A WIFE UNTIL FUTHER NOTICE

Chapterone

Heather had learned to spot them before they spotted her. That was the one skill she didn't need a mentor or instruction delivered across a mahogany desk to teach her. It was the kind of knowledge that accumulated in her body long before her mind caught up, it had been born from three years of looking over her shoulder so often it became as real as breathing.

The man in the dark suit was standing beside the stone pillar where the path curved away from the street at the east entrance of Central Park. He was holding a coffee cup in his hand, his eyes turning occasionally to his phone, while almost never leaving her face, everything about him screamed;

“Hey! My name is nobody, I'm just standing here and I'm definitely not watching you”.

And it was that casualness that made Heather's stride falter for a second before she corrected it. She kept on running, allowing her breathing to stay even while maintaining a neutral face just the exact way she had learnt to whenever she received terrible information and she didn't want it to mess with her expression.

The October air bit at her cheeks. Around her, the park moved like it always did on Tuesday mornings, the dog owners were walking their dogs, the babies gurgling in their strollers and a pair of elderly men playing chess at the concrete table near the fountain, they all looked unbothered by the quiet chaos that was unfolding in the chest of the woman jogging past them.

She looked at the man one more time, he had broad shoulders that fitted perfectly into his black suit and dark sunglasses that sat on his nose. She looked at her watch, he had not taken a sip from the coffee cup that had been in his right hand for the past eleven minutes she had been on this path.

When she got to the fountain, she turned and headed back the way she came, taking the path that most morning joggers skipped because it was uneven and poorly lit even in daylight. She knew this park like she knew the lines that ran in her palms. And by the time she came out onto the westside of Central Park, her heart was beating so fast it almost exploded from her ribs.

********

Her apartment was on the fourth floor of one of the modest looking buildings on West 72nd one she had chosen deliberately. When she said modest, she meant invisible. She had become very good at being invisible until two weeks ago when the black Escalade appeared on the street below her window and had refused to leave.

She took the stairs and came inside her apartment. Inside, she double-locked the door and stood in the middle of her kitchen bracing her hands on the counter, as she let her head drop as she slouched her shoulders as if trying to feel the full weight of everything the morning had confirmed.

The man at the park had just confirmed her greatest fear. They had found her and she had no single idea what she was supposed to do with that. She straightened up, picked a chilled glass she had kept in the fridge, filled it with water, and gulped on it as she walked to stand by the sink.

She pulled back the blinds a little and looked at the street below. It was still there. The clean, black Cadillac Escalade was parked just far enough from the hydrant to be legal. The windows were tinted in a way that the eyes could never see through it. Her head became foggy as a lot of questions roamed endlessly through it...

How long have they known? she sighed.

“How long have they been watching me put on my shoes, buy my groceries and walk to the subway like a woman who believed she was safe?” she ran her fingers through her hair as she dropped the cup in the sink.

It's been three years.

Three years since she became Josephine Cross, the one thing she had built carefully. She had taken her grandmother's maiden name and her mother's middle name, and used it to put together an identity that could hold its shape even under pressure. She had left Antwerp that morning with nothing but a carry-on bag, its contents being the private account her grandfather had set up for her when she was sixteen, seven years after her both parents had died in a plane crash.

“This is yours alone, little one. Not the family's or the business. Yours.”

He had said those words to her that morning, telling her with the quiet foresight of a man who understood that mighty empires attracted even mightier enemies and now she had never spent a single cent of it on anything but survival.

She pulled the band out of her hair and went to her bedroom and opened her laptop.

She had just forty-three dollars left in her checking account, a freelance invoice that was thirty days overdue, and exactly no plan for what came next. Running away again was possible, it was one regular thing she had done before and knew the exact mechanics of it. She could be on a train to another city by this evening with a bag packed in under twenty minutes.

But she was tired, tired of all of it. She was twenty-four years old and couldn't remember the last time she actually had a normal life. She had become so bone-deep tired of running that the mere thought of doing it again pressed down on her chest like lead.

What she needed was a different cover that didn't need to be geographic, maybe a job, a purpose or a reason to be somewhere that would make her presence invisible to anyone watching and most of all she needed income.

She opened a new browser tab and typed on the search bar, the one decision she had been putting off for the last three days because actually doing it made it look so real.

New York strategy officer positions. She clicked on “Search".

The results loaded, Heather scrolled past the ones that were either too small, too exposed or too easily infiltrated. She was looking for a company large enough that one employee could move within it without drawing attention and substantial enough that its security infrastructure would provide a layer of cover she couldn't get on her own.

Then Cameron Group appeared on the third page.

The listing was a single paragraph with no corporate flourish, the kind of posting that came from a company with enough reputation to not need to sell itself.

“Strategy Officer. Senior level. Cameron Group, New York.”

She had almost scrolled past it when she saw the salary range, it was significantly worth it all the stress she knew came with this job. The responsibilities were listed in plain language that immediately told her that whoever had written the listing understood what the role actually required.

She clicked through to the company profile.

Cameron Group. Real estate, infrastructure, private equity. Founded by Gerald Cameron but currently run by his son Raymond Cameron who was thirty-two years old. The profile photograph was formal, it showed a man in a dark suit, he looked composed, staring directly into the camera as if his gaze could pierce into the souls of anyone who came across it.

She read the recent press release and apparently the company had taken a significant hit from a failed partnership eighteen months ago, involving a deal with a firm claiming to have affiliation with Bilunia, that had turned out to be neither legitimate nor recoverable. The losses were substantial and the comments? Ohh… the comments were nasty. Very nasty.

Heather squeezed her eyes shut, as she opened her eyes again because the one thing that stood of what she had just read frightened the s**t out of her.

Bilunia affiliation.

Shit! These bastards were everywhere. She just sat very still for a moment, rubbing her fingers across her forehead. Outside her window the city moved indifferently, entirely unaware that something had just shifted in a fourth floor apartment on West 72nd Street. She read the article through to the end, then found two more and read those as well, and when she was finished she laid flat on the bed, looking at the ceiling.

She knew that operation, the name they had used, the structure they had built around it and the exact pattern of extraction they loved to use — take the money, dissolve the entity and leave their victim holding debris. She had seen the blueprints of it years ago, when she still had her life, living happily in a different country, before she understood fully what kind of family she had been born into and the men that existed in it.

Raymond Cameron had not partnered with the wrong company.

He had just been targeted deliberately by the same network that had been hunting her for the past three years. The same people who had decided that a twenty-one year old woman knowing what she knew was a problem that needed a permanent erasure.

She closed the laptop and when she opened it again, she looked and found the application portal.

She was not as qualified on paper in the ways that most companies wanted because a greater part of her education existed under her real name and her work history under Josephine Cross was quite thin. What she had instead was something that could not be listed in a bullet point, it was an understanding of financial architecture that had been built inside from birth while growing up inside one of the biggest diamond processing empires in the western world, as she sat across dinner tables across men who moved money the way people moved furniture.

She had watched her grandfather build structures that lasted and had, at the same time watched her uncle quietly destroy them for parts. She understood both, which made her more dangerous than either.

She began to type and in less than twenty minutes she was done with the cover letter. She laid out her abilities in plain specific languages that didn't need the usual drama and when she was done, she submitted the application immediately before she could talk herself out of it.

She was about to take her bath when she went back into the kitchen to fix a sandwich, as her stomach didn't stop rumbling, she tiptoed to the kitchen window and peered outside again, the Escalade was still there in the street below.

She sighed and thought about how strange it was that the same people trying to destroy her had, without meaning to, just handed her the only door still open.

And ohh… she was going to walk through it.