He was a thorough man by training and inclination, and thoroughness required examining what was there rather than only what he expected to find. He opened the sketchbook.
The drawings were charcoal — confident, observational work, the kind that came from practicing attention rather than technique. City scenes, executed with architectural precision. Crowds in motion, individual figures caught in the middle of gestures that revealed something about them. Station platforms. Café windows. Strangers mid-conversation, the exchange between them legible in the angle of their bodies.
He turned a page.
And stopped.
The drawing was partial — not finished, built from a series of exploratory lines rather than a completed image. A figure ata kitchen counter, viewed from the left side. One sleeve rolled back to the forearm. A coffee mug held in both hands, the grip slightly too tight to be entirely relaxed. Grey eyes under the suggestion of heavy brows, the gaze directed somewhere past the edge of the page.
The deep tension in those drawn eyes was unmistakable.
Tav looked at it. The drawing was careful. Studied. The kind of portrait that required sustained observation of its subject, the accumulation of many small looking rather than a single extended session.
Alistair had been watching him long before Tav had noticed he was watching back.
Something shifted low in his chest. He couldn't classify it cleanly — a complicated compound of things that he would need to examine at a less operationally sensitive moment. He closed the sketchbook and replaced it beneath the notebooks.
Then: the apartment door.
He moved without thought, the assessment and the decision happening simultaneously. The balcony was behind the curtains to his right — accessible and concealed. He slid behind the fabric in a single smooth movement as footsteps crossed the living room.
"Forgot my laptop," Alistair's voice called, with the particular brightness of someone projecting naturalness toward an empty apartment.
Tav stayed still.
The bedroom door opened.
Alistair walked in.
And stopped.
The shift was instantaneous and almost invisible: the easy motion arresting into something different, his attention sharpening through the casual surface into the professional competence underneath. He stood in the middle of the room andhis eyes moved across it with the quiet precision of someone cataloguing rather than looking.
Desk.
Closet.
Window.
Curtain.
He stopped on the curtain.
"See," Alistair said, to the empty room, with a soft and particular satisfaction, "this is exactly why trust issues are important."
He moved to the desk.
He reached for the second drawer and ran two fingers along the front edge of it, checking something — alignment, or a marker Tav hadn't noticed. His expression remained composed, but his attention was surgical now, stripped of the warm surface.
Predatory.
It was, Tav reflected from behind the curtain, quite something to watch.
Then Alistair said, still to the apparently empty room, "You're good."
A pause.
"But not that good."
