Today, the order is broken.
The draft swirling around my ankles smells wrong. Wood shavings. Fresh paint. A harsh, chemical tang of high-grade industrial solvent. None of those scents belong in my run-down Chicago walk-up. The building has been mostly abandoned for eight months, save for my unit on the third floor and the half-finished renovations the landlord never bothered to complete below me. The landlord lives in Florida and barely cashes my rent checks. No one fixes anything. No one paints anything.
My boots hit the hardwood floor of the hallway. The temperature drops another five degrees outside my apartment door. I lock the deadbolt. I test the handle twice. The stairwell stretches out below me, bathed in the gray, anemic light of a Chicago dawn. Dust motes dance in the cold shafts of illumination.
I take the first step down. My left knee gives a dull, familiar throb. The barometer is dropping. A storm is coming off the lake. I compensate automatically, shifting my weight to my right hip, a minor biomechanical adjustment I have perfected over the last three years. The descent usually takes exactly forty-two seconds.
Today, I stop at the second-floor landing.
The door to apartment 2B is open.
My blood goes cold. The unit has been vacant since a chaotic eviction last spring. The landlord screwed a heavy piece of plywood over the shattered doorframe and left it to rot. Nobody has touched it since. Until, apparently, last night. The plywood is gone. The half-finished reinforced frame the landlord abandoned months ago has been completed overnight. A steel door now stands slightly ajar, fitted with a matte black biometric keypad above a deadbolt that looks like it belongs on a bank vault. I slept through all of it, the white-noise machine I run every night drowning the world into static.
A shadow moves inside the apartment.
Adrenaline spikes through my system. Fight or flight kicks in, hard and fast. My grip tightens on the strap of my medical bag. I should turn around, run back up the stairs, call the police.
A man steps out of the shadows and fills the doorframe.
The air leaves my lungs in a single, violent rush.
Salt, iron, and sun-baked earth hit my senses. The scent is heavy, consuming the narrow stairwell. It erases the dust and the old wood. It erases the chill. It wraps around me like a physical weight.
Nico.
He stands exactly where he stood on the street last night, with that same unnatural stillness. He wears a black tactical shirt stretched taut across his muscled chest. Cargo pants tuck into worn combat boots. The sleeves of his shirt are pushed up to his elbows. Tribal and geometric tattoos wrap around his forearms, vanishing under the fabric. His eyes lock onto mine.
He doesn't look surprised to see me. He looks like a spider waiting in the center of a web.
Anger immediately burns through the ice of my fear. The audacity of this man is staggering. He tracked me. He threatened me on the sidewalk. Now he is inside my sanctuary.
"What the hell are you doing in my building?" The words snap out of my mouth like a whip.
Nico watches me. His assessing gaze tracks from my face, down my body, stopping at my left knee.
"You favor the left." His voice is a low, rough gravel that scrapes against the acoustic walls of the stairwell. "Cartilage tear? Meniscus?"
The accuracy of his question throws me off balance. I expected a threat. I expected a mobster cliché. I did not expect a diagnostic evaluation from a man who looks like he kills people for a living.
"Excuse me?" I square my shoulders. "I asked you a question. Did you break into this apartment?"
"The plywood was rotting." Nico steps fully into the threshold. His sheer size dominates the landing. The ceiling suddenly seems too low. The walls seem too close. "A strong breeze could have kicked that door in. Your security system is a joke, Priya."
Hearing my name in his mouth sends a sharp, involuntary jolt straight down to my toes. I hate the way he says it. I hate that he makes it sound like an ancient, sacred vow.
"My security is none of your business." I grip the railing. "You need to leave. Right now. I'm calling the police."
Nico reaches into his pocket. He doesn't rush. He doesn't flinch. He pulls out a set of keys and tosses them onto a small wooden table inside the door. "The police won't care. My family has leverage over the property's holding company in Florida. The lease was signed through their management firm last night. The keys were waiting for me in a lockbox. I have permission to upgrade the locks."
Heat crawls up the back of my neck. "You rented the apartment below me."
"I secured the perimeter," Nico corrects me.
"This isn't a military base." I gesture wildly to the peeling wallpaper. "This is a residential building. My residential building. You can't just move in here because you decided to play stalker."
"You walked out of your clinic last night." Nico takes half a step forward. The space between us vanishes. The air practically hums with tension. "Right next to a building you had nobusiness being near. You put yourself on a board you don't understand. I'm taking you off the board."
"By moving into the apartment below me?" I shoot back, my sarcasm acting as a flimsy shield against the overwhelming force of his presence. "Brilliant maneuver. What's next? Are you going to set up sandbags in the laundry room?"
