What The Morning Brought

She woke before he did.

The morning light came through the bedroom curtains in long pale stripes, and the first thing she saw was his hand on the duvet beside hers. Bigger than she remembered. The wedding ring he had stopped wearing two and a half years ago had left a faint pale band on his fourth finger that had never quite tanned over. She had not noticed it at dinner. She noticed it now.

She did not move.

She was afraid that if she moved, he would wake, and the moment would end, and she would have to go back to being the woman who could not let him near her.

He breathed evenly beside her. Still on top of the covers. Still in his shirt. He had not crossed any of the lines she had drawn. She had asked for closeness without surrender, and he had given her exactly that, and the discipline of it was almost worse than tenderness.

Almost.

Her phone vibrated on the bedside table.

She picked it up. Lucas.

"Sera. Need you to call me when you wake up. Not urgent. Just important."

She frowned. Lucas did not text at six in the morning unless something had happened. She slid out from under the duvet without disturbing Damien, padded into the hallway, closed the bedroom door behind her, and dialed.

He answered on the second ring.

"You alone?"

"More or less. Why."

"There is a woman in the lobby of your building. She has been there since five. She told the doorman she is your aunt and asked which floor your flat is on. He told her you do not have an aunt. She has not left. She is sitting in one of the chairs reading a newspaper."

Seraphina's blood cooled.

"Describe her."

"Older. Sixties. Expensive coat. Black leather gloves. She looks European. Italian, maybe, or Spanish. She has not done anything threatening. The doorman said she is just sitting there waiting."

"How did she know my address?"

"That is what I am trying to figure out. Your address is private. Even your team does not have it. Whoever she is, she has resources."

Seraphina pressed her free hand against the wall. Her mind was racing through possibilities and discarding them. Not Vanessa. Not Rose, since the description was wrong. A new player.

"Lucas. Stay where you are. Do not let her come up. I am going to send Damien down to handle it."

"Damien."

"He stayed last night. Do not start."

Lucas paused. Then, "I am not starting."

She hung up.

She turned to find Damien already in the hallway, fully dressed, watching her with the alert eyes of a man who had not actually been as asleep as she thought.

"There is a woman in the lobby asking for me," she said. "I do not know her. I need you to go down there and find out who she is and what she wants. Without scaring her off."

"On it."

"Damien. If she is from a tabloid, get her name and tell her I will sue her for trespassing. If she is something else, do not let her up here. I do not want her near Luna."

"Understood."

He crossed the hallway and kissed her forehead. Brief. Dry. Like a husband leaving for work. He was gone before she had time to feel it properly.

She stood in the hallway listening to him jog down the stairs.

She walked back into the bedroom. Sat on the edge of the bed. Pressed her hands flat against her thighs to stop them from shaking, and realized only then that her body was not shaking from fear. It was shaking from the unfamiliar weight of having someone else in the house she could send downstairs to handle a problem.

For three years, every problem had been hers alone. Every fire. Every threat. Every late night decision.

This morning, she had handed him one, and he had taken it without question.

She did not know what to do with that.

She walked into Luna's room. Her daughter was still asleep, curled around her stuffed rabbit. Seraphina sat on the edge of the bed and watched her sleep, and waited for Damien to come back upstairs and tell her who the woman in the lobby was.

She had a feeling, in some place beneath thought, that today was going to be the day a wall came down that she had not even known was there.

She was not wrong.

Luna stirred. One small hand came out from under the blanket and reached for Seraphina without opening her eyes.

"Mummy."

"I am here, baby. Go back to sleep."

"Mummy I had a dream."

"What was it about."

"There was a lady. She was in our garden. She had a hat with flowers."

Seraphina went still.

"Did the lady say anything."

"She said hello. She said she was looking for me."

"Was the dream scary, baby."

"No. The lady was nice. But Mummy I think she was outside the window. I think I saw her when I went pee in the night."

Seraphina's stomach dropped.

She did not react. She kept her face calm. She stroked Luna's hair until her daughter's breathing slowed back into sleep.

Then she stood up, walked into the hallway, and locked the nursery door from the outside.

She would not tell Luna she had locked it. She would unlock it before her daughter woke. But for the next hour, until she knew who was downstairs and what they wanted, Luna was going to be safe behind a door with a deadbolt.

She walked back to the master bedroom. Sat on the edge of the unmade bed.

In her head she was already running the threat tree. Whoever the woman in the lobby was, whoever Luna had seen at the window in the night, they had not made a move yet. They had only watched. Watching was the prelude. The move was always next.

She picked up her phone. Sent one text to Lucas.

"If something happens to me today, take Luna. Get her out of London. You have power of attorney."

Lucas wrote back in twenty seconds.

"Sera. What is going on?"

"I am being careful."

"I will be on the next train."

She did not argue.

She set the phone face down on the duvet and listened to the elevator return to the ground floor and the front door open and Damien's voice in the hallway, low, even, controlled.

He was bringing the woman upstairs.