Page 20 of You, Only You

Except it wasn't amateur. It was intentional. A message:We know you're there. We can reach you whenever we want.

I took a series of deliberate turns into the financial district, using the maze-like streets to my advantage. A delivery truck provided cover. A yellow light turned red just as they approached the intersection. I slipped into a private parkinggarage beneath a building owned by a client who never asked questions, killed my headlights, and waited in the darkness.

The sedan didn't follow.

Point made. Point received.

My phone buzzed against my thigh, and I almost ignored it, still watching the garage entrance, still running plates in my head even though I knew they'd come back clean. Then I saw the name on the screen.

Lindsey.

She never called. We texted coordinates and file references and the occasional comment about what food we’d order that day. Phone calls meant something had gone wrong.

"Yeah?" My voice came out sharper than I intended.

Silence. Then a breath. Controlled. Measured. The kind of breathing you do when you're trying very hard not to sound like you're falling apart.

"Will." Her voice was steady in a way that immediately told me it shouldn't be. "My apartment. Someone was here."

Everything else dropped out. The sedan, the tail, the counter-surveillance calculations. Gone. "Are you hurt?"

"No. I wasn't home. I just got back, and the door was..." A breath. Carefully measured. "The lock is scratched. Picked, not forced. I looked inside. Nothing's missing, but everything's... wrong."

"Wrong how?"

"My files. From the dining table. They're everywhere." Another breath, this one shakier. "And my bedroom. They... Will, they emptied my underwear drawer. Onto the bed."

My hand tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked. Not a search. Not a robbery. A violation. Deliberate, calculated, designed to crawl inside her head and make her feel unsafe in her own skin. The message wasn'twe can take your things.It was something worse. Something I wasn't going to sayout loud because she was already holding herself together with duct tape and willpower.

"Are you inside the apartment right now?"

"No. The hallway. I didn't... I looked in, but I didn't go back."

"Good. Stay there. Don't touch anything. I'm twenty minutes away." I was already reversing out of the garage, tires squealing against concrete. "I'm calling the police for a burglary report, but when they get there, you don't mention the case. Don't mention me. Don't mention Reeves. As far as they know, this was random. Understand?"

"Yes." Her voice was small. Wrong. Lindsey didn't do small. Lindsey did sharp and precise and occasionally devastating, but not small.

"I'll be there." I ended the call and drove.

The drive was sixteen minutes. I know because she'd told me later that she'd counted. I ran two red lights and broke the speed limit on every street between the garage and her building, and the entire time my brain was doing what it always did: running scenarios. Entry points. Surveillance coverage. Whether her building had cameras. Whether the neighbors had seen anything. How long the intruders had been inside. What they'd touched. What they'd planted.

Operational. All of it operational. The rage was separate. The rage was in a locked room in my chest, and it could stay there until I had names.

I found her building, a modest walk-up in a respectable neighborhood. She was sitting on the top step of the staircase, arms wrapped around her knees, and she looked up when she heard my footsteps and her face did something complicated. Relief and anger and something else, all at once, before she locked it down.

"There you are," she said. Her voice was almost normal. "That was sixteen minutes. You must have broken several laws."

"Most of them." I took the stairs two at a time and stopped in front of her, scanning her automatically. No visible injuries. Pupils normal. Breathing controlled but too fast. "The police?"

"On their way. I told them I came home and found signs of a break-in." She hugged her knees tighter. "I didn't go back in. Like you said."

"Good."

I stepped past her toward the apartment. The door was slightly ajar, the lock scratched but not destroyed; someone had picked it rather than forced it. Professional. I pushed it open with my elbow, keeping my hands clear.

The living room looked like a tornado had passed through. Cushions pulled from the sofa, books swept from shelves, her files, color-coded, organized with that obsessive precision I'd been making fun of for a week, scattered across the carpet. But my eyes went straight to the bedroom doorway, to the spill of fabric visible from where I stood.

Personal items. Laid out on the dark comforter. Not dumped. Arranged. Deliberately, methodically, like a display.