Those cameras weren't original to the building. The mounting hardware was new brushed steel, not the corroded brackets you'd expect on a structure this age, and the cameras themselves were commercial-grade. Not consumer. Not the doorbell nonsense that half of suburban America relied on. These were serious pieces of equipment, the kind that fed to a monitored system with recording capability and remote access,and they had Boris written all over them. The Pakhan's security infrastructure extending its reach to cover the apartment of a woman his wife considered family.
I should have found that comforting. Instead, I felt guilty I hadn’t thought of it. But then I’d been burying my head in the sand all this time, so what was one more?
I was halfway through my sixth circuit when my phone buzzed.
Gideon.
I stopped walking. Leaned against the brick wall of the alley on the east side, where the shadow was deepest and the camera coverage, based on my assessment of the mounting angles, had a narrow blind spot. Old habits. I answered on the first buzz.
"Tell me you're not doing what I think you're doing," Gideon said.
"Depends on what you think I'm doing."
"I think you're standing outside Molly's apartment building at—" A pause. The sound of a screen being checked. "—eight seventeen p.m., having circled the building approximately six times in the last twenty minutes, based on the movement pattern I'm currently watching on my app. You look like a shark. A very large, very lovesick shark swimming in a very small circle."
I closed my eyes. The app we all kept active as a team safety protocol, the one that let us track each other's locations in real time in case of emergency. The one I'd specifically advocated for after an incident away from base camp because I never wanted to lose a team member's position again. The irony of it being used to catch me stalking my own girlfriend's apartment building was not lost on me.
"I'm not inside," I said, as if that distinction mattered. As if the line between showing up at her door and orbiting her building like a distressed satellite was a meaningful moral boundary.
"No, you're not inside. You're outside, which might actually be worse, because at least inside you'd have a plausible reason for being there. Outside, you're just a man loitering in an alley, which—and I say this with love, brother—is not a great look for someone in our line of work."
"I'm not loitering. I'm—"
"You're what? Conducting a security assessment? Without notifying anyone?"
I didn't answer, because every response I could formulate sounded exactly as ridiculous as it was.
Gideon's sigh came through the phone with the weight of a man who'd managed teams of highly skilled, emotionally compromised operators for the better part of a decade and had long ago accepted that tactical brilliance and personal stupidity could coexist in the same individual without contradiction.
"I also got a call," he said, and his tone shifted—still warm, still Gideon, but with the undercurrent of something that was trying very hard not to be amused. "From Boris Volkov's head of security. A man named Gregor, who I've met exactly once, at a security coordination meeting that felt more like a summit between two small nations. Gregor informed me, with the particular brand of dry Russian understatement that Boris's people have perfected into an art form, that their surveillance cameras had picked up a male subject repeatedly circling the building in a pattern consistent with—and I'm quoting here, Xavier—'pre-breach reconnaissance.'"
I pressed the back of my head against the brick and stared up at the narrow strip of sky visible between the buildings. A single star. Maybe a planet. I didn't know enough about astronomy to tell the difference, and right now I didn't care, because the universe was apparently conspiring to make this the most humiliating night of my life, which was saying something given that it had started with me begging a naked woman notto leave and ended with me being reported to a Russian crime syndicate's security apparatus as a potential burglar.
"They ran my plates," I said. It wasn't a question.
"They ran your plates. Identified you in approximately ninety seconds, which tells you something about the quality of Boris's intelligence network. Gregor said, and again I'm quoting: 'Please inform Mr. Moreno that the Pakhan appreciates his dedication to Miss Gilbertson's safety, but if he continues to circle the building like a man casing a jewelry store, our ground team will be sent to make contact, and that conversation will be less pleasant than this one.'"
I let out a breath that was half laugh and half something closer to despair. Boris Volkov's security team had made me. A decorated special operations veteran with fifteen years of field experience, multiple commendations for covert surveillance work, and a service record that included operations in environments significantly more hostile than a residential street in Tampa—and I'd been burned by a camera system protecting my girlfriend's apartment because I'd been too emotionally compromised to run proper counter-surveillance. I hadn't even checked for the cameras before I started walking. Hadn't thought to. Hadn't thought about anything except the light in her window and the silence in my chest where her breathing should have been.
"How many people know?" I asked.
"Right now? Me, Gregor, and presumably whoever was monitoring the feed in real time. Gregor called me as a professional courtesy because he recognized you were one of mine. He was—I'll be generous and call it diplomatic. But the subtext was clear: get your man under control before we have to do it for you."
"Christ."
"It gets better. Dion saw your location ping and texted me approximately fifteen seconds before Gregor called. His exact words were—" Another pause. The sound of a screen scrolling. "'Is Xavier parked outside Molly's building like a psychopath or did his truck get stolen by a psychopath? Either way, someone should handle it.' He then offered to come join you, which I declined on the grounds that two former special operators surveilling a civilian apartment building would not, in fact, be less conspicuous than one."
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the ground, which was cold and slightly damp and smelled like the dumpster I'd cataloged during my third circuit. The position was undignified. The entire situation was undignified. I was a forty-one-year-old man sitting in an alley behind a dumpster, having been identified by a Russian security team and tracked by my own teammates, because I couldn't handle the first night without the woman I loved sleeping more than three feet away from me.
"What do I do, Gideon?" The question came out stripped of every layer of professional composure I'd ever built. It was the question of a man who'd run out of tactical options and strategic frameworks and carefully reasoned positions on autonomy and healing and the appropriate timeline for emotional dependency. It was the question I'd been asking in one form or another since the morning she'd tried to kiss me and I'd turned my head and sat in my truck with my hands shaking. What do I do. How do I do this. How do I love someone so much that their absence feels like a missing limb and still respect their right to walk away from me.
Gideon was quiet for a long moment. Not his tactical silence—the one that preceded operational decisions, the one that meant he was running calculations and weighing variables. This was his other silence. The personal one. The one he brought toconversations that mattered in ways that couldn't be mapped on a whiteboard or resolved with a briefing.
"You go home," he said finally. His voice had shifted into the tone of a man who understood somehow the particular agony of loving someone whose healing required your absence. "You go home, Xavier. You get in your truck, you drive back to your house, and you walk into the bedroom that smells like her and lie down on sheets that are still warm from what happened between you, and you let tonight be what it is."
"And what is it?"
"Terrible. It's going to be terrible. And you're going to survive it, because surviving terrible things is what you do. It's what she's doing right now, on the other side of that wall, and the least you can do is match her courage from your own house instead of lurking in an alley like a man who's about to get shot by a Russian security detail."
