I thought quite a lot about it now. It was clearly not just a coincidence.
I went to the window. Looked down at the street. The grey sedan was gone—they rotated it, I had figured out, cycling through at least three different vehicles to avoid making it obvious.
Brilliant.
But the very effort of not making it obvious made me furious in a way that the surveillance itself hadn’t quite managed.
He thought I wouldn’t notice. Or, worse, he thought I would notice, and it wouldn’t matter, because what was I going to do about it? Call the police? Report it to management? Stand at my window and glare at a rotating series of unmarked cars until one of them apologized?
I pressed my palm against the glass and breathed through it and felt the fury compact itself into something denser and more useful than heat. Not rage. Intention.
I got dressed. I went to find Viktor Golovin.
He wasn’t on the floor when I arrived for my shift—or he was, but not where I could see him, which was its own kind of message. I clocked in, took my section, worked for ninety minutes with half my attention on the job and the other half tracking the mezzanine, the security desk, and the places he tended to appear.
He materialized near the east corridor around 11 pm.
I finished the order I was carrying, deposited the tray, told the girl covering the adjacent section I’d be back in fiveminutes, and walked toward him with my heart thumping purposefully in my chest.
He saw me coming. Of course he saw me coming—Viktor Golovin, I had come to understand, saw everything, processed it, and noted it before most people had finished looking. He watched me cross the floor without moving, without adjusting his expression, and I had the brief, uncharitable thought that one day I was going to say something that actually surprised him, and I was going to enjoy that moment very much.
“The private elevator corridor,” I said when I reached him. “Now. Unless you want this conversation on the floor.”
Something moved in his face—not quite amusement, but the shadow of it, gone before I could be certain. He pushed off the wall and walked. I followed, and then we were through the door and in the corridor, the casino’s sound receding behind us, and I stopped a few feet inside and turned on him.
“You’re having me followed,” I said.
“I’m ensuring your safety.”
“Don’t.” The word came out sharp. “Don’t package it. You’re running surveillance on my building. Your people are rotating vehicles, so I won’t notice. You have someone at the parking structure entrance.” I watched his face. Nothing shifted, still. “I noticed.”
“I know,” he said.
“You—” I stopped. “You know.”
“I was told at approximately 10 am that you had identified three points of coverage over seventy-two hours.” He said it withthe calm of a man reading a weather report. “I adjusted the rotation.”
The audacity of that—the complete, unembellished admission, delivered without apology or justification—landed somewhere between outrageous and almost impressively brazen. I stared at him for a moment.
“You’re stalking me,” I said.
“I’m protecting you.”
The corridor was narrow and lit with the same subdued lighting as all the restricted sections, wall sconces that suggested atmosphere rather than visibility. It made everything feel closer than it was. It made Viktor feel closer than he was, which was already too close, which was a problem I tried not to think of.
“So I’m in danger,” I said. “Great. Good. That’s information I could have used four days ago.”
“Four days ago, you were still deciding whether to go to the police.”
I went still. “I never said—”
“You didn’t have to.” He looked at me. “You have been considering your options. That is reasonable. Most people in your position would have made the call already.”
He had made a perimeter around my life. He had looked at me in a hallway and decided, in whatever calculating silence he lived in, that I would be monitored, tracked, covered, and contained.
“You want to own me,” I said. “Through fear. Through making my life small enough that the only person moving freely in it is you.”
“That’s not what this is.”
