He turned from the window. Something shifted at one corner of his mouth; brief, controlled.
“Appreciate the hospitality,” he said.
A shriek from somewhere outside, distant and carried on the wind through the old walls of the house.
Finn stepped back from the window.
The handshake, the introductions—all of it was gone. His eyes swept the room with the same hard, calculating focus he’d come through the front door with, pale gray gone flat and cold. Whatever he’d been for those thirty seconds, he wasn’t that anymore.
“How many entrances?” he asked.
I blinked. “What?”
“Into the house.” He turned to face me fully. “How many ways in?”
“Two. The front door and the back door off the kitchen.”
“What kind of door?”
“Wood. Old. There’s a deadbolt, but—”
He was already moving.
He crossed the hallway and disappeared into the kitchen before I finished the sentence. I heard his boots on the tile, then the sound of him testing the back door—handle, frame, edges—running a methodical hand across every surface.
I followed him in.
He stood at the door with one hand flat against the wood, pressing his palm into it once, firmly. Then he pressed it again.
“Hollow core.”
I opened my mouth.
“Don’t apologize for it,” he said.
“It’s a brownstone,” I said, folding my arms. “The building is a hundred and forty years old. Unfortunately that door was replaced years ago from rot.”
He looked at me over his shoulder—not with judgment, more the expression of someone filing a problem under urgent and moving on. “Security gate on the outside?”
“No. Just the door and the deadbolt.” I stopped. “I kept meaning to get one installed.”
He pressed the door again. The wood flexed slightly under his palm, and something behind his eyes tightened, though his expression didn’t shift.
“One good hit and this thing gets obliterated,” he said quietly, more to himself than to me.
He turned from the door, systematically scanning the kitchen: the window over the sink, the window beside the refrigerator, the narrow transom above the pantry. Each received a full second of attention before he moved to the next.
“Back windows—security grates?” he asked.
“The ones facing the street, yes. Front of the house, all three floors. The building came with them.” I hesitated.
His eyes locked onto my hesitation like a hawk tracking movement in an open field. The question was evident.
“The back windows don’t have grates,” I admitted.
He crossed to the kitchen window over the sink and looked out at the small garden below—overgrown ivy climbing the neighboring brick, a rusted fire escape zigzagging up the back of the building next door. He tested the latch. It wiggled loosely under his thumb, the kind of lock that existed more as a suggestion than security.
“How many windows without grates total?” he asked, still looking out at the garden. “All floors.”
