Page 52 of The Last Dance

I was not afraid to lose him. I was afraid of what it meant if I didn’t.

Iren was exactly where I expected: library, first floor, the hour of day when the light comes in slantwise and throws the dust into visible orbit. Iren sat cross-legged on the floor between two tall shelves, three books open at his knees, a fourth balanced on the upturned arch of his foot.

He didn’t look up when I came in. The carpet around him was littered with cards and notes he’d torn from the pages, each one annotated in handwriting that could have belonged to a conspiracy theorist or a saint.

The room was made for this hour: the air so still you could hear the atoms shuffling, the light so pale it made even the oldest volumes look photo-shopped.

I moved to the nearest armchair, leather stiff with the weight of decades, and let myself sink into it with a small, deliberate exhale.

For a while, neither of us spoke. I watched the motes drifting in their columns of light. Iren watched the slow passage of the sunbeam across the text, the way it illuminated then abandoned whole paragraphs in the time it took to read a sentence.

It was a stand-off, and we both liked it that way.

When I did speak, it was without preamble. “We found the house.”

He looked up, no surprise in his face, just the sharpness of a man who’d run this simulation ten thousand times. “Parsons?”

“Eleven miles away,” I said. “Detached. Curtains blacked out. No sign of life except a single porch light, always on. Purchased through a trust.”

He closed one book, careful not to lose his page. “Neighbors?”

“None who matter. Yard maintained by a service that doesn’t exist on paper. No mail. No trash. He visits at night, parks inside, disappears.”

I watched him process it, cataloguing the information like he was stacking bones. He nodded, once. “When?”

“First purchase, eighteen months ago. First visit, ten days before you left the club.”

I let the implication sit.

He made a small sound, almost a laugh. “So all the rest—Tuesday booths, scripture cards, the lurking—”

“Were warm-ups,” I said.

He nodded again, and when he looked up the light caught the line of his jaw, the cut on his cheek still healing but hard now, almost deliberate. “I always knew he was patient.” His voice was flat, no tremor, not even for effect.

I was not here to coddle, so I didn’t. “You know what comes next.”

He stared at his lap for a second, then back at me. “Are you going to kill him?”

“Yes,” I said. The word had no echo. I watched him for the reaction, but there wasn’t one.

He waited a full four seconds. “When?”

“When I have all the data,” I said. “Or if he tries to accelerate. Whichever comes first.”

He considered this, nodded, and set the closed book aside with a gentle click. “Can I see the house?”

“No,” I said, too fast. I didn’t want him in that airspace, didn’t want his scent in the place Parsons had built for him.

His head tilted, just a fraction. “I want to see it.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

He pulled his knees up to his chest, arms looped around them. He stared into the distance, but his focus was inward. “He picked it for a reason. He would have planned the approach. He would have designed it around…around me.” He gave a tiny shrug. “I want to know what it looks like, before it’s gone. Is that so weird?”

I hesitated. “You can see the pictures.”

“I need the real place. I need to see what he thought I would love.” He said it like it was nothing, but I caught the catch in the phrasing: not what he thought I would be, or need, but what I would love.