Page 44 of Fractured Allegiance

I don’t blink. I don’t move.

She turns and stops in front of the window.

Not close enough to see me. But close enough for me to see her.

She raises the glass to her lips, but seems to hesitate a moment before she downs it all.

I jerk back when she bursts into abrupt laughter, watching as it propels her against the window with mysterious force. When she presses her forehead to the glass… For the first time, I see the exhaustion.

It’s not physical. It’s something underneath, something hollowed out from too many nights like this. Too manyperformances. Too many times she’s worn skin that doesn’t feel like hers anymore.

She doesn’t know she’s being watched.

Not yet.

But there’s a shift in her posture.

Her chin lifts. She looks out, not directly at me, but at the dark beyond the window, as if the glass might whisper something back.

I reach out.

My gloved hand brushes the glass of the scope like I’m tracing her outline.

The city disappears. It’s just her and this invisible string between us, tugged at every time she looks away from the world and into whatever place she keeps just for herself.

I could go down there. I could knock. Say something that sounds like a threat or a promise or a warning. She’d answer the door. Maybe. Or maybe she’d shoot me through it.

But instead, I whisper what she’ll never hear.

“You’re already mine.”

And the thing is, I don’t mean that like possession.

I mean it like an inevitability.

From up here, I could see her whole world unfold in pieces—fragments lit by slanted amber, a body in motion, a drink that never quite made it to her mouth. But rooftops are for watching from a distance. Tonight, distance feels like a cage.

But eventually, I go down from the rooftop.

The alley behind her building is uneven stone, the kind that remembers older crimes. A busted steam pipe hisses somewhere close, but I tune it out. Across the street, in the poolof shadow cast by a burnt-out streetlight, I stop and watch the windows above.

Second floor. Her floor.

One of them still glows faintly. Warm, honey-colored. Not bright enough to expose her, just enough to silhouette movement. A figure passing left to right, pausing, then retracing the path.

I can’t count her steps from here. But I can read the rhythm.

Lydia’s pacing again. Not steady. There’s a stagger to it, like her thoughts are moving faster than her body can follow. Every now and again, she stops near the window, just long enough for her outline to come into focus. Her shoulders stay rigid. Her arms mostly stay at her sides.

When she turns away from the window, the glow dims, and all I see is shadow on shadow. But then she passes back again, and her shape returns—blurred, tense, human.

I move to the edge of the sidewalk and tilt my head back.

The window’s too high for her to see me unless she’s looking for something. She isn’t. Not yet.

But I imagine her eyes behind the glass. Not focused on anything in the room. Just drifting, somewhere far enough away that she can’t feel the walls anymore.

I know that feeling. It’s the one you get right before you make a mistake you won’t regret until morning.