"I hope he was a gentleman."
A beat. She stills in the doorframe. "What makes you think it was a he?"
***
My first mistake was to think with my cock.
I didn't need Leo's brain, and so I didn't consider it. Now, as I slip through the front door of her apartment and bash the alarm code into the panel on the opposite wall, I realise how much I failed to question. I confused sex with honesty, and we haven't even had it...yet.
The moment I laid eyes on her, it felt like we were three seconds from a fuck. Always does. Some men call this teasing, but it's my favourite part of the chase. My second mistake was to indulge myself too long in it. If you enjoy something enough, it probably has the power to kill you...God, flesh tempts me to forget this. Wants me to.
Thirty minutes until Leo usually arrives home from her office on a Tuesday. Since I can't get inside her brain, I'll do the next best thing and spend every one of those minutes going through her personal effects.
Leo's apartment is small but luxurious; set on the fourth floor of a small art deco building, complete with twenties-style chandeliers and a purple velvet chaise-lounge in the lobby. Off the hall, there are doors to a single bedroom, a bathroom, and then a kitchen living area with double doors to a terrace. The whole place smells like mulled wine and old candle smoke, as if Leo left just moments ago and blew herself out in the hall.
I hit the bathroom first—specifically the medicine cabinet, which hangs over an opulent marble sink. Above the bottom shelf, lined with skin creams and dental floss boxes with their lids half-cocked, is a constellation of pill jars and packets. After Tuija's report, this is what I'm most interested in.
Tylenol. Contraceptive pills. A half-finished antibiotic and a barely touched anti-sickness med. There are no mood stabilizers, no anti-depressants; nothing to suggest Leo is anything other than normal these days. A part of me is disappointed in this. It's so much easier to take a girl apart when she hands you the strings to pull; not that I prefer easier, but Leo has shit on me. Taking her apart will be necessary at some point.
Next, I head to the kitchen living area. Silver and white cabinets line the walls beside a retro refrigerator and several plants in desperate need of watering. The living area has been turned into a home office, with stacks of SilentWitn3ss boxes sitting in scattered heaps on the carpet. A laptop is splayed open on her cream sofa, its screen bent back, and a plastic basket of tangled wires sits beside it like some kind of garnish. Near the stove, there's a copy of New Scientist open, its pages marred by the charred halo of a coffee cup ring. The only real colour in the room comes from a bowl of apples and bananas on the breakfast bar.
A couple of sun-bleached Polaroids are stuck to her refrigerator: Leo between a man and woman I assume to be her parents, beaming into the camera at a restaurant. Leo lying on the floor next to a golden retriever and pulling a stupid face. A shot of a group of girls in a bar, all holding up their cocktails and pouting; Leo stands on the edge, eyeballing her friends with good humour.
I peer into her refrigerator; she keeps eggs, beer, roast chicken and salad. There's popcorn in the cupboard, ice cream in the freezer. A glass dish on the counter holds a half-finished bar of cherry dark chocolate, carefully rewrapped. These are the kinds of foods a girl stocks if she comes home most nights; if she watches television and works instead of going out to see friends or lovers. Not that this is anything useful. I slam the freezer shut, impatient...and that's when I spot it.
There's a camera mounted on the side of one cabinet. A SilentWitn3ss model with its pale grey casing and tiny blue light. My pulse skitters, and then I raise a hand, my dimpled grin flashing at the lens as I wave.
Hello, little lion. Are you watching me?
Of course you are. It's what you've built your career on. It's what you do.
But Leo won't be at her office to watch, not right now. She'll be on the subway. In transit. Before long, she'll be opening the door and wondering why the hell her alarm isn't wailing. My whole body pulls tight with anticipation at the thought.
Other thoughts creep in as I stalk through to her bedroom. Useful thoughts. The question I should really be asking about Leontine is why she's preoccupied with surveillance in the first place. With watching, learning. Why are you so paranoid? What are you afraid of?
It pains me to give kudos to Lincoln Warner. The jackass. But maybe Leo's not so much afraid of something as ashamed. Fearful girls don't look you in the eye the way Leo looks at me; they don't hire private security companies to fuck with you. She's too brazen to be some frightened lamb.
What are you hiding...?
Her room is the nicest of the lot. More personally decorated. A cream feature wall is dissected by the black outlines of hexagons; the bed is piled high with cushions in red velvet and pale silk. Her walk-in closet hangs open, revealing shelves of pretty heels, and a red lace bra is slung lazily over the corner of an art deco dresser. I take the bra in my hand as I walk past.
Squeeze it.
Bring it to my nose, breathe her in.
I find honesty in the scent of her body. On underwear, it can't hide behind perfume, and the clean laundry smell is long gone; it's just flesh and heat and something almost lemony.
There's a diary splayed on her nightstand, its pages taunting from beneath the beaded glass canopy of her chandelier-style lamp. I flick the lamp on, let it illuminate the room. Maybe I'll flick through the diary too.
Or maybe I'll look for more of her clothes. Her panties. Bury myself in the honesty there, take—
Something knocks against the front door. The sound of a bag landing on the floor, perhaps. A key bites into the lock from the outside, and then the door creaks open, heels totter along the tiles. A big lick of heat rolls up my spine. I stretch back like a cat to enjoy it.
She stops almost immediately. Has noticed the distinct lack of alarm and the fact that the lights are on. Jesus. This is better than any drug imaginable, this brief stretch of a moment before she discovers me—the thread between us struggles to unpick its own knots.
Slowly, I reach out toward her lamp and run my fingers through the cascade of glass beads. The jingling sound is faint, but I know she hears it. I can almost see the way it makes her shiver.
Her bag hits the floor again.
Heels, cautious steps.
A familiar clicking sound.
Honey, I'm home.
I sit on the end of her bed and knot my fingers. A slow ache of a smile makes its way across my face, and my eyes fall closed as if I'm being touched. When I open them, Leontine stands in the doorway not three feet away, her gun pointed straight at my head.
Her voice is hoarse, her hair loose and half-hanging over her face. "What the fuck are you doing in my apartment?"
I'm still smiling. "It's nice to see you, too."
"You touch me and I'll blow your head off." Panic pulls at her words, tugs their edges up an octave. "I'll do it."
"You haven't signed the contract."
She blows the hair out of her face to reveal flushed cheeks. "Fuck you."
"Sweetheart. Put the gun down." I raise my hands, spread them in mercy. "I'm not going to hurt you—can't you hear yourself? This is ridiculous."
"I know what you are," she whispers.
"Mmm. Your friend Wentworth filled me in."
"I know what you are, and I won't let you do the same things to me."
Interesting, that she assumes it's what I want. Ah, little thread. You talk to her in your strange language of frayed knots and loose ends.
"Well?" The gun shakes slightly. "You have nothing to say for yourself?"
I shrug. "You have a script? If I read it out, will you feel better?"
"No." She gulps. "And it wouldn't make Rachel feel better, either."
"Ah. So that's what this is about."
She chokes out a stale laugh. "If you say so."
I give her outfit an appreciative nod. She wears a black leather skirt, tight and cut almost to the knee, with a fitted white shirt tucked in. "You're awfully dressed up for a day at a tech office."
"Fuck. You."
"I like it."
"Thanks to your little red carpet trick, I'm now being followed by Us-freaking-Weekly and a bunch of other low lives."
"And you want to look good for their cameras, huh?"
"Stop trying to change the subject."
I grin. "Bad Aeron. Very bad."
"You think all this is funny? You think this is some kind of joke?" The gun shakes again; her palms are sweaty, filming the black metal with a damp gauze of panic. "What kind of monster are you?"