"Most roommates don't interrogate each other about cabinet doors," Alistair remarked, leaning in the kitchen entrance.
"Most roommates don't move like trained operatives." The word landed in the air between them and sat there.
Silence followed — not comfortable, not hostile. Assessing.
Alistair walked to the living room with an ease that was too calibrated to be genuine, dropping onto the couch and stretching one arm across the back of it. The posture said: unbothered. The stillness underneath it said: calculating.
"Operatives," he repeated, with the tone of someone trying the word out for size and finding it mildly amusing. "That's a strange choice of vocabulary."
"You hold yourself like someone trained."
"I mentioned martial arts."
"You did. And then you deflected every subsequent question about it with a precision that itself suggested training."
Alistair found his face. Something crept behind his expression — not anger, not amusement. The brief appearance of something sharper and more genuine, like a blade catching light before being covered again.
"And what do you move like?" he asked.
"Quietly." Tav said it the same way he had in the kitchen that first morning, and watched the same thing happen in Alistair's expression — that fractional, carefully suppressed reaction.
"You know," Alistair said slowly, "most people who think someone's hiding something just ask."
"You aren't?"
Alistair stopped walking.
He was half-turned away from Tav, his profile caught in the rain-grey light from the windows, the city visible behind him in streaks of silver and dark. The jazz had stopped. The only sounds were rain on glass and the distant pulse of the street below.
"Aren't you?" he said.
Tav studied him. At the careful posture and the layered expression and the rings on his hands and the scar he'd noticed on the third day near the left side of his jaw, small and old and placed exactly where blunt force trauma typically landed in close-quarters contexts.
Something spread through his chest — hot and restless and distinctly unhelpful. He classified it, set it aside, and focused on what mattered.
His phone vibrated once in his coat pocket.
Private line. Ablation.
The apartment's ambient temperature seemed to drop slightly. Tav pulled the phone out. No caller ID. One message.
SURVEILLANCE
WINDOW
MOVED.
CONFIRM
NO
THIRD-PARTY
INTERFERENCE.
He looked up from the screen. Across the room, Alistair had gone very still.
Watching him.
