"That concerns me significantly."
His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked it under the table without changing expression.
Unknown number.
SUBJECT SHOWING HEIGHTENED PATTERN RECOGNITION. MAINTAIN COVER.
Pattern recognition. Yes. That was understating it somewhat. Tav Prescott had identified his dominant hand preference by day three, noticed the shoulder compensation by day four, and last
night had looked at him across a dim living room with the focused calm of someone arriving at a conclusion, which suggested he was approximately two to four observations away from a question that would require either a very good lie or a significant recalibration of approach.
Alistair deleted the message and looked up.
And found Tav walking through the café entrance.
He became aware of it as a kind of perceptual shift before he registered the visual — a change in his attention, his bodynoting a relevant variable before his conscious mind caught up. He'd been trying to analyze that particular response for ten days and hadn't made satisfactory progress.
Dark coat. Grey sweater. The type of walk that commanded space without demanding it — quiet and precise and carrying the unmistakable demeanor of someone accustomed to being watched and entirely indifferent to it. Several people glanced up as he moved through the café, pulled by something in his bearing that bypassed the usual social calculation.
Alistair watched him and felt, annoyingly, the thing he'd been feeling since approximately the second morning in the apartment: warmth, moving through his chest like light through a window.
Deeply inconvenient.
Naomi's gaze followed his. Then she looked back at him with the expression that had just found something more interesting than she'd anticipated.
"Oh," she said softly. "That's the roommate?"
"I never said I had a roommate."
"You didn't have to." Her smile was gathering into something he recognized as trouble. "You have the face."
"What face?"
"The one people wear when someone is actively dismantling their equilibrium and they can't decide whether to be angry about it."
"That's a very strange face."
"It's a very specific look." She was watching him with the bright-eyed interest of someone who had just identified the story in a room full of noise. "He's coming over."
Tav arrived at the table. He met Naomi's eyes. Then at Alistair. The assessment took approximately two seconds and was, Alistair reflected, entirely mutual.
"Prescott," Naomi said. "Didn't expect to see you voluntarily near human interaction."
"Reyes." Tav's attention returned to Alistair. "You didn't answer your phone."
No greeting. No preamble. Just the direct deployment of the thing he actually meant, stripped of all social padding. Alistair had been cataloguing this characteristic for days and still found it — and this was the professionally embarrassing part — attractive rather than abrasive.
"I was busy," Alistair said.
"With coffee?"
Naomi looked between them with poorly concealed delight.
"I need to absent myself from this conversation immediately before it becomes something I have to witness," she announced, gathering her things with the brisk efficiency of someone exiting a situation on their own terms. "Whatever this divorced-assassin-energy thing is that you've both got happening — figure it out." She paused at the edge of the booth. "I'm saying that with love. Mostly."
Then she was gone, disappearing into the café crowd with her coffee and her investigative instincts, leaving Alistair and Tav in the corner booth with a silence that resulted from Naomi's departure and the direct attention Tav was currently directing at him.
Alistair leaned back.
