Page 12 of Fractured Loyalties
Three.
I check the windows. All latched.
I pull the curtains tight.
I shower, eat half a banana, and crawl into bed without turning on the television. The silence is safer.
But sleep doesn’t come quickly. My eyes stay fixed on the ceiling, then the door, then the window.
When I do finally drift off, it’s shallow and uneasy.
Chapter 4 – Elias – Breach
She hasn’t turned off her bedroom light.
I sit across the street in the dark, engine off, mirror tilted just enough to frame her apartment’s second-story window. The glass glows softly, diffused through curtains she thinks she pulled tight. But nothing is ever tight enough. Not for someone like her. Not for someone like me.
It’s almost midnight. She doesn’t know I’m here. She doesn’t know how close the threat is—the real one. The one with my face, if she ever saw it from this distance.
But she won’t. Not yet.
Not until I want her to.
Her silhouette shifts once, passing behind the curtain. The faintest change in shadow. Then stillness again.
She thinks she’s safe. I want her to believe that. For now.
She’s seen me before, I know she has, though she may not pay much attention to it. Little moments placed with precision, where I’ve deliberately crossed her path. I gave her outlines, not details. Presence without explanation. Enough to stir her instincts but not enough to trace. That’s how familiarity is built: in fragments. Now, when I finally step out of the shadows, she won’t know whether to call it intrusion or inevitability.
I lean back against the leather seat and close my eyes. It takes effort to keep my breathing measured. Because the image of her all through today keeps resurfacing. Her face had shifted. Paler. Tight around the eyes. Her steps were too precise, like she was counting them.
Panic, even second-hand, is unmistakable.
Lydia said I was too close to this.
But Lydia didn’t see what I saw, what I've been seeing.
She didn’t see the way Mara folds herself smaller every day. Like she’s trying to disappear molecule by molecule.
I open my eyes and look again at the window.
She’s lying down now.
I don’t need to see her to know it.
My hand shifts on the gear, but I don’t start the car. Not yet. There are still twenty-three minutes until the next marked patrol passes this street. That’s enough time.
Enough to decide.
Enough to prepare.
The heat in the car has begun to stale, thick with breath and the faint trace of leather polish. I crack the window two inches. Just enough. Cold air slides in, sharp and bracing.
Across the street, her light finally clicks off.
I don’t move. Not yet. Watching her window go dark is not the same as her sleeping. She has rituals. I’ve mapped them. After the light goes out, she waits. Ten minutes, sometimes twelve. Then she checks the windows and door again. A soft shuffle of feet across wood, then silence.
That silence is where I listen hardest.
