Page 6 of Night of Shadows
I close her door.
I go to my own bedroom. I look at the woman in the mirror. Hair up. Cardigan. The face of a woman who’s been told someone wants her dead and is responding by making tea. I take the cardigan off. I put on a different one for no reason.
There’s a knock at the door.
I walk to it. I look through the peephole. I see a man's chest in a dark coat. I cannot see his face. I open the door without taking the chain off, the way a federal protective detail had taught me to do, the same way I have done seven times over the last few weeks.
And then I look up.
Chapter 3
Lex
Detonation
She’s been crying.
She’s holding it together now, in front of me, the way a woman does when she’s been holding it alone for a long time. It isn’t the eyes that tell me. It’s the cardigan, on backward, put on by a woman who wasn’t thinking about the cardigan.
Then she sees me, and her hand goes to the chain at her throat and stays there.
"No," she says.
"Maeve."
"No."
Petrov is in the hallway behind me. I do not turn to look at him. I don’t need to. Petrov has been doing this for twenty-two years, and he can read a doorway before I can. He can read this one. He’s already taken three steps back to give us space, the way a man steps back from a fire.
"Maeve. I am the federal protective detail."
"You are not."
"I am."
"You are not federal anything." Her voice drops. The chain is still on. Her eyes are not on me. Her eyes are on the hallway behind me, then back to me, then on the chain. She’s calculating.She’s good at calculating. "Konstantinos contracts the federal protective detail in cases connected to organized crime. The Konstantinos family is the federal protective detail in this case."
"That is correct."
"You are the Konstantinos family."
"I am."
"Oh," she says. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."
Three years ago, at the Greek consulate, she said the same word in my ear in a hotel room at 12:45 in the morning.
She said it with pleasure. The word was a praise. The word now is something else. The sound of a woman who is being asked to choose between her daughter's safety and the man who is the mathematical reason her daughter exists, probably.
"Maeve."
"Don't."
"I didn’t know."
"You didn’t know what."
I don’t answer her question. The thing I didn’t know on the other side of a door I cannot see through. Two years old. A red jacket and a stuffed elephant. The federal protective detail doesn’t put that thing on a brief because the federal protective detail didn’t have any reason to. The brief was for a witness. The witness happens to have a daughter.
