Chapter 4 · Five Cameras

I found the first camera at 4:40 A.M., standing on the bathroom vanity with a butter knife in my hand and both socks soaked.

Red dot. Blinking. Tucked into the smoke detector.

Nobody looks up. That's the whole trick.

I popped the cover. Glass lens, black wire, a serial number printed small enough that I had to squint. My hands went then. The bad shake. The ICU-hallway shake.

Second one in the mirror frame, aimed at the bed. Third in the light switch by the closet. Two more in the ceiling.

Right over the bed.

I slid down with my back against the cold tile. Four in, four out. The breathing thing the social worker taught me four years ago, back when my life was falling apart next to a vending machine.

Nine hundred square feet. Five cameras. Three nights I'd been sleeping in a fishbowl.

And the sick part, the part I'd be ashamed of later — my first thought wasn't *how do I run.* It was: *who else is going to pay the interest?*

I put the serial number in my bra and the camera in my pocket.

***

"Those are for coffee," Julian said. Didn't look up from his laptop.

Six in the morning, sleeves rolled, tie gone, jaw still pink from the razor. I dropped the camera and the knife on his desk and it made a sound like something small dying.

"Nine hundred square feet of coffee?" I shoved it toward him. "Explain the one over my bed."

"It's my building."

"It's my bedroom."

"Which I pay for." He turned a page. Slow. Bored. "Read your contract, Elena."

"I read it six times. Paragraph nine. Common areas. Not my suite. Not my bed."

That got his eyes up off the page. Not guilt — guilt would've been better. Interest.

"Then I'll amend paragraph nine."

"You can't rewrite a contract because you feel like it."

"I can rewrite anything I own." He shut the laptop. "You want the difference between us? I read all fifty pages. You read the first one and hoped."

Then he slid his phone across the desk, screen already awake, my name in white letters.

"Yours is a liability. Hand it over."

"What's wrong with mine?"

He turned his palm up and waited. "Cross's people strip a phone in an hour. Photos. Locations. Four years of where you've been. And he's circling."

Dominic Cross. The name came up my throat like something I'd swallowed wrong.

I gave him the phone. Twenty minutes the night before I'd spent deleting pictures. Lily's first steps. Noah asleep with his fist knotted in his sister's hair. The twins curled in one crib because neither one would sleep alone. Four years of them, gone, because of a camera in a smoke detector.

Julian scrolled. His thumb stopped on nothing I could see. Then he tossed a new phone onto the desk.

"There's a tracker in it," I said.

"Yes."

"You're not even going to lie to me?"

"No."

By four I walked past his office with a coffee he didn't ask for. His phone lay face-up. Four feeds. My suite. The door. The mirror. My pajamas folded on the bed.

He let me see it. Then he let me go.

***

He kept me till 8:40. Dictation, manifests, a call to Rotterdam where he made a grown man cry without ever raising his voice.

"I have an appointment," I said at 6:45.

"Cancel it."

"I can't."

"You can. You'd just rather not." Still didn't look up.

When he finally cut me loose I ran. G train, rain, wet wool, the whole Brooklyn smell. Mrs. Kessler's stairwell bulb was dead again. Four knocks. The chain rattled.

Noah was on the couch with that dry rattle in his chest that drops my stomach through the floor. Lily was asleep sitting straight up, shoes still on, one hand fisted in her brother's sleeve.

"Two hours," Mrs. Kessler hissed. "You said six."

"I know. I'm sorry." I knelt on the rug and put my palm flat on Noah's back. So small. He reached up, found my neck, checked I was still there. *Mama.*

Twenty minutes. That was my cut of nine hours of being hunted.

Then I put my coat back on and went back to hell.

***

My suite was black. I dropped my keys.

*Click.*

The lamp. Julian in the armchair, ankles crossed, like he'd been sitting there an hour. Maybe he had.

"You were off-grid two hours and eleven minutes."

"You had me followed."

"I had you found." He stood. Crossed the room faster than a man his size should move. "The pharmacy has one exit. I own the building next to it."

"It was an errand," I said.

"In Brooklyn."

The room tilted. He lifted his hand and dragged his knuckles along my hairline, and his skin was too warm, and I hated how still I went. Hated worse that I leaned in.

"I don't share," he said, low. "Not the money. Not the name. Not one thing that's mine."

"Nothing of mine is yours."

"Yet." He dropped his hand. Went to the door, stopped in the frame, turned his head just enough. "You have secrets. I have a floor full of people paid to dig them up. So here's the only thing you need to know about your next year."

He looked back at me.

"I see everything."

The lights died behind him.

I stood in the dark with my heart going, and then the new phone buzzed against my palm. Unknown number. A photo — me on the vanity at 4:41, butter knife up, mid-pry. Shot from above. From the smoke detector I'd already gutted.

A second text came through before I could breathe.

*Ask him who else has the password.*