"You're telling me no."
"I'm telling you later. There's a difference." My thumb traces her jaw, and she exhales, slow and deliberate. "When we're clear. When I can take the time you deserve. Not in a hotel room with a surveillance window closing."
Her hands tighten on my lapels. "Say it, then. Make me wait properly."
The challenge in her voice does more damage than it should. "Say you'll wait."
Her eyes hold mine for a long beat, green and steady, entirely aware of what she's doing. "I'll wait."
The submission in it, chosen, offered, hers to give, lands harder than anything else tonight. I kiss her once more, slow enough to be a promise, and step back before I change my mind.
I retrieve my jacket and move toward the connecting door. Three steps from it, movement on an upper floor of the building opposite pulls my eye, half-shadowed under an awning, a directsightline to Isabella's window. Too still for a tourist, wrong posture for a resident.
Every instinct I have points the same direction.
"Get away from the window," I say, voice flat. "Now."
9
ISABELLA
“Get away from the window. Now.”
The flatness in his voice is enough. Before the words fully land, my back is against the wall, below the sill. Remy kills the lamp. The room goes dark except for the bleed of Manhattan light through the curtains, amber-edged, restless, the city doing what it always does, indifferent to whatever is happening on the floors above it.
"How many?" I ask.
"One confirmed. Upper floor, building opposite." He's at the connecting door, his eye to the peephole. "Could be more we haven't placed yet."
The Knickerbocker's floor plan assembles itself in my memory, the way he taught me on the first walk-through, because exits are what you need before you need them. Two stairwells. Elevator bank. Housekeeping closets on alternating floors. The service corridor running the full length of the east wing. I'd done it automatically, the way I used to memorize the layout of a new lab before I touched anything, understanding the space before the work starts.
"They'll cover the stairwells," I say.
"And the lobby."
"How did they find us?"
"Doesn't matter right now." He's already moving, jacket on, the Glock disappearing under it in one practiced motion. "We move in two minutes. Dress fast and get your bag."
It's already in my hand: passport, the drive, the emergency kit I've carried since Prague and never fully unpacked. Old habits from a life I didn't know I was building.
He eases the connecting door open an inch and goes still. That particular stillness, the one that means he's reading something in the corridor I can't yet read. I hold my own breath without meaning to. After three seconds, he pulls it closed again.
"Three of them. Iron Choir, from the positioning. One at each stairwell, one at the elevator."
Exit mapping. Three covered. Two stairwells, one elevator. Which leaves the service corridor, and the housekeeping closet two doors down that I'd noted when we checked in, because old precision doesn't die, it just redirects.
"I need a minute and a housekeeping cart," I say.
He looks at me.
"The service closet, two doors down. Bleach-based surface cleaner and ammonia degreaser, hotels stock both. Combined in an enclosed space, they off-gas chloramine vapor. Dispersed through the ventilation return, it reaches every room on this floor within two minutes. Eye and throat irritation, immediate and disorienting. Enough to force evacuation."
The math is clean in my head. I've run this kind of dispersion model before, in a lab, with safety controls. I know exactly where the line sits between uncomfortable and harmful.
"Every person on this floor goes for the stairwells. Including whoever's standing in them."
His eyes hold mine for a beat. Whatever the calculation is, it resolves.
