Morning in Enemy Territory
1239 Words
Sienna didn't sleep well in unfamiliar places.
This was not a new development. It had started the year she turned sixteen, when her father's enemies had burned down their first house and she had learned in the most visceral way possible that walls were not protection and locked doors were not guarantees. After that, some part of her brain had refused to fully switch off in any space that wasn't hers. She slept lightly, woke often, and always knew exactly where she was before she opened her eyes.
She woke at 5:47 AM in Damian Voss's house and lay still for forty seconds cataloguing the sounds.
The house was quiet but not silent. Old buildings had their own language, the shift and settle of stone and timber that had been standing long enough to develop opinions. She could hear wind against the tall windows. Somewhere below her, the distant sound of movement. Soft and deliberate, the kind of movement that belonged to someone who had been awake for a while.
She got up.
She had slept in her clothes, an old habit she had never fully broken, and she took ten minutes to shower in the en suite bathroom that was larger than her office at the club and significantly better lit. She dressed in dark jeans and a black fitted top and pulled her hair back and looked at herself in the mirror for exactly as long as it took to confirm she looked like someone who had not spent half the night staring at an unfamiliar ceiling.
Then she unlocked her door and went downstairs.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, through a corridor lined with framed architectural drawings of buildings she didn't recognize. The door was half open and warm light spilled through the gap and she could smell coffee before she was halfway down the hall.
She pushed the door open.
Damian was standing at the kitchen counter with his back to her, reading something on his phone. He was dressed, dark trousers again, a grey shirt, and there was a mug at his elbow and a coffee pot that was clearly freshly made. He didn't startle when she came in. He didn't turn around immediately either.
"There are cups in the cabinet above the machine," he said.
She crossed the kitchen, took a cup, and poured her own coffee without responding. She was not a morning person and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise on the first day. If Damian Voss wanted pleasant breakfast conversation he had made a significant miscalculation in his choice of consultant.
She leaned against the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen and drank her coffee and looked out the window at the back garden. It was large and overgrown in a way that seemed intentional, wild hedges and old stone paths and a tree in the far corner that had clearly been left to do whatever it wanted for at least thirty years. The morning light was grey and flat, the way Velmora mornings usually were, as if the city needed time to remember how to be beautiful before it committed to the day.
"You were up at four," she said.
He looked up from his phone. "The floors creak on the east side of the second storey. You walked past my room."
She had. She had done a quiet circuit of the upper floor at four in the morning because old habits and unfamiliar places. She had not expected to be noticed.
"You were awake," she said. Not a question.
"I'm usually awake by three thirty."
She looked at him. "Every day?"
"Most days." He set his phone face down on the counter, a deliberate gesture, she noted. Putting it away rather than just ignoring it. "It's been that way for a long time."
She didn't ask why. It wasn't her business and she didn't want to know personal things about Damian Voss. Personal things made people human and human was harder to maintain the correct distance from.
She drank her coffee.
He picked up a folded newspaper from the counter, an actual physical newspaper, which she found inexplicably strange for a man who ran half of Velmora's criminal infrastructure, and read in silence.
It should have been uncomfortable. Two people who were essentially adversaries in a kitchen at six in the morning with nothing to say to each other. She waited for the discomfort to arrive and found instead something she had no good word for. Not ease. Not quite. But the absence of the specific tension she had expected, which was almost the same thing.
After a while he said, without looking up from the newspaper, "There's a briefing at nine. Rafe will come for you at eight forty-five."
"What kind of briefing?"
"The kind where I tell you what I need and you tell me what you can realistically provide." He turned a page. "Bring questions."
"I have questions now."
He looked up.
"The northern district operation," she said. "You told me at the club that you needed access to the mid-tier network. That network covers about forty independent operators across six territories. What you said tells me you're not trying to map the whole network. You're looking for someone specific. One person, maybe two, who are embedded in there." She paused. "Who are you looking for?"
The kitchen was quiet.
Damian looked at her with an expression she was starting to recognize, that recalibrating look, the one that flickered through his eyes when she did something he hadn't fully predicted. It lasted less than a second and then his face was composed again.
"We'll cover that at the briefing," he said.
"You said bring questions. I'm bringing them early."
"I said bring them at eight forty-five."
"It's a forty minute walk from here to the nearest Westside contact. If I know who you're looking for before the briefing I can make that walk this morning and have something useful for you by nine instead of starting from scratch."
He studied her across the kitchen.
She drank her coffee and waited and did not look away.
"His name is Dorian Vale," Damian said finally. "He's been operating in the northern mid-tier for about eighteen months. Small import business as cover. I need to know who he's actually working for."
"Dorian Vale." She filed the name away. "I'll ask around."
"Carefully."
"I've been doing this since I was nineteen." She set her empty mug in the sink. "I don't need the qualifier."
She was almost at the door when he spoke again.
"You take your coffee black."
She stopped. Turned slightly. "Yes."
"I'll make sure the kitchen is stocked the way you need it." He had picked up his newspaper again. "This is your space too, for the next six months. You shouldn't have to go without things."
It was a small thing. A practical thing. The kind of thing a decent host said to a houseguest and nothing more.
She didn't know why it sat differently than she expected it to.
"Thank you," she said. Two words, carefully even.
She walked out into the corridor with the grey morning light coming through the windows and the name Dorian Vale already turning over in the back of her mind, and she told herself the slight warmth in her chest was just the coffee.
Just the coffee.
She almost believed it.
- Writer
