Something shifted in his expression — surprise, and underneath it, something that looked almost like respect. “You’re offering to spy on a man who burned down a house to kill everyone inside it.”
“I’m offering to stop being someone things happen to,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake at all. “For ten years I made myself small so nothing would ever be my fault. I’m done with that. If there’s a way I can help stop him — actually help, not just hide in a guest room waiting to find out if he’s found this house too — then I want to do it.”
For a long moment, Damian didn’t answer. Then he stood, came around the desk, and for the first time since the library, he reached out and touched my face — just his fingers along my jaw, careful, like he was asking permission with the gesture itself.
“You are the least small person I have ever met,” he said quietly. “I need you to know that. Whatever this city, or your own head, has told you about the space you take up — it was always wrong. I saw it the first sixty seconds I spent in a room with you, and every day since has only proven it.”
I didn’t have words for what that did to something in my chest that had been clenched tight for a decade. So I didn’t try to find them. I just let his hand stay where it was, and let myself, for the first time in longer than I could remember, be looked at and not flinch.
PART 7 — The Vote
The port authority vote was scheduled for a Thursday, in a municipal building three blocks from the water, and by the time the week arrived, the plan Damian and I had built together — half his intelligence network, half mine — had a shape neither of us could have built alone.
I’d spent four days making calls to former coworkers, sitting in diners with bartenders who remembered me fondly from a hundred late shifts, buying coffee for hotel staff who owed nobody anything but who talked, easily, to someone who’d once covered their shift without being asked. What I gathered wasn’t dramatic. It was small. A name overheard at a private dinner. A reservation under an alias. A valet who remembered a car, a driver, a route taken twice in one week to the same unremarkable office building on the edge of downtown.
