Page 45 of The Last Dance

He said, “Is it weird that it doesn’t scare me?”

I thought about it. “Not weird. Just…statistically abnormal.”

He laughed, the sound breaking through the static like a snapped branch. “Good. I’d hate to be average.”

I stood, this time meaning to leave. “Next time you get a letter, bring it to me. Even if it’s a bill.”

He saluted, two fingers to the temple. “Yes, Boss.”

I walked out, the letter’s words burned into my memory even though I’d only read them once. The last line, especially: “I will come for you when you are ready. And you will be ready soon.”

The threat was not in the timing, or the words. It was in the certainty.

I had no intention of waiting for the next letter.

* * * *

At night, the estate was a different animal. The windows went black, and every room that had hummed with activity during daylight locked down to its lowest metabolic function, the way a body does when it knows the threat is real but unseen.

I spent most nights in the command center. It was a windowless basement room that hummed with its own nervous system: six monitors, three keyboards, a soundboard patched to every intercom, and a wall map the size of a modest casket, crisscrossed with pins and lines and taped-over photos. Sasha had never been allowed in here. Lin and Yuri ran shifts, but it was always my space.

Yuri was at the table, not speaking, watching the feeds cycle: perimeter, main gate, garage, atrium, second floor, Iren’s room. He made notes on a legal pad, never looking down, as if his hand and the camera feeds shared the same nerve bundle.

I stood in front of the board. There were two main threads now, each with its own color. Sasha’s, bright red, was a spiderweb stretching from the estate to London, then through three dummy accounts and two burned phones. Every node had a date, a sum, a name.

It was almost beautiful in its precision.

Parsons’s thread was blue, and it was different: less a web, more a series of slow, deliberate dashes, each one a letter, a phone call, a traceable anomaly in a life that should have been invisible. The two threads met at exactly one point: the estate.

I didn’t like it.

I traced the lines with my finger, then dropped my hand. “Sasha is the immediate close,” I said. “Parsons is the longer problem.”

Yuri nodded, still not looking away from the monitors.

I let a breath out, slow. “The longer problem is the one that keeps me awake.”

This time he did look up, and the look was enough. He’d already run the same math.

On the rightmost screen, a six-window grid ran the internal feeds. In the top right, a small square of light: the master bedroom, the lamp still on, a shadow moving now and then.

He should have been asleep hours ago. But he wasn’t. I watched the shadow for a minute, the way it paced, the way it sometimes stopped in front of the glass, as if looking for something outside.

I thought about the letter, the way Parsons had written it with such certainty, such quiet confidence. “I will come for you when you are ready. And you will be ready soon.”

I had read hundreds of threats, but this was different. This was not the bravado of a man who wanted to scare, or wound, or destroy. This was the calm of a man who had already made up his mind, and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

I looked at Yuri. “Get me everything on his wife,” I said. “The children, too. School records. Church. Travel. Nothing is off limits.”

He made a note, then looked at me. “You want me to do it now?”

“Now,” I said.

He stood, set the pen down, and left without a word.

I let my eyes drift back to the monitor, to the small square of light in the dark. I watched it until my eyes burned. I thought about all the things you could protect with glass and steel and cameras, and all the things you couldn’t.

The hum of the room was the only sound.