“Do you want ice cream?”
The pivot was so abrupt it took me a second to track. But I knew to let it go. For now.
“Sure,” I replied.
She led us outside and across the street to the truck. The vendor was a teenager who looked half-asleep, barely glancing up from his phone.
“What do you want?” she asked me.
“Whatever you’re getting.”
She shrugged and turned to the window. “One of every flavor. Stacked.”
The teenager looked at her then the cone options and back at her. “Every flavor? That’s nine scoops.”
“Yes.”
“On one cone?”
“Do you have a bigger cone?”
He did not. Mira got a cup instead, and watched with visible delight as he piled nine different colors into a paper bowl until it looked structurally unsound. I handed over the cash quickly and she beamed at me before walking away with her tower of sugar, spooning a bite with the focus of a woman conducting serious research.
I watched her. She stood in the afternoon sun with ice cream on her lip and her disguise firmly in place, and she was still the most luminous thing on the block.
Bright underneath all the dark, burning through every layer she’d built to contain herself.
But all of a sudden, the sensation hit without warning.
Eyes on us.
More than one pair.
My spine straightened. The ice cream, the sun, the warm afternoon dissolved into tactical awareness. I scanned the street. Storefronts, parked cars, pedestrians.
Nothing obviously wrong. No scent markers or visible threat.
But my instincts didn’t lie.
They’d kept me alive through wars and assassinations.
Someone was watching.And underneath the surveillance, faint but unmistakable, the distant click of a camera shutter.
Not Hudson. Or notjustHudson.
The sensation was wrong, too dispersed. One stalker created a focused point of attention, a single beam of malice aimed at its target.
My blood froze.
“Hey, what is it?” Mira was watching me, spoon halfway to her mouth. She’d noticed the shift in my posture immediately.
Of course she had. Hypervigilance recognized hypervigilance.
I turned to her and kept my expression neutral.
“I think we should go. It might rain.”
She looked up at the sky. Cloudless, bright, without a trace of weather for miles.
