Chapter 74

[ 1,002 words ]

Julian’s POV

We stood there for a moment in the specific comfortable silence of two people who had just discovered they had reached the same conclusion by the same route without discussing it. It was the kind of silence that should have been easy to step away from. Neither of us stepped away.

“You’ve been following Catwoman’s career,” I said. It wasn’t a question. It came out before I decided to say it, which was unusual for me. I didn’t say things before deciding to.

Her expression didn’t change. Not one degree. “Everyone in racing follows Catwoman p>

“You said that to Gail p>

A very slight pause. Barely there. “Gail talks too much p>

“Gail talks the right amount. I just listen carefully.” I looked at her. She looked at a point slightly to my left, which was as close to not meeting my eyes as she ever got. “What do you think of her? Catwoman. As a driver p>

“Technically extraordinary,” she said, without hesitation. “Better in wet conditions than any driver currently on a professional circuit. Takes the inside line at a speed that should be physically impossible and somehow isn’t.” A pause. “Whoever she is, she’s been doing this her whole life. You don’t get that instinct from training. You’re born with it or you’re not p>

I looked at her profile. The way she said it was fluent, specific, and from somewhere that wasn’t research.

“You sound like you know her,” I said.

She turned and looked at me directly. “I sound like someone who’s watched the footage p>

Her eyes were very steady. The room moved around us, glasses, voices, and the particular hum of a successful event winding down. I held her gaze, and she held mine, and for a moment the conversation existed on two levels simultaneously, the way our conversations always did, and on both levels neither of us was saying exactly what we meant.

A reporter materialized to my left with a camera. I heard the shutter before I registered the movement, a professional reflex, barely noticeable. Katia heard it too. We both turned fractionally toward it at the same moment, which meant the photograph, when it ran, would show us side by side, turned slightly toward each other, in the middle of something that looked exactly like what it was.

I should have moved away.

I didn’t.

The next morning the photograph was on page six of two publications and the homepage of a business news site. The caption read: Windsor and the mystery Kensington business or something more?

I read it in my office at seven AM and thought the journalist was asking the wrong question. The right question wasn’t business or something more. The right question was something more and how much more and what exactly was I prepared to do about it.

I didn’t have an answer yet.

Across the estate, in the east wing breakfast room, Delia set her coffee down beside the open newspaper. She looked at the photograph for a long time. Julian’s profile, slightly turned. Katia was beside him, with that particular quality of stillness she had, like someone who was always thinking three things and showing you none of them.

Delia picked up her phone.

She opened the photograph on the news site. She saved it to her camera roll without deciding to. Then she put the phone face down on the table and finished her coffee with both hands wrapped around the cup, staring at nothing in particular, her expression giving away exactly nothing at all.

Katia’s POV

Sam texted at 11:47 PM: I’m outside. Go.

That was our system. She parked two blocks from the building, engine running, and sent one word when the coast was clear. I was already dressed. The carbon fiber suit lived in the false floor of my wardrobe behind the winter coats, a cavity I had engineered myself, measured to the centimeter, and lined with sound-dampening material so the zip didn’t carry. Aiden had never found it. He found everything eventually, but he hadn’t found this. I intended to keep it that way.

I checked on him first. Always. Every single time, without exception, I stood in the frame of his door for thirty seconds before I left. He was on his back tonight, one arm flung wide, duvet halfway off, the nightlight casting everything in soft amber. His breathing was deep and even. The monitor on his bedside table was linked to Sam’s phone; she’d see any movement, hear any sound, and be up those stairs in four minutes if she needed to be.

Four minutes was fast enough.

I pulled the door almost closed and went to get my helmet.

The Bronx circuit wasn’t a circuit in any official sense. It was three blocks of decommissioned industrial road behind a logistics park that had been closed for two years, bordered on two sides by chain-link and on the third by a concrete wall someone had been painting since before I started racing here. The artwork was extraordinary, actually. I had spent more time looking at that wall over the years than I had ever admitted to anyone.

Tonight it was lit by floodlights someone had rigged to a generator, and the crowd was pressed three deep along the chain link on both sides, and the noise was already at the level it reached when something worth watching was about to happen.

I arrived in Sam’s car. I changed in the back, an exercise in spatial awareness I had perfected over years, and walked to the start line in full gear. Blacked-out visor. No name. No number. Just Catwoman, the way I had always been Catwoman, which was entirely and without apology.

Twelve riders. Mostly men, a few women, one I recognized from the Monaco underground circuit who gave me a nod I returned with a tilt of the helmet. The bike was already there. Sam had arranged collection and delivery through a contact who asked no questions and charged accordingly.

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