Page 16

I take her through it the way I’d take anyone, slower, because she has a question at every step. How the magazine seats home. How to check a chamber so your own eyes have confirmed it. The safety. The weight. Why both hands, always. She loads it herself on the third pass, clears it, loads it again, because she won’t believe a single thing until her own hands have done it twice.

Then I stand her on the line, and that is where it stops being a lesson and starts being a problem.

Her stance is wrong. Feet squared up, shoulders dragged back like she’s bracing for the sound instead of the kick, and I tell her, but she argues, so I give up explaining and step in behind her to set it right, which is the error I walk into with both eyes open.

“Feet.” I knock the inside of her boot with mine until she widens them. “Your weight goes forward. You’re leaning off it. Lean into the thing that scares you, it’s the only move that has ever worked on anything worth the fear.” I lay a hand on her hip and draw her weight onto the front foot, the other hand running up her arm to seat the elbow, and she goes still under both of them. Her breath catches, the same catch I felt against my own mouth in a bathroom two nights ago, running now down the whole line of her back where she stands an inch off my chest.

It all arrives at once and I have no use for any of it. The curve of her under my palm. The warmth coming off the back of her neck. The loose curls dragging at my jaw. The plain fact that I’ve set her in a position that has nothing to do with a paper target hung twenty feet out. My body marks the likeness and makes its case before my mind can throw it out, and makes the case again the second I do. Two days of her in my house and now she’s stacked warm and quiet against me with my hands already in place, and the discipline this is taking is not a number I’ll be admitting to even later, or alone, or in the dark.

“You’re very close,” she says, and the blade’s gone out of her voice, dropped low and unsteady.

“I’m setting your elbow.”

“Your hand is on my hip. The elbow’s up here. The hip’s down there. They’re not even neighbors, and you’ve had your hands on enough of me by now to know that.”

“The elbow answers to the stance, the stance starts at the hip, the hand stays.” I keep my voice level by main strength, which is costing me more than the lesson is worth. “Stop talking. Breathe out. On the empty part of the breath, squeeze it. Don’t pull, don’t snatch. Squeeze.”

She breathes out. Her shoulders drop the half inch I’ve been chasing the whole time. She squeezes, and the round cracks down the lane and punches the paper off-center but inside the lines. The sound she makes is pure surprise, and her whole body rocks back into me for half a second before she catches it, her ass flush against my cock, all of her against all of me. I let her stay there. I should move her off me, but I don’t.

“Again,” I say against her hair, and then I step off her, before stepping off her becomes a thing I’m no longer able to do.

She empties the magazine over the next hour and improves with every round. By the end her grouping has pulled tight enough that I quit correcting and only watch her work.

“You’ve gone quiet back there,” she says, not turning, sighting her next target. “Either I’ve gotten good or you’ve died standing up. Tell me it’s the first. I’ve had the worst day of my life, and I’d like a single result I can put down on paper.”

“You’re good.” I don’t decorate it. “Better in an hour than men who’ve done this for years. Pretending otherwise would insult you, so I won’t.”

Her shot goes dead center. She lowers the pistol and I watch her decide not to smile but she loses.

When the box is empty I walk her to the bench and set a second case in front of her, smaller, and open it. A compact pistol, sized for a hand like hers, sized for a purse or a coat pocket.

“This one is yours.”

She looks at it, then up at me. “You’re handing me a gun. One hour ago you were shouting that I’m a danger to myself, and the remedy you’ve landed on is to arm the danger. I want you to hear that plan read back in the order it happened.”

“I’m handing you a piece of strength you can carry out of any room.” I fold her fingers around the grip until the weight of it settles into her hand. “You asked me to open a door and let you walk out alone. I won’t do it. But this goes where you go, and it means the next time a man stands between you and the way out, you’re not empty-handed, waiting on me to be early.”

“And when I shoot a hole in my own bag digging for my keys?”

“Then you’ll learn precisely how much that hurts, and you’ll be more careful with it, and you’ll keep every part of yourself that matters.” I let go of her hand. “You will never stand helpless in a room like that one. Not while this is in your bag.”

She turns it over once in her palm, learning the weight, and then she slides it into her purse without one word of argument.

10

Elena

The second pattern surfaces at eleven forty at night, and I’m out of the chair before I’ve finished confirming it.

I almost missed it because it didn’t want to be found, which is the whole genius of it. The first signature I pulled a couple of days ago lives in the timing, payments going out three days after a receivable clears, never two, never four, a rhythm set once and never varied because varying it would mean trusting a second person to remember the rule. Tonight I find the rule’s twin, buried in the rounding. Every transfer through this hand gets dressed down to a figure ending in the same two decimals, a habit so small no auditor breathing would flag it, because auditors flag amounts and nobody ever flags the cents. I lay the timing against the rounding, and they fit each other like a hand into a glove worn soft from one set of fingers, and my pulse goes stupid. Two tics that mean nothing apart, but together they’re a fingerprint of one person across years, across shells built to look like strangers to each other, and I can prove it.

Kalliopi would’ve found it in half the time and been insufferable for a week. The thought comes without the usual undertow, warmer than it’s been, because for once I’m not failing her, I’m finishing the job she started, and the grief sits quiet in my chest like it’s reading over my shoulder.

I don’t print it. I should because paper’s the only thing I trust to be real, but my legs are already moving, and this is too alive in me to hold until morning.

Adrianos’ office is dark. Lamp off, monitors black, no light under the door, and the disappointment hits before my brain offers the correction that the man sleeps somewhere, even him, even this house. The professional move, the one a woman makes when she works for a man who had her abducted, is to go back to my borrowed room and hand him a fingerprint over coffee like a person with boundaries.

I go to his bedroom instead, because the finding’s bigger than my manners, and I’ve never once in my life sat on a result.