Page 13 of Pawn

Her building is third from the corner. Second floor. One window glowing — warm light pushing through curtains that are not fully drawn. A gap of maybe six inches between the fabric panels. Enough to let the streetlight in.

Enough to let someone look in.

I should drive away. Go back to the penthouse and do this from the margin, from the data, from the negative space where the invisible boy does his work.

I do not drive away.

She crosses the gap in the curtains, and my chest does something I do not authorize.

Dark hair. Long enough to catch the lamplight. Her father's jaw — I have studied Emiliano's face in enough surveillance photos to recognize the bone structure, the mandible that carries authority even in a twenty-year-old girl who does not know the authority is genetic. She is wearing something loose — oversized, the kind of thing a woman wears at four in the morning when she does not expect to be seen.

She doesn't expect to be seen.

But her eyes stop me.

She turns toward the window — not looking out, not looking at me. Looking at something inside the room. And in the half-second her face angles toward the glass, I see the sweep. Her gaze moving across the space — not random, not casual. Tracking. Reading for what is missing. What has been moved. What is absent from the arrangement she expected.

I know that sweep. I built my life on that sweep.

She reads what has been kept from her. I read what was never there.

Same architecture. Different wound.

My pulse has been steady through every crisis this family has handed me. Through Costa's betrayal and Dante's chains and the war that tore through the infrastructure while I sat in the margin and watched my brothers bleed. Steady. Quiet. The heartbeat of a boy who made himself invisible because invisibility was the only safe thing in Giovanni's house.

Right now — watching a girl I have never met move through a gap in her curtains with her father's jaw and eyes that read absence the way mine do — my pulse does something it has never done.

It gets louder.

Not faster. Louder. Every beat pushing against my ribs with a weight it did not carry thirty seconds ago. I hear it in my ears. Feel it in my wrists.

She moves past the window. The gap holds nothing now — just warm light falling onto an empty frame. And I stare at the space where she was, the way I have stared at the space her name occupied on my screen for six months.

Her absence is worse than the absence of her name.

I sit in the dark. My pulse is loud in a body that has never been loud. Hands on a wheel in a car that should not be here, outside the window of a girl my dead father mapped before she could read.

Not yet is over.

2

liana

The Stage Set

The apartment is perfect.

That is the problem.

I stand in the kitchen at four in the morning because sleep stopped being something my body does willingly around the time I turned eighteen and realized the lock on my front door works from the outside. Not literally. My father is not a monster. He is something more sophisticated than that — a man who builds cages out of comfort and calls them love.

The countertops are granite. Gray-veined. Cold under my palms at this hour, the kind of cold that feels deliberate, chosen by someone who understands that a kitchen should feel expensive but has never cooked a meal in one. The cabinets are white. The appliances are stainless steel. The furniture in the living room matches in a way that furniture only matches when a single person selected every piece in a single afternoon and had it delivered before the tenant moved in.

I did not pick the couch. I did not pick the curtains. I did not pick the paint — a shade of cream that exists in the exact center of the spectrum between warm and cold, committing to neither, offending no one. A color chosen by someone who studied what normal apartments look like and replicated the answer without understanding the question.

My father pays for this. Every month. The rent, the utilities, the tuition at the university where I study finance because someone — him, his people, the architecture of a life I did not design — decided finance was appropriate for a girl who would one day need to understand where money moves. I did not choose finance. I chose it the way I chose this apartment. By walking through a door that was already open and finding everything already arranged on the other side.

Twenty years old. I live alone. I attend classes. I buy groceries. I have two friends from my program who think my father works in import-export, which is technically not a lie in the same way that this apartment is technically not a cage. The bars are invisible. The lock works from the outside. And the woman inside has spent twenty years running her fingers along the walls looking for the seam — the place where the set ends and the real structure shows through.