Everything stops.
Not time. Not the family moving toward the car. Not traffic outside.
Me. I stop.
The only thing that moves is the memory.
“I have a kid. He’s only five. Please… he’s waiting for me. I won’t say anything, I swear on his life, just let me go home to him.”
“Eight one five Oak Hollow Drive.”
“No. No. No. No. Please, my son. I’m all he has. I can’t…please.”
“I’m sorry, Allison.”
My hand on the karambit is steady because my hands are always steady. Everything else is not.
Ice moves up my spine one vertebra at a time. My pulse spikes—not the controlled elevation of operational stress, the other kind, the kind I can't manage down, the kind that has nothing to do with training and everything to do with the horror of understanding what she just showed me.
My stomach turns. Worse than nausea. It’s a physical response of a body managed by a mind that realizes a line has circled back. A thread that was meant for penance that’s now a weapon in the devil’s hands.
“Valeria, what the fuck is this?” My voice comes out low. Unrecognizable.
“This is you realizing that you can't hide anything from me.” She speaks with the patience of someone who already knows she’s won. “This is you realizing that there is no version of your life where I don’t knoweverything.” A pause. “This is you knowing, without a single doubt, exactly how chained you are to me.”
The boy laughs at something the man says. A child's laugh—unguarded, complete, the laugh of someone who has no idea that the world contains people like me.
“I know about the anonymous deposit made to the adoption agency. I know about the monthly transfer to that boy’s new family,” she says softly. “I thought you knew by now, Nazareth.”
I’m already moving, stepping back into the shadow, back against the wall. “Knew what?”
“That there is no redemption for people like you.”
I press my back harder against the concrete. The cold of it through my jacket. The grounding reality of stone and shadow and the smell of oil on asphalt. I focus on it the way you focus on something physical when the thing happening inside you is too large to look at directly.
“You know I’m right.” I can hear her smile. “That’s the part that hollows you out, isn’t it? The fact that I’m always right.”
The family reaches their car. The boy is lifted into the back seat. The door closes.
They drive away.
“You've become sloppy. Too easy to read.”
“You made your point.” My jaw clenches.
“Did I?” She sounds almost pleased. “I haven't even started, darling. You've been leaving leashes all over for me to find. The boy. The girl…in Paris.”
My insides peel open, my heart and spine shatter all at once. Like a sledgehammer ripping through cinderblock.
Sophia.
The girl in Paris.Said the way you say the name of something you own. The surgical knowledge of someone who has been watching long enough to know exactly where to put the knife.
I don't speak.
I don't move.
I don't give her a single thing.
