Chapter 43 The Table by the Window

Chapter 43 The Table by the Window
Gia showed the photograph to Marco with ten minutes on the clock and no time left to be afraid about it properly.

He looked at it once. Looked at her.

“He’s not at the café now,” he said. “That photo was taken hours ago, before we even knew about the fitting room camera. He’s telling you he’s been ahead of us the whole day.”

“Then Reyes walks into a trap.”

“Reyes walks into exactly what she planned for,” Marco said. “Two agents, watching, not obvious. This changes nothing about the plan. It changes what we tell her before she gets there.”

Gia called her while a stylist adjusted the final pin in the hem, phone pressed to her ear with a hand that was not quite steady.

“He has a photo of your table,” she said. “Taken before today. He knew about the café almost as soon as we did.”

There was a pause on Reyes’s end. Not panic. The economy of someone recalculating without wasting a single second on the feeling first.

“That’s useful,” Reyes said finally.

“How is that useful?”

“Because it means he’s not improvising the café. He planned for it. Which means he intends to be there, or near there, tonight. For the first time all day, I know exactly where to look for him instead of chasing a man who could be anywhere in this city.” A breath. “Send me the photo. I’m moving the drop location, and my two agents move with me. He can watch an empty table.”

The show started on time.

Gia stood in the wings the way she had stood in Milan, lights up, the sound of the room coming through the curtain, except this time the calm she had felt then would not arrive no matter how many times she reached for it.

Marco stood beside her.

“You don’t have to be calm,” he said quietly. “You just have to walk.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s the only thing that matters right now,” he said.

She walked.

The runway itself she barely felt underfoot. What mattered came at the far end of it, seventeen steps from the curtain, when Gia’s eyes moved across the audience the way they had been trained to move across every room she had ever walked into since she was a child, cataloguing faces without seeming to look for anyone at all.

Second row. Aisle seat.

A man who was not looking at the clothes.

He was looking at her.

Gia did not break stride. Did not let her face change. She had spent twenty-four years learning exactly how to keep walking while something inside her went completely still, and she used every year of it now, turning at the end of the runway, pausing exactly as long as she was supposed to pause, and walking back into the wings like nothing in the room had touched her at all.

Marco was waiting.

“Second row,” she said. “Aisle. He’s here.”

Marco’s face did not change either, but something in his stance shifted, weight settling differently, the readiness of a man deciding how fast he could reach a specific seat if he needed to.

“Security has him,” he said. “I’m not moving until I know what he’s here to do.”

“Watch,” Gia said. “Just like the fitting room. He’s not here to stop the show. He’s here to watch it happen.”

“That’s what worries me,” Marco said. “A man like this doesn’t watch things he isn’t planning to end.”

The show finished without incident.

Applause, the creative director’s hand in hers at the end of the runway, flashbulbs, the entire machinery of an evening that from the audience’s side looked exactly like triumph and from Gia’s side felt like holding her breath for eleven minutes straight.

Backstage, security confirmed the man in the second row had left before the lights came up, walking out with the rest of the departing crowd, impossible to follow without causing a scene neither Reyes nor Marco wanted in a room full of press.

Gia’s phone buzzed as she was pulling off the white dress.

Reyes.

Moved the drop to a different café six blocks away. Told no one but you and Marco. If he shows up at the original table anyway, we’ll know he’s tracking something other than the plan we discussed. A person, not a location.

Gia read it twice, dress half off, hands going cold.

“He’s not tracking the café,” she said. “He’s tracking Reyes.”

Marco took the phone. Read it. Looked up.

“Or he’s tracking you,” he said, “and Reyes is only in danger because she’s standing next to something he wants.”

Gia looked at the portfolio case, sitting where it always sat now, close enough to reach without looking.

“Then we don’t send Reyes to either café,” she said. “We go ourselves. Both locations. We watch which one he comes to.”

Marco was already shaking his head before she finished.

“That splits us up,” he said. “That’s exactly what he wants.”

“I know,” Gia said. “That’s how we find out who he’s really after.”