuel trying to shake a tail through London traffic.
Disruption was cleaner.
I unlocked the deadbolt on the front door.
"Mateo?" Rowan’s voice pitch shifted up. "Where are you going?"
"To blind him," I said.
"No!" She rushed forward, grabbing my arm. Her fingers dug into the leather of my jacket, surprisingly strong. "We don't engage. We need to evade. If you go out there, you escalate the threat level. You make it a scene."
"He’s already made it a scene," I said, looking down at her. She barely reached my chest. She looked small, fierce, and completely out of her depth. "He has footage of you in the window. That footage doesn't leave the street."
"We can outrun the upload!"
"I don't run," I said.
I gently, firmly removed her hand from my arm.
