Claimed as the Wrong Bride

Chapter 9 Part 2: Mona Lick Returns

The third day she went back to The Meridian because she had a shift. The world did not stop for illegal marriages. Mona Lick had regulars who would notice an absence, and she was not in the business of being noticed for the wrong reasons.

But first, the materials.

The address Sol had given her was a courier depot on the west side of the grey zone, the kind of facility that handled specialist deliveries and asked no questions about the contents as long as the paperwork was in order. Legitimate. Neutral. The kind of location that had been chosen by someone who understood that it needed to be somewhere she could not reasonably refuse without breaching the contract.

She went at seven in the morning when courier depots were busy and staffed by people who had been on shift since five and were not interested in anything except processing the queue. She wore the gym clothes, hair up, no eyeshadow. Nothing that read as the woman from the gallery. She paid cash for a transit card two stops from the depot and walked the last eight minutes.

The depot was exactly what it looked like from the outside. Industrial, functional, a loading bay on one side and a customer collection window on the other. She gave the reference number Sol had forwarded her and waited while the staff member disappeared into the back.

She counted the exits. Two visible. One probable through the loading bay.

The staff member came back with two flat parcels and one long tube, all wrapped in brown paper and labeled with the reference number. She checked the weights. The parcels had the density of gold leaf and filament paper in quantity, properly packed, which meant whoever had specified the order knew what they were doing. The tube would be the adhesive in specialist applicators, the kind sold in proper art supply rather than general hardware.

Good materials. Exactly what the piece needed.

She signed for them, took the parcels, and was back through the door in under four minutes.

The man outside was good. She almost missed him.

Almost.

He was positioned on the opposite side of the street in the specific way that was not waiting for a bus and not checking his phone and not doing any of the things people did when they were standing on a pavement and not trying to look like they were watching something. She clocked him in her peripheral vision on the way out and kept walking without adjusting her pace because adjusting her pace would confirm she had seen him.

She walked to the corner. Turned left. The transit stop was to the right, which he would know. She went left into the industrial block behind the depot, the one with the loading vehicles and the narrow gaps between buildings that were not quite alleys but were not quite passages either, and she moved through it the way she moved through the city at night, quickly and without hesitation and with the specific knowledge of someone who had walked every block of this zone at various hours for various purposes.

She came out two streets over, joined the foot traffic heading toward the market district, took a bus she did not need to take for four stops and then got off and doubled back on herself.

By the time she reached the gym her arms ached from the parcels and she was slightly out of breath and she was thinking about the adhesive application problem in the lower left quadrant of the canvas.

She was not thinking about whether he had sent one person or two.

She was not thinking about the fact that the materials order had been specified with the precision of someone who understood the piece, which meant someone who had read the commission documentation carefully, which meant someone who had paid attention when she explained what the work was becoming.

She was absolutely not thinking about that.