Chapter 106

[ 880 words ]

Katia’s POV

I had known we were staying there — it had been in the itinerary, the kind of hotel that appeared on WEG itineraries the way other companies’ itineraries listed conference centres and airport hotels. The building was exactly what it looked like from photographs and also nothing like photographs, because photographs could not account for the specific quality of being next to something that large and that committed to its own statement.

Our suites were confirmed at check-in. Sam received the details with the calm efficiency of someone who had stopped being impressed by hotels three years ago. I received mine and looked at the floor number.

Three floors below Julian’s.

I said nothing. Sam said nothing. We took our key cards and followed the staff to the elevator, and the elevator opened onto a corridor that smelt of something subtle and expensive, and my suite was the kind of room that required a moment of adjustment — not because it was overwhelming but because it was so completely, deliberately beautiful that the eyes needed a second to accept it as a functional space rather than a display.

I set my bags down. I opened the balcony doors.

Dubai spread below and around me in every direction — the coastline curving away to the left, the city rising to the right, the Gulf catching the late afternoon light and throwing it back in fragments. The air was still hot but moving now, the evening beginning to negotiate with the afternoon, the specific quality of a desert city settling into dusk.

I stood on the balcony and breathed it in.

My phone buzzed.

I looked at the screen. Unknown number — but the format of it, the specific prefix, was one I recognised from the two previous Dubai trips. My race contact. I opened the message.

Night race. 0100. Location follows. Encrypted link — memorise and delete.

I read the location. I memorised it in the thirty seconds it took to read it twice. Then I deleted the message and cleared the notification and put the phone in my pocket and looked at the city.

The circuit was in the industrial port district — the same general area as the previous two years, but a different specific route. The back straight ran along the waterfront. The revised configuration Julian had sent me on the jet — the one I had absolutely not been thinking about — was visible in the location details. The approach to the final corner was going to be faster than anything I had run on this circuit before.

Good.

I heard them before I saw them.

The helicopters first — the low thrum of rotary blades cutting the evening air somewhere to the north. I looked up. Three of them, moving in a pattern that was too deliberate to be news coverage or tourism. They were covering a grid. Overlapping sweeps, systematic, the kind of flight path that suggested they were looking for something rather than going somewhere.

Then lower, quieter, moving along the waterfront below my balcony: drones. Small, fast, running without navigation lights – the kind of equipment that serious security operations used when they needed coverage without visibility.

I watched them for a moment.

Then I smiled.

He had deployed them already. The event wasn’t until tomorrow night, and he had his drones in the air tonight, mapping the city, pre-sweeping the perimeter, and establishing the grid that would cover the race circuit during the 24 Hour Race. Facial recognition, heat signatures, vehicle tracking — all of it building the net that was supposed to catch a woman who had been racing in this city for four years and had never once been caught.

He really was hunting.

I watched a drone arc over the waterfront below and bank north toward the port district and disappear into the evening haze.

Three floors above me, in a suite I had not seen and would not see, Julian Windsor was presumably watching the same feeds on a screen somewhere, building the same map I was looking at from the other side.

My phone buzzed again. Aiden’s nightly call — early, because of the time difference.

I stepped back from the balcony railing and answered.

“Mum.” His voice came through clear and immediate, with the specific quality of Aiden on the phone — always direct, always present, never the half-attention of someone doing something else simultaneously. “How is Dubai p>

“Hot,” I said. “And very tall p>

“Gail made pasta,” he said. “Not as good as yours, but I didn’t say that p>

“Very diplomatic p>

“I’m learning,” he paused and continued. “Are you okay p>

I looked at the city. At the last of the evening light on the Gulf. At the drone just visible against the darkening sky, still running its grid.

“I’m good, baby,” I said. “I’m really good p>

“Win,” he said.

“Goodnight, Aiden p>

“Goodnight, Mum p>

I hung up. I stood on the balcony for another minute in the warm Dubai evening with the city below me and the drones above and the race circuit three kilometres away and the race suit folded under the false lining of a bag in my suite.

Then I went inside to get ready for Julian’s welcome dinner.

I wore red.

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