Page 49 of Power Play

"How long have they been on her?"

"At least since the article dropped. Possibly longer. The rotation is professional. Whoever's running them has budget and patience."

Budget and patience. Arthur's signature on everything he touches.

"Can you identify the team?"

"I've got partial plates on a vehicle and a physical description of one operative. Consistent presence near the entrance in a pattern that doesn't match the foot traffic."

I'm already pulling on my boots. The truck keys are on the counter. The loft is large enough that crossing it takes steps I use to think. What I think is that she's sitting in an apartment with a deadbolt I installed and a conspiracy watching her front door. She doesn't know.

She told me to earn it. She told me to stop showing up during crises. She told me to figure out how to be honest without the honesty being forced out of me.

I'm about to do the opposite of everything she asked.

The drive to Printer's Row takes less time than it should. November traffic is thin past midnight, the city opening up the way it does for people who move through it at hours reserved for emergencies and bad decisions. I park the truck on a side street and scan the block. The vehicle Priest described is gone, which means the rotation shifted or the team is inside a building with a sightline to her entrance.

I take the stairs. The hallway is quiet. The deadbolt on the other side of her door is the one I chose because it holds against a forced entry. Right now the knowledge that the hardware is solid is the only thing keeping the kid from kicking the door in and pulling her out by force.

I knock. The knock is controlled. I am not controlled.

The door opens. She's in the same sweatshirt from when I was here before, barefoot, and her expression when she sees me cycles through recognition and anger before settling on something she locks down before I can read it.

"No." The word is flat. The word is the same one she used when I showed up after the article. "I told you what I need from you, Kincaid. A crisis doesn't change the terms."

"Someone is watching your building. A two-person surveillance team with professional rotation patterns, operating since the article went live. They've been tracking your movement in and out of the entrance."

The information lands the way intelligence always lands on Meagan Keating. Her eyes narrow. Her weight shifts. The fury recalibrates from me to the new target without releasing me entirely.

"Come in," she says. The cost of the invitation is audible.

I step through the door. The apartment is warm and still, the air of a room where someone has been awake too long. The soap on her skin reaches me, the scent I only know because I've had my mouth on the places she doesn't show anyone.

The laptop is closed on the counter. The legal pad is beside it.

"How long?" she asks.

"At least since the article. The rotation suggests budget and coordination. This isn't freelance."

"Arthur."

"Arthur or someone he authorized. The distinction stopped mattering the moment they set up outside your door."

She stands in the kitchen with her arms crossed and her jaw set. The anger in her is layered: the surveillance outside her door and me standing in her kitchen delivering information she should have found herself. She needs the man she threw out because the alternative isn’t knowing that someone is tracking her movements from the sidewalk, and the necessity is its own kind of wound.

I watch the anger settle into her the way a blade settles. It doesn't soften. It sharpens. She is the most dangerous version of Meagan Keating I've encountered.

"You could have called," she says. "You could have sent a text. You didn't have to show up in my hallway past midnight like a man who thinks proximity is the same as protection."

"A text doesn't tell me whether the team is still outside when you open the door."

"That's operational logic. Not honesty."

"The terms changed when someone put a team on your building."

The distance between us is the width of her kitchen. The counter is to her left. The hallway is behind me. The space is charged with the same voltage that turned the last visit into something neither of us finished.

"Stop managing me." Her voice drops into the register I've been hearing in my sleep since the night she threw me out. Low, precise, aimed. "Stop deciding what I need. Stop showing up and standing in my space and making my decisions for me."