I smiled.
He wasn't waiting for me in the alley when I'd left last night. I'd stood in the cold for ten minutes like an idiot, waiting for that specific gravity of his presence to settle against my skin, and when it didn't come, something ugly and unfamiliar had crawled up my throat.
It wasn't heartbreak. I didn't know him well enough for that.
Perhaps it was lust. The hollow ache of a melody cut off mid-phrase, silence where the resolution should have been.
Whatever it was, I hated the feeling. And I hated him for causing it. Hated myself even more for standing in a filthy alley at eleven o'clock at night, waiting for my mystery man to come out of the shadows and tell me to go home.
So tonight, I wasn't waiting.
Tonight, I was hunting. And it wasn't just Milo in my crosshairs.
The dinner rush swallowed the restaurant whole by eight.
I played Chopin, Prélude in E minor. Pretty, harmless Chopin that made rich couples hold hands and mobsters feel cultured. My fingers moved on autopilot while I listened to the world around me, gathering information like I did every night I was here.
Viktor's raised voice bled through the partition wall of the private room. "...shipment, fourteenth, Galveston port..."
A date. A location. I filed it away in my mind.
The Wheeler-Dealer's wet laugh, pitched a half-step too high. Bluffing about something.
Noted.
I tilted my ear toward the sound of a new voice. It was deeper, with a slight lisp on his sibilants and a smoker's rasp that suggested sixty-plus years and a pack-a-day habit. I'd never heard him before.
I filed him underunknownand kept listening.
I'd been doing this since I was strong enough to return after the accident, only to discover the blood and soul my father had invested in this place had been disrespected by the criminals who now controlled it.
This restaurant was my last thread to my father, the only parent I'd ever known, and I'd come back here the instant I'd kicked out my caretakers and gathered up the nerve to leave my apartment. When I'd shared my history with the new owners, they'd pitied me, I suppose, and permitted me to come back and perform here for just enough money to keep myself from starving.
Initially, I was thankful—desperately thankful—they'd let me return. The piano was the only "normal" thing I still had after losing my sight.
Then I began to notice things…
Things that unsettled me.
I realized quickly that everyone here overlooked me the way the rest of the world did. And gradually, I started soaking up their secrets and tucking them away in a place they'd never consider searching—the mind of a sightless woman they assumed was harmless.
Now I had names. Dates. Shipping routes. The identity of a judge on their payroll. The location of a warehouse in Galveston where product moved on the second and fourth Thursday of every month. I knew which soldiers were loyal, which ones were skimming, and which ones Viktor suspected of talking to the Feds.
I didn't have a plan for any of it. No FBI contact. No journalist. No grand scheme of justice for my father.
But it was mine. My loaded gun. My proof that they'd made a mistake when they looked at me and saw nothing but another piece of furniture.
And one day, I was going to take them all down.
***
Milo left sometime before my second set. I got up to use the restroom during my break, and when I got back, I knew he was no longer there.
The walk home was sharp with cold, the kind that climbed up under your coat collar and settled against the back of your neck. My cane tapped a steady rhythm against the pavement. Forty-two steps to the corner. Left turn. Bus stop in eleven more.
I counted eight before I heard him.
He was leaning against the brick wall of the building adjacent to the bus stop. I knew it was him before I heard him cough—that particular stillness, the scent of cold air and something clean underneath. The ocean in winter.
