Just that.
I gripped the edge of the bar divider and pressed my fingers hard into the wood, and thought about it with concentrated focus.
He was holding back.
He was not doing nothing because he had to. He wasn’t passive or uncertain. He wasn’t, whatever I might have preferred to believe, afraid of what I might do or say. He was doing nothing because he had chosen to do nothing. Because whatever he was planning, it was not the obvious move, and the non-obvious moves were the ones that left you with no room to prepare.
The restraint was the threat.
And part of me—the part I was going to spend a significant amount of energy pretending did not exist—had wanted to see what came next.
That was the most terrifying thing. Not the murder, not the cameras, not the way he watched me work from the mezzanine.
The most terrifying thing was that Viktor Golovin had gotten close enough to be warm, and my body had not read him as danger.
My body had read him as something else entirely, and I did not have a plan for that.
I straightened. Picked up my tray. Went back to work.
Well, I am not scared.
Okay, I take that back.
Chapter Four
Viktor
I watched her walk away, and I did not follow.
And it required more effort than it should have. That was the first problem of the evening. I internally recorded.
I do not exert effort to remain stationary.
I do not watch a woman cross a casino floor and feel the absence of her.
But then...
Marco had appeared at precisely the wrong moment, or the right one, depending on which part of me was doing the evaluating. The part that understood the strategy was grateful. The part that had been standing close enough to count the faint crease at the corner of her eye when her jaw tightened had something less coherent to say about Marco’s timing.
The tablet in my hand had seven unread notifications. I read none of them.
I sent out the surveillance order about an hour later.
I wrote it in the language we used for operational directives: clean, specific, stripped of anything that could be read as personal investment.
“Increased monitoring—civilian adjacent to ongoing containment situation. Flag external communications. Note unusual behavioral patterns. Report directly to me.”
Sergei received it without comment.
I sat in the security office afterward and did not think about why I had writtenflag external communicationsinstead ofintercept and suppress, which was what the protocol called for in active witness situations. I did not think about the distinction between those two instructions and what it revealed about the distance between what I was doing and what I had told myself I was doing.
I pulled up her footage instead.
Three nights of it, now. I had developed, without quite deciding to, a habit of reviewing her floor shifts at the end of each evening. I told myself this was a threat assessment. I had told myself many things over the past week that I was becoming less and less convinced of.
I watched her at 9:47 pm, before the confrontation, before Marco. She was working the far end of the VIP section, the tables near the east windows where the high rollers who wanted privacy over atmosphere preferred to sit. She moved through it with the efficiency I had noticed before. But I was watching something else tonight. I was watching her face between the tables, in the moments when she wasn’t performing for anyone.
She smiled when she was angry.
