I push off the doorframe. "After you."
We drive in my car. A dark SUV with tinted windows that blends into any neighborhood. Stefania sits in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the road and she doesn't speak for the first ten minutes.
I let the silence sit. I know what this means to her. The first time she's done this with someone beside her. The first time the thing she does in the dark has a witness.
"You're quiet," I say.
"I'm always quiet before."
"Before what? The approach?"
"Before everything." She turns her head and looks at me. The streetlights slide across her face in orange bars. "I go somewhere else. Inside. The part of me that thinks and worries and second-guesses shuts down and something else takes over. Something that just... executes… in every sense of the word."
"I know the feeling."
"I know you do." She looks back at the road. "That's why I'm not afraid to have you here."
A feeling of quiet, permanent recognition moves through me.
I park two blocks from Jones' apartment. The neighborhood is residential, low-income, the kind of area where people mind their own business because minding someone else's has never done them any good. The streetlights are spaced far apart and half of them are out.
Stefania checks the time. "It's eleven-forty now. The bar closes at twelve."
"How do you want to do this?"
She studies me. I can see her calculating, adjusting her usual approach to account for a second person, factoring in the variable of me.
"I work alone," she says. "Usually."
"Tonight I was hoping you’d accept help. Partnership."
"I know." She's quiet for a moment. "I need you to stay back. Not far. But back. If he sees two people, he won't come down the alley. He needs to think I'm alone."
"You want to use yourself as bait."
"It's what I usually do."
My jaw tightens. Everything in me resists this aspect. Every instinct I have as a man, as her husband, as someone who has spent three weeks learning every detail of her life and the last twenty-four hours beside her, inside her, rejects the idea of watching her walk into danger.
But this is who she is. This is who I married. The part of her I told her I wouldn't try to cage.
"How close can I be?"
"Twenty feet. In the shadows. If something goes wrong, you'll see it and step in, but otherwise, I need you to trust me."
We take position. The alley runs between a shuttered laundromat and a check-cashing place. It’s narrow and dim. A dumpster at the entrance and a chain-link fence at the far end. Stefania walks halfway down and stops beneath the one functioning light, which casts a weak yellow circle around her feet.
She takes off the cap. Lets her hair fall. Unzips the jacket enough to show the cleavage underneath. In ten seconds, she transforms from the weapon I watched get dressed in our bedroom, to a woman walking alone at night who made a wrong turn. She pulls out her phone, lifting it to the sky as she pretends to search for signal.
The performance is flawless. And it terrifies and excites me in equal measure.
I settle behind the dumpster. I can see her from here. I can see the mouth of the alley and the sidewalk beyond it.
We wait.
Twelve-fourteen. Footsteps on the sidewalk. Heavy. A man's stride, slightly uneven. The loose, careless gait of someone who's had four or five beers and thinks the night belongs to him.
Kyle-John Jones turns the corner and sees her.
