Page 9
Four monitors glow in the dark of the penthouse around me, but I only watch one.
God, look at her.
Twelve hours on her feet and she still moves so gracefully.
Jeans, a long-sleeved gray shirt, that battered leather bag she’s carried for over two years because the strap broke once and she stitched it herself rather than replace it.
How do I know this?
Because I have the photographs of her sitting in a coffee shop window doing it, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration.
Her hair is down tonight, and that’s rare enough that I lean forward without meaning to.
Dark waves, loose and heavy past her shoulders, still kinked from the elastic.
Eleven hundred and forty-one days I’ve watched this woman, and I could count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen her hair down outside her own windows.
Tonight, it seems, the universe is in a generous mood.
She pauses at the top of the steps and turns.
She scans the street, the rooftops, the parked cars, the shadowed stoops, and her face tips up toward the streetlight.
Even through the camera at this distance, those eyes hit me like they did two years ago in a hospital room. Warm brown gone sharp with suspicion.
Hunting for something she can feel but can’t see.
You're looking the wrong direction, angel. I’m not on your street. I’m everywhere else.
She feels me, though.
She’s felt me all night.
Outside the hospital she spun around so fast her hair fanned out like a matador’s cape, and I watched her pulse jump in her throat on the long lens, and I confess I enjoyed that more than a good man would. But then, I’m not a good man.
The vault door closes behind her and the interior feed picks her up in the entryway—my people threaded those cameras through her security system fourteen months ago, during the seventy-one hours she spent in Boston at a trauma symposium, and her cousin’s countermeasures never so much as blinked.
She sets down her keys in the blue ceramic bowl and toes off her shoes, left then right, the way she always does.
She stands in her own hallway hugging her own elbows, looking small in a way she never lets anyone see.
The security detail Nikolai promised her is already deploying outside. I track them across the other monitors with something close to affection.
Two men in the gray Suburban at the corner, sight line to her front door. One on foot rotating the block at irregular intervals—credit where due, the irregularity is good tradecraft.
A fourth covering the garden-level entrance from the rear alley. Exactly the positions I war-gamed.
Exactly the gaps I expected. They’ve arranged themselves like chess pieces defending a queen, and not one of them understands the game ended two years ago.
They’re guarding her from the world, but no one thought to guard her from me. No one ever does, until it’s too late, and by then I’ve already won.
The report sits open on the side monitor.
The child is settled at the lake property and she’s been fed, bathed, and asleep by eight thirty after a tantrum that apparently required both caregivers and a stuffed puppy purchased en route.
Maria Reyes is a former pediatric nurse. The second woman raised four children of her own.
The little girl will be read to and kept warm and safe.
