MasukI had not moved from the window.The street below was quiet. A car parked across the road that had been there since I arrived. A light on in the flat above the pharmacy three buildings down. Nothing moving. Nothing that looked wrong.But that was the problem. Sophia had been in this flat tonight and nothing had looked wrong before that either.I kept my eyes on the street and turned it over in my mind. If there were more people involved, if this went beyond Sophia and whoever had helped her get in and out tonight, then what we were dealing with was not a grudge or a personal vendetta. It was something with structure. Something planned over time by more than one person. And that changed everything about how exposed Elena and Maya actually were."Adrian."I turned from the window. Elena was standing in the middle of the room, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes on me. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. The fear was still sitting in her face, quiet b
The smoke was gone but the smell of it was still in the room.I sat on the edge of Maya's bed with my arm around her, her head resting against my shoulder. She had stopped coughing but her breathing was still uneven, catching slightly every few seconds. I kept my arm firm around her and did not move."Nothing is going to happen to you," I told her. "I promise."Maya did not say anything for a moment. Then she turned her face slightly toward me. "You are shaking, mom l."I looked down at my hands. She was right. My fingers were trembling against her arm, a small, constant movement I had not been able to stop since the smoke cleared and I found myself standing in the middle of my own flat not knowing where Sophia had gone.I pressed my hand flat against Maya's arm and held it there. "Sweetheart, I'm fine."She did not argue with me. She just leaned in a little closer, and I kept my eyes on the doorway.In the sitting room, I could hear Dominic. The slow, measured sound of him moving, b
I stepped fully into the room.The darkness did not slow me down. My eyes adjusted fast and I swept every corner, the space behind the sofa, the wall beside the bookshelf, the hallway entrance to the left. I could feel her in here. That particular kind of stillness that someone leaves in a room when they are trying hard not to be found."Sophia." I moved further in, away from the door. "Stop hiding. You wanted my attention. You have it. So come out and speak to me and stop behaving like a coward."Nothing for a moment. Then the laugh came, from somewhere near the far wall."So confident." Her voice was unhurried. "I have always admired that about you, Dominic."I did not respond to that. I kept moving, slowly, tracking the direction the sound had come from.Adrian shifted to my left, keeping himself in front of Elena and Maya. He glanced at me. "Dominic, don't not play her game."I did not look at him. "I'm not playing her game. I'm ending it.""Dominic." Elena called. Her voice was
I could not see anything.The darkness was complete, the kind that presses against your eyes and makes you uncertain whether they are open or closed.I blinked twice just to be sure. My hand was already out behind me, palm flat, keeping Elena and Maya where they were.My eyes moved across the room, adjusting slowly. The outline of the sofa. The window, faint grey from the street light outside. The doorway to the hall. I tracked each shape and held them in my mind like a map."Stay close to me," I ordered. "Both of you. Do not move."Elena's hand found the back of my arm. "What is happening?"I did not get the chance to answer.Footsteps. Soft and unhurried, somewhere to the left of us. Then silence. Then a laugh, low and easy, coming from the far corner of the room near the bookshelf."I am here."Sophia's voice. Calm as ever, like she had walked into a room she owned.I turned toward the sound. "Show yourself."A beat of silence. Then she stepped out of the shadow, just enough to
They were still arguing. Not loudly but in a low voice, like two men who had decided that volume was beneath them but had not decided to stop. I sat on the arm of the sofa with my fingers laced together in my lap and I watched them and I tried to breathe evenly and I could feel my hands shaking slightly no matter how tightly I held them.Dominic was standing near the window. Adrian was a few feet away, facing him. They had been going back and forth for the last ten minutes in that same measured, clipped way, each of them choosing their words carefully, each of them making it very clear without raising their voice that they did not entirely trust the other to get this right.I had been quiet through most of it. I had told myself I was letting them work it out. But the longer it went on, the clearer it became that they were not working anything out. They were just disagreeing more politely than before.My hands tightened in my lap.Then something in me stopped waiting."It is not abo
I could not sit down.I had tried, twice. Once on the sofa and once on the edge of my bed, but neither lasted more than a minute before I was on my feet again, moving. My flat was not large and I had walked the length of it so many times in the last hour that I knew exactly how many steps it took to get from the kitchen to the window. Eleven. I had counted without meaning to.Outside, the evening had settled into a grey, quiet dark. The street below was ordinary. Normal things happening in a normal world, and none of it felt real because inside my head, Sophia's voice was still playing on a loop.The pieces are already moving. I hold the cards now.She had said it so calmly. That was what I could not shake. Not the words themselves but the way she had delivered them, as though she had already seen how everything was going to end and found it amusing. Sophia was not the kind of woman who made empty threats. I had known that from the beginning. What I had not known, what I was only be
The office was quiet.I was sitting at my desk with my hands folded in front of me, not working, just thinking. The meeting had ended three hours ago and I was still turning it over.Elena had held her ground.I had expected her to crack a little. Not completely, not in a way that was obvious, but
I had heard about the meeting by midday.One of the research coordinators I knew from the project had mentioned it in passing, the kind of casual mention that was not actually casual at all. Tension in the room. One of the doctors challenged publicly. I had not needed him to say the name because I
Sophia's words would not leave me alone.I don't like weak competition.I was at my desk with the risk assessment document open on my screen and I had been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes. Every time I got through a sentence, my mind pulled me back to that meeting room. The way S
The quarterly reports had been sitting on my desk since eight in the morning.I turned a page read half a line and stopped.I leaned back and dropped the file down. My mind had been refusing to cooperate all day and forcing it was not working. I picked up my pen, set it back down, and looked out th







