My fists clench as we pass Fliss's desk. She's spotted me, has quietened; is trying to blot her red eyes and running makeup with a tissue.
"Buck up, sweetie." I reach over to the tissue box, grab a handful and shove them at her face. She recoils into the chair, spluttering. "It's going to be a long fucking day."
***
It's past midnight when I finally get in; not because they really needed me at the office, but because I like to make them think they do. The bomb, it turns out, went off in a car park east of the airport lobby; eight people were killed, a further forty seven injured, and most of the cars were DOA. No suspects as of yet, but my night shift team will no doubt have something in the morning. It'll be an individual; the MO is all wrong for extremists. A terrorist sect would have claimed it by now.
In the lobby of my apartment building, the concierge doesn't speak to me as I drift past. Instead, he offers a nod of respect, which I return with the best grateful half-smile I can muster. I've spent way too long today trying to feign horror when all I felt was irritation. Empathy. Jeez. Too much and you're just an annoyance; too little and you're suddenly dangerous.
Well.
The doors of my private elevator peel back to reveal a dark, silent apartment. Ash will have been asleep for hours by now. Ethan has gone to bed in the guest room. He left me dinner in the microwave, which I promptly scrape into the bin before fixing myself a sandwich.
A file waits in my bag. Leontine's background check. I've been waiting all day to get her alone. When I had to sit through another fucking Skype call from Phil at the White House with all his fake agenda bullshit, I ran my fingers over the highlighter tabs Tuija had left peeking from the top of the folder. I plucked at them softly. Thought of plucking other things. The paper tore a little; I smiled and soothed it with the pad of my thumb.
I have time for her now. And even as I sit in the shadows of my sparse living area, the unopened file a pleasing weight on my half-stiff cock, I can feel the sparks. The adrenaline whispering. This is how obsession creeps in—past blunt synapses, through dark doors.
It's all here. Black type on white pages. Everything from her credit card bills to a full report on her social media accounts. Leontine Melissa Reeves: twenty-four years old. American mother, British father. Lives alone in an apartment on the East Side. Grew up in Dorset, England, and came to New York at seventeen when her parents divorced. Took a gap year to travel Asia. Entered Harvard School of Engineering at nineteen.
A lot of it is dull and repetitive. Nobody could be turned on reading a grocery receipt, or a list of previous addresses, or the endless tech discussion the girl likes to have in her Facebook comments. But there are other things. Personal things. Things a man like me shouldn't see...which Tuija, considerate as she is, has highlighted and annotated.
Photographs of Leontine as a teenager, wearing a navy school blazer and short pleated skirt. Fresh face, pouty smile, a hand braced on her cocked hip to a backdrop of jagged mountains. I think she might actually be legal here, writes Tuija. A man can dream.
Paperwork for a hand gun permit. Turns out she's hiding some balls in those tight little skirts. Hahaaaa
Login details for her email accounts. All clean and work-related. Srsly, either they only make prissy choir girls in England, or she's in the habit of deleting shit
Medical files. Not much here b/c most of it hasn't arrived from UK yet. But I got you the good stuff anyways ;)
Notes from the gynaecologist's office; God, I love those. Leontine has only been twice, but these are words written by a doctor whose fingers have been inside her. Whose hands have examined her breasts with enough pressure to feel right into the tissue. I wonder if she liked that, my little lion? Whether she lay still and wet and open, or shifted about, uncomfortable and tight.