Chapter 3: Lucas

Chapter 3: Lucas

The guard was staring again.

He thought he’d learned subtlety from the mirrored glass and the way this place eats sound, but his eyes kept returning to the same point—Evelyn—like a hand that can’t leave a bruise alone. He watched the soft angles of her mouth when she spoke, the line of her throat when she swallowed, the way she chose the wall seat without thinking. He watched, and that was his mistake.

I move when I feel like hunting, not when a schedule tells me to. Two steps, slow enough to read as idle. Another, casual as breath. I cut the sightline and stop where my shoulder just brushes hers when I turn. The contact is incidental in the report that will be written later and read by no one who matters. Here, it is a decision.

She tilts her head up. The overhead light finds her eyes and sets a spark inside the green. Close like this, I can count the fan of tiny fractures around her composure. Not cracks. Stress lines. She’s built to flex.

“Lucas,” she says, quiet, like we’re sharing a secret that belongs to the air.

“Keep talking,” I tell her, voice lower than necessary. “Pretend I’m furniture.”

Her mouth does that not-quite smile that gets filed under noncompliant but manageable. She turns back to the woman asking for the salt. I stand where I am and become a wall. The guard’s gaze hits the back of me and slides, irritated. Good.

I lean in as if to hear Evelyn better, letting the heat of me sit just behind her ear. I could count her breaths by how the hair near her temple lifts and settles. “Left corner,” I murmur. “Second camera is lazy. There’s a half-second where it resets if the angle changes.”

She doesn’t glance. “How generous,” she says, passing the salt without looking. “A man with tips.”

“Just sharing the weather,” I say. “And the forecast.”

“What’s the forecast?”

“That he won’t be looking at you again after today.”

A flicker runs through the line of her throat. She swallows it down and sets the shaker exactly on the table’s seam. “You collect storms,” she says.

“I choose where they land.”

We break apart on the rhythm of the room: trays returned, chairs scraping, the shuffle of people who’ve survived another hour by arranging their bodies into shapes the cameras like. I let her go first. The guard pretends to look away and fails. I file his face where I file other pending corrections.

The corridor breathes its long, chemical breath. The fake window is set to a late afternoon no one asked for. A trolley squeaks a violin note off-key. I walk at my pace, unhurried enough that anyone watching assumes I don’t have a destination. Everyone in here thinks stillness is safety. Stillness is just a different way to be obvious.

Office doors go by: 1, 2, 3. The slot in 2’s door is dark. Good. Malik’s elsewhere. I keep walking.

There’s a alcove before the turn where the wall juts just enough to bend the camera’s sightline for a count of three. I stop there because I’m not wasteful. The concrete is cool through my sleeve. The hum of the building gets louder when you touch it. I like to feel the place I’m about to move through.

Footsteps. Her cadence. She comes around the corner like she didn’t practice it a hundred times as a kid—shoulders down, head level, stride that reads as neutral to people who don’t know how to listen. I do.

She notices me and doesn’t change pace, which is its own change.

“Orientation go well?” I ask, as if the alcove is an accident we’re both having.

“They gave me a partner,” she says.

“Congratulations.” I let the word turn in my mouth. “I hear he’s difficult.”

“I hear he’s manageable.”

“One of us is wrong.”

She stops inside that little blind spot, exactly where I wanted her. To anyone glancing down the hall, we’re compliant shapes occupying acceptable space. Inside the inches—different weather.

I put my palm on the wall beside her head. Not touching her yet, just claiming the concrete. The angle lets me shadow her from the camera that will realize in two seconds it’s looking at nothing and blink to fix itself. Two seconds is a lot of time if you spend it properly.

“You’re being watched,” I say, not a warning so much as a fact I like the taste of. “Back of the canteen. Guard with the soft tread. He stares when he thinks you’re not looking.”

Her gaze stays on mine. “And you are looking. Helpful.”

“I’m acquisitive.” The corner of my mouth moves. “And territorial.”

“Of the wall?” she says, and then, deliberately, shifts half an inch closer so that the heat of her shoulder brushes mine. “Or of me?”

“That’s the one,” I say softly, and let my forearm drop the next inch so the crook of my elbow cages her without the cameras ever getting a clean angle. It isn’t contact. It feels like contact. Her breath hitches in a way she probably hates being proud of.

“You’re on your meds,” she says, eyes careful. “This is you restrained.”

“Accurate.” I look at her mouth because I intend to, not because I can’t help it. “Imagine me unrestrained.”

“I don’t have to imagine,” she says, and the heat under her words has nothing to do with the radiator. “You’ll show me.”

“Soon,” I tell her, and the word drops between us with exactly the weight I mean it to. “But not here. He doesn’t deserve that view.”

Her eyes flick just once past my shoulder, enough to confirm what I already know: the guard who pretends to inventory the cutlery is making a list of her instead. I let my hand ghost along the line of the wall until my knuckles could, if I wanted, graze the hair behind her ear.

“If you touch me,” she says, not moving, not blinking, “I won’t stop you.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You’ll think about it all night.” A beat. “So will I.”

I laugh, quiet and low. The camera finds us again; I feel the lens settle on my back like a cold hand. I lift my arm away and the moment closes with the soft click of something hot put back under glass.

We separate because separation is the currency that makes the next contact expensive. She goes left. I go right. The guard pretends to be bored. I move down the hall with a pace that would bore a priest.

At the corner, I peel off into the service corridor. The angle of the floor changes by a degree; the smell turns from polish to rubber and stale coffee. Staff doors are painted a grey that wants to be important. I’ve learned which latches lie. This one doesn’t.

I don’t need to do anything stupid. I don’t need to do anything loud. There are ways to move a man off a game without knocking over the board.

The guard’s route takes him past Laundry, then to the storage room with the flickering ballast that Maintenance never prioritizes. There’s a blind triangle where the two cameras’ cones don’t quite kiss. Someone thought about it. Not enough. I stand in the blind seam and wait for my weather to arrive.

He does, with the slow inevitability of a man whose day is made of rectangles and keys. He rounds the corner and sees me and tries on a professional expression.

“Winters,” he says, like that should work on me. “You shouldn’t be back here.”

“It’s a hallway,” I say. “It goes both ways.”

He tightens his grip on the keys, which tells me what he thinks will keep him safe. Keys are power in here. The people who hold them believe in doors more than people.

I step in close enough that he has to tilt his head back a fraction. Not aggressive. Comradely. A man requesting a lighter. I keep my voice conversational. “Do you know what triangulation is?”

He blinks, thrown by the shape of the word. “What?”

“Two cameras,” I say, and point vaguely up so he looks away from my face. “Angles. There’s a seam between them. A place that belongs to no one. Like a sentence without a subject.”

“I don’t have time for—”

“You will,” I say gently, and let my gaze go from his eyes to the place just below his throat where the pulse tells the truth. “Listen. Don’t look at her again.”

He tries to laugh. It comes out too high. “You threatening staff, Winters?”

“I’m forecasting.” I tilt my head the way Malik does when he wants someone to feel understood. “You have a job to keep. She has me.”

His mouth opens, closes. I watch the calculation cross his face: the cost of the remark he will not write in a logbook against the cost of pretending he never heard me. I make it easy.

“Look at me,” I say. “If your eyes need something.”

He does, because men like him always understand possession better than they understand warning. He looks and what he sees looks back with interest. Not rage. Not even heat. Interest is scarier. Rage is noisy. Interest is a plan.

He breaks first. “I’ve got rounds,” he mutters, and steps around me into the safety of the cameras’ kiss like a man going back under a blanket. Good. Go back to your rectangles, little key holder. Consider yourself moved off this board.

I give him my back, which is a gift where I come from. He doesn’t take it. I walk away at my pace, heart rate steady, thoughts lined up in rows like soldiers who know they’re being inspected.

When I pass the laundry, the radio hangs on a bright note a fraction too long and then remembers the song. I could convince myself the building is playing with me. I don’t. I already have everything I want to play with.

The common room is half-full and pretending to be more. Evelyn’s in the same seat as earlier, back to a wall, face to the door. She looks like she hasn’t moved at all and like she’s been away to somewhere private and returned with a decision.

I take the chair opposite. The chessboard between us is still arranged in a position I left yesterday, meaningless pieces in a meaningful shape. She looks at the board, then at me, then at the place where my hand rests on the table like it could be useful.

“You handled your weather,” she says.

“I redirected it,” I say. “Storms should be seen from a safe distance.”

“And what’s safe?”

“Nothing,” I say, and let my fingers tap once on the edge of the table so the sound is only for her. “But I can fake it for the camera.”

Her eyes drop to my mouth and back up as if she didn’t mean to. She did. “Tomorrow,” she says, like we’re scheduling a meeting that will require fresh ink, “we test your theory.”

“About begging?” I ask, amused.

“About storms,” she says. A beat. “The other thing can wait.”

I lean back, making a shape the camera likes. “It won’t have to wait long.”

Hargreaves appears at the doorway with a clipboard and a name on her lips that isn’t ours. The room exhales. The camera blinks. The guard with the soft tread keeps his eyes where they belong.

On the card in my cell tonight, under ONE WORD, I write possession. I cap the pen, because that’s a detail someone will enjoy noting.

Tomorrow I’ll sit opposite again, because distance is the best way to measure gravity. And if anyone tries to look at her like she’s free to be taken, I’ll show them how wrong a man can be while still breathing.

For now I fold the day in half and put it where the camera can’t see. I let the meds keep their neatness over my thoughts, like a sheet pulled smooth.

Soon is still soon.

But soon is close.

Chapter end