The subject closes like a steel vault.
"I will patch your feed to the new location," Vincenzo finally says, his tone clipped. "Stay dark."
The line goes dead.
I slide the phone back into my vest. I step out of the alley. The cold wind bites at the exposed skin of my face. The street is empty. The factory down the block is locked down, the Bellanti guards huddled near the rolling metal doors. I ignore them.
I retrieve my vehicle and head to the boarded apartment building she lives in across the city. It gives me the angle I need on her.
Her building is a three-story brick structure. The ground floor was a defunct laundromat, boarded up since the recession. The upper two floors are residential. I have already mapped the occupancy down to the inch. The second floor is entirely vacant, a skeleton undergoing abandoned renovations. The third floor holds a single occupied unit—hers. Until she returns, the rest of the building is dead space, and dead space is useful for a predator.
I walk up to the secure front entrance. A magnetic lock. A keypad. I don’t use the front door.
I move around to the alleyway on the eastern side. A rusted fire escape clings to the brick. I test the bottom rung. It groans but holds. I scale the metal stairs with the silence of a predator. I don’t make a sound. My boots find the solid edges of the grating. I reach the second-floor landing. The window leading into the vacant apartment is painted shut.
I pull a thin steel pry bar from my tactical belt. I slide it under the wooden sash. A sharp, controlled twist shatters the dried paint. I slide the window up.
I step over the sill and into the darkness.
The apartment smells of sawdust, plaster, and stale air. Drop cloths cover the hardwood floors. Bare drywall stands unpainted. It is a hollow shell. Perfect.
I move through the dark without stumbling. I reach the living room. The windows face the street. On my encrypted phone, I pull up the remote camera feed of the Bellanti auto-shop armory pressed against her clinic wall. I drop my rifle bag on a wooden sawhorse. I strip my tactical vest off, tossing it onto a pile of unused drywall. I’m running hot. Adrenaline burns away the Chicago winter.
She’s driving home. She’s on the highway.
I need to secure the perimeter before she returns.
I open my gear bag, pull out my surveillance rig. Two laptops. Signal interceptors. I set them up on the makeshift desk and boot the systems. Blue light paints my arms, highlighting the ink.
I bypass the building's outdated security matrix in less than three minutes. The camera feeds pop onto my left monitor. The lobby. The rear alley. The stairwell.
I’m inside her fortress.Making it mine.
I pull up the local traffic grids on my right monitor. I track the highway cameras. I find her sedan. She is driving exactly the speed limit, holding her lane like it is a discipline. Even through the grainy pixelated footage, the control reads as fury. She is furious. She’s terrified. Good. Fear keeps you alive. Anger keeps you sharp. I will take both over apathy.
I lean over the screens, my hands braced on the sawhorse. The memory of her scent slams into me again. A warm, restless spice that contrasts violently with the bloody world I inhabit. She’s curves and heat and defiance. She rebuilt her clinic right next to a war zone after the Bellantis firebombed the adjacent building. She didn’t run then or tonight.
She stood on the sidewalk and looked right at me. She challenged a monster in the dark.
My jaw locks. Heat crawls up my neck.
I need to check the third floor. I need to know the exact layout of the space she occupies.
I leave the second-floor apartment. I enter the main stairwell. The silence of the building is absolute. I climb the stairs to the third floor. Her door is solid oak. Three locks. A digital deadbolt, a high-security cylinder, and a heavy-duty reinforced latch plate. She’s careful. She understands the world is not safe.
I don’t touch the locks. I do not cross her threshold. Not the apartment. Not yet.
I press my palm flat against the wood of her door. The wood is cold, but the instinct raging in my blood is blinding.
Mine. She is mine. She doesn't know it yet.
She thinks I’m a threat she can manage, a thug she can sass into retreating. She has no idea what she just invited into her life. I’m not a threat. I’m an unavoidable consequence.
I step away from her door. I climb the final half-flight of stairs to the roof access hatch. The padlock is iron. I pick it in twenty seconds.
I push the hatch open and step out onto the tar-paper roof.
The city spreads out below me, a grid of sodium lights and frozen concrete. The wind is vicious up here. It tears at my shirt, biting into my skin. I welcome the cold. It forces focus. I walk to the edge of the parapet. I look down at the street. The quiet residential block is directly in my line of sight. I can see the streetlamps. I can see the alleyway approach. It is a tactically superior position.
