The drifting started five years ago. Before that: a home address in Delaware, a college enrollment record, financial aid. And then, mid-semester, nothing. She stopped. Left, or simply stopped arriving, and started moving, and hasn't stopped since.
Something happened.
I'm building a theory — the college exit, the five years, the way she moved through the Setai bar like someone who'd spent a long time not being noticed — when I catch myself mid-thought.
I'm not vetting her. I haven't been vetting her for at least the last ten minutes.
I know exactly what I'm doing. I do it anyway.
I close the window. Sit back.
I should end this now. Return the plane fare, send a brief message.The arrangement isn't proceeding.No explanation required. She'd move on to the next city, the next sublet. I'd go back to the mole hunt and the forty things that actually need my attention.
Jorge's voice surfaces.
Don't let feelings make you stupid, mijo.
He'd say it in that dry way he had, not unkind, just practical. A man who built an empire on the understanding that feelings were vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities got exploited. I traced his enemy through his own accounting systems, arranged for his ashes to be picked up from a funeral home. And now I'm standing at a window thinking about a woman he'd tell me to walk away from.
I stay with it for a moment. Don't dismiss it.
You're better than this.
Maybe. Jorge believed I was better than most things I suspected about myself. He paid for Wharton. He handed me a role. He watched me become someone who held things together rather than broke them, and he seemed to find that sufficient evidence for something.
He's not here to argue his case anymore.
I let the voice pass. Not because it has no weight — it does, it always will — but because the man who owned it is gone. I'm the only one left to make the argument. Tonight I don't want to make it.
My phone buzzes.
Gunner:Zayas approached the dock worker. Probe. Worker declined, reported it.
I file it. The Zayas are testing the fence line, measuring the organization's response time since Jorge died. The information lands at the edge of my attention and stays there. I'm already planning tomorrow. The motel address I've memorized. The layout I've already pulled without deciding to. The pattern of her days in a city she doesn't know yet — when she leaves, where she walks, what she stops for.
I'm going to follow her. Without warning, without scheduling, without any of the rules I built to make this contained.
I'm conscious of the line.
I cross it anyway.
5 - Wren
Someone is in this room.
The certainty arrives before anything else — before I understand I'm awake, before I know where I am. I'm just a body in the dark with that knowledge already running through me like a current.
I don't move.
The AC unit hums its low, indifferent hum. The curtain is still. The orange strip of parking lot light lies across the floor exactly where it was when I fell asleep, the jacket I didn't hang up thrown over the chair beside it. Everything looks the same.
Nothing is the same.
I lie on my back with my breath held and my pulse climbing fast. The room is dark. My body is rigid under the thin coverlet, arms at my sides, fingers pressed flat against the mattress. My skin is doing something — a crawling, all-over awareness. Like the air pressure dropping before a storm. The body knowing before the mind.
I don't know how I know. There's no sound I can point to, no shadow I can name. Just the absolute animal certainty that the air in here belongs to more than one person. That something is watching me. That it has been watching me, possibly, while I slept.
I keep my breath shallow. Keep my hands still.
