Chapter 5
Three days of cold silence.
They ate dinner together at the long table, because attendance was part of the performance, and she said nothing beyond what was necessary. Please. Thank you. Goodnight. She didn’t look at his hands. She didn’t look at the ring on her own finger, which she couldn’t take off, because taking it off would mean something she wasn’t ready to name.
On the second morning, she saw it out the east wing window: a black sedan idling at the edge of the drive. Simon’s car. Simon’s reptilian eyes, watching the front door.
A security detail. Discreet. Constant.
She found Dominic in his study.
“I am not a prisoner,” she said.
“You are a target.” He didn’t look up from his desk. “Those are different things.”
“I want to go back to work. One shift. The hospital is short-staffed, and I’m a nurse, and I’m going to lose my mind in this house if I read one more book by that fireplace.”
The silence stretched. He set down his pen.
“Simon drives you. You don’t leave the building without him.”
“Done.”
The hospital smelled the same. Antiseptic and fluorescent light and coffee burned at the bottom of a pot that hadn’t been washed since before she’d left. She pulled on her scrubs, clipped her badge to her lanyard, and became again the person she had been before the ring.
For eight hours, she was herself. She ran a code. She held a twelve-year-old’s hand while they sewed up his palm. She told a woman her husband was going to be fine, and she meant it, and she was a nurse, and nothing else in the world mattered.
The shift ended. The night was quiet. She told Simon to wait at the entrance. She needed one minute. One minute to stand in the parking garage and breathe the cold air and feel, for a moment, like a person who got to decide where she went.
There was a man waiting by her car.
He wasn’t security. He was too still, too deliberate. He stood beside the driver’s door, holding a lit cigarette, and he watched her approach with the flat patience of a man being paid to stand in a parking garage and block a woman’s path.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t threaten. He just stood there. A message. A reminder. You’re not as safe as you think you are.
She understood immediately. The Tarasovs. A warning. A proof of reach.
She didn’t run. She didn’t shake. She kept her spine straight and her eyes on him, and she kept walking, because a nurse does not run from a man with a cigarette in a parking garage.
And then Simon was there.
He materialized out of the shadows with two other men, and they moved like water, and suddenly the man with the cigarette had three hard-eyed men between him and her, and the garage was very quiet.
She didn’t see what happened. She walked to the car with her spine straight, got in, the door closed, the engine turned over, and the garage slid away.
In the SUV, she stared at her hands in her lap. The ring caught the passing streetlights. Simon said nothing. He didn’t have to. The message had been delivered, and received, and the only question was who would deliver the next one.
When she got home, Dominic was at his desk. He looked up when she walked in. He read the answer in her face — the pale skin, the straight spine, the hands that were very still.
He said nothing. He just nodded once.
May you like
She nodded back.
She went to bed. In the dark, with the fire crackling and the Atlantic hammering below, she allowed herself to be afraid.
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