Page 86 of Ruin
"Peter spotted him. Watched him for seven hours before we pulled him. He'd been photographing everyone coming in and out of her building for at least a week. Had a folder in his glovebox—shots of Selene at the grocery store, Selene at the coffee shop on her corner, Selene getting into her car." Vincent pauses.
My hand tightens around my whiskey glass.
"The man is no longer a problem," Vincent says. "But he wasn't working alone. We found his phone with check-in texts to a Brighton Beach number. He was reporting her schedule daily."
The glass in my hand is going to crack if I don't set it down. I set it down.
"Which brings me to the conversation you don't want to have." Vincent leans forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. "She's exposed. Alone in that apartment with no security, no infrastructure, no one watching her back except your cameras. And cameras don't stop bullets."
"I'm aware."
"Then do something about it. Bring her back in or cut her loose, but this limbo is going to get her killed. Or worse, it's going to get her taken, and then Zhukov has leverage that makes everything else irrelevant."
He's right. I know he's right.
The strategic calculus is obvious: she's a vulnerability in the field, unprotected, connected to me in ways that any competent intelligence operation could exploit in hours.
Bring her inside the perimeter or accept that she's a liability.
But the strategic calculus doesn't account for the fact that the last time I saw her, she was pointing a .38 at my chest with tears running down her face and a steadiness in her hands that told me she'd actually considered pulling the trigger.
It doesn't account for the look in her eyes when I told her about her parents.
Like watching someone fall from a great height and knowing you're the one who pushed them.
"I'll handle it," I say.
"When?"
"Tonight."
Vincent studies me for a long moment, reading whatever's written on my face with the fluency of thirty years' practice.
Then he stands, buttons his jacket, and walks to the door.
"For what it's worth," he says without turning around, "I've never seen you like this. Not once. And I've known you since you were twelve years old and too angry to cry at your mother's funeral."
He leaves and the door clicks shut behind him.
I sit in the dark office and finish my whiskey and think about a woman holding a phone against her chest three miles away, and then I pick up my keys.
13
CASSIUS
Her building has the kind of security that keeps out college students and delivery drivers but wouldn't slow down a professional for more than thirty seconds.
I've had a key to her apartment since before she moved in.
Since I chose the apartment, furnished it, positioned it close enough to my world that I could watch her orbit around me without knowing she was caught in a gravity she didn't choose.
It’s nearly three in the morning and the lobby is empty.
The elevator is silent. The hallway smells like carpet cleaner and someone's leftover takeout, and the ordinariness of it feels obscene next to what's about to happen.
I don't knock. The key turns without sound, and I ease the door open and step inside.
Her apartment breathes around me.
