Page 94 of Secret Baby Daddy

It’s something more fragile than that, two people relearning how to occupy the same room without either the old ease or the old animosity.

“You’re good at this,” he tells me one night, near midnight, reviewing the final version of the plan together. “Better than good. I don’t think I could have built something this precise on my own.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised anymore,” I say, echoing, almost exactly, a conversation we had weeks ago in a different life, before either of us knew what the other was still hiding.

“I’m not surprised.”

He looks at me for a long moment.

“I just don’t think I ever properly told you, before all of this, how much I respect the way your mind works. I’d like the chance to say it again, someday, in a context that isn’t strategy.”

I don’t answer that, not directly, though something in my chest aches at the careful, hopeful restraint in how he offers it: no pressure, no expectation, just an honest wish laid down and left there for me to pick up whenever, if ever, I’m ready.

There will be time, later, to examine what any of this means for us.

Right now, there’s only Roman, and the exact, patient trap we’re building to make him walk into the truth himself.

I gather the plan and my coat.

*

A trap only works if the person walking into it believes he built the room himself.

I run the operation from a rented office two floors above a dry cleaner’s, four blocks from the Merrick archive, a bank of monitors Hayes wired together in an afternoon and a headset that keeps slipping off my left ear because I haven’t stopped touching it since nine o’clock.

Wren sits beside me with three browser tabs open on three different fabricated trails, ready to nudge whichever one Roman’s people check first.

Nobody has said Dominic’s name in twenty minutes.

Nobody needs to.

It’s the only name in the room.

“He’s through the service gate,” Wren says, watching a feed I paid a contractor far too much money to install without leaving a permit record. “Alone. No driver waiting.”

“He wouldn’t bring anyone he’d have to explain this to afterward.”

I lean into the monitor, watching a shape in a gray coat cross the loading dock with the unhurried walk of a man who has never once been caught doing anything.

“That’s the whole bet. He has to be the one who opens the file, because he doesn’t trust anyone else with what’s inside it.”

I key the channel open.

“Calder. He’s inside the perimeter.”

“Copy.”

His voice comes back low, even, the particular flatness he uses when his pulse is doing something his voice has decided not to admit to.

“Hayes has the east corridor. I’m in position.”

I sit with my hand over the headset mic, saying nothing else, because there is nothing left to say that wouldn’t distract him at exactly the wrong moment, and I have spent weeks building a plan precise enough that my only remaining job is to trust it.

33

DOMINIC

The most dangerous moment in any trap is the second your target realizes the door was never locked behind him.