“I thought you liked the south parapet for exits,” he said.
I knew the voice before I turned. Akintola. Coat dark. Head bareto the cold. He did not take out his notebook. He did not take out his cuffs. He stood in the wind like he had the right to talk to the roof.
“I moved,” I said.
“I noticed,” he said.
He came to the parapet and let the city blow through us. We watched the square pretend to be asleep. Sirens stitched the river.
“How,” I asked, because it was already over and I wanted to know the shape of it.
He angled me a look. Patient. Tired. “You want the list.”
“Yes.”
“All right.” He counted on the air with a gloved hand, not for effect. For order.
“One. Gait. Your security footage from the palace courtyard last month. Slow-motion analysis on a public clip from a different night on a very different roof. Same stride length. Same external rotation on the right foot from an old fencing injury you have not had repaired. People are not as unique as they think. They are unique enough.”
He let that settle.
“Two. Draw. The vigilante is right-eye dominant and prefers a Mediterranean draw with a high anchor. That narrows our pool in a city of casual hobbyists who learned off YouTube. The short list got shorter when I saw you shooting in the King’s private range. Form does not lie.”
My mouth went dry. He kept going.
“Three. Hands. You shake a lot of hands, Your Highness. You are good at it. You also carry a callus at the proximal phalanx of the index finger on your right hand where bowstring abrasion hides once it heals. It was not there six months ago. It is there now.”
He turned his palm as if showing me where to look on my own skin.
“Four. Timing. Four-minute security loop in your wing on three separate nights that correspond to three separate incidents I have on my board. I did not need to know how. I needed to know when. It matched.”
Wind worried the edge of my hood. He did not rush.
“Five. Injuries. My men bag blood from scenes when we can. We do not always test it when we do not have to. We tested one swab for type only. A and Rh positive. Not a fingerprint. A direction. Then you appeared at a hospital the next morning with a ‘doorframe’ cut over your ribs and a very specific way of guarding your left arm. I do not gamble. I connect.”
He paused. “Six. Smell. Cedar and oil in your workshop. It clings. You wore it the night I came to your rooms. I smelled it again in a stairwell after a man with a bow had just gone by. People forget the nose is a better detective than the eye.”
I thought of the box I had carved and the shavings on my cuffs. I said nothing.
“Seven,” he finished. “The locker. The map. The code cut into the kiosk underside with a blade a woodworker would carry and a pressure pattern that matches your handwriting when you press too hard on downstrokes. You made it neat. You made it you.”
He looked back to the square. “Any one of these is noise. Together, they are a song.”
“If you are going to arrest me,” I said, “better do it quick.”
“I did not bring a theater troupe,” he said. “No press. No uniforms. Just a man with a choice.”
“What choice.”
“The useful kind,” he said. “You tell me what you took from Belmont. You tell me what you saw tonight that I did not. You tell me who hands cash to boys with slogans and guns. In return I tell my team to stop reaching for the word obstruction every time a shadow shows up in my case notes.”
“You will look the other way.”
“I will look at the right thing,” he said. “Your arrows do not get to decide who lives here. Evidence does. So justify yourself. Or run. I will take either. I will not take silence.”
Wind found the edge of my hood. The city threw up the smell of wet stone and fried onions and all the things worth breaking for. He watched me the way he watches rooms. Not hunting. Measuring.
“I hit Belmont because the rifles were going to a rally,” I said. “Tonight or next week. Dock to van to stash to crowd. I saw the routing. Numbers. Dates. I heard the name they used for the drop. Black Chapel.”
