House On Fire

House On Fire
POV: Selina

The alarm woke me from the first real sleep I had managed in weeks.

I was on my feet before I was fully conscious, some part of my body having apparently decided during the past months that waking slowly was a luxury it was no longer offering me. The smell of smoke reached me at the same moment Felix's fist hit my door, two sharp knocks, not waiting, the door already opening.

"Get up, get your shoes, come now," he said. No construction around it.

I was already reaching for my shoes. "Martin."

"Gone." The word was very flat. "Fire in the basement. We're getting out."

I looked at him for one second, at the expression on his face, which was not panic, was not anything as simple as panic, was the look of a man who had made a mistake in a specific and unforgivable way and had filed that information away to be dealt with later and was currently entirely focused on the present, and then I tied my shoes and went.

Amaya was in the corridor already, Marco beside her, and we moved through the house and out through the side entrance into the night garden where Felix's security team had assembled with the organised urgency of people executing a protocol they had rehearsed. The fire was below us, visible through the lower windows now, orange light moving in the rooms we had just left, the alarm continuing its useless conversation with the night.

I stood on the lawn and watched the house and felt the heat from twenty metres away and thought about Martin and a bible and a bible on a table and a cup of Camille's tea.

"He planned this from the beginning," I said. Not to anyone specifically.

Felix was beside me. Close but not touching, his attention split between his phone and the house and the perimeter his men were still searching with decreasing optimism. "Yes," he said.

"The remorse. The bible."

"Yes."

"How long did he need?"

Felix was quiet for a moment. "Four days," he said. "He needed four days and he took them efficiently." Another pause. "I underestimated him. Again."

I looked at the burning house and thought about what it meant that Martin was out there now, in the city, with his network partially dismantled but not entirely, with the knowledge of where we were and what we knew and what we had done to interrupt his timeline. I thought about what a man like Martin did when his timeline was interrupted.

He built a new one.

"He's not running," I said.

Felix looked at me.

"He's not going to disappear," I said. "That's not what this is. If he wanted to disappear he would have done it before you found the bunker, he had the infrastructure for it." I watched a window on the lower floor go dark as something inside it finished burning. "He's staying close. He wants us to know he's close."

Felix was quiet for a moment. "Yes," he said. "I think so too."

The first note arrived three days later.

It was left on the bonnet of Felix's car, which was parked in the secure underground garage of the new property he had moved us to, a place with more layers of security than the eastern house, with more people, with cameras covering every angle of approach and professional monitoring running twenty-four hours. The garage had three access points, all of them guarded, all of them on camera.

The camera footage showed nothing. Nobody approaching the vehicle, nobody in the garage who shouldn't have been there. The note simply appeared between one camera sweep and the next, placed on the bonnet of the car with a precision that suggested someone who knew exactly how long the sweep interval was.

Marco brought it to Felix in a sealed evidence bag and Felix read it and handed it to me without a word.

The handwriting was Martin's. I recognised it from the notebook.

Felix. I hope the house wasn't too sentimental. I want you to know I'm well. I'll be in touch.

That was all.

Below the note, in different ink, added as an afterthought: Selina. You were right, I should have stayed in the city I loved. I think about that conversation often.

I stared at the second line for a long moment.

We had never had that conversation. The city he loved, the trip he had described over dinner in the bunker, I had listened and nodded and performed the interest of a woman at ease, and I had not said anything about staying or leaving or any of it, because I was not at ease and the conversation was not real.

He was telling me he remembered everything. Every dinner, every word, every performance and what it had cost to maintain it. He was telling me that the two weeks underground had been as real to him as they had to me, in whatever way things were real to Martin.

He was telling me he was close enough to know which car was Felix's in a guarded underground garage.

I folded the note and gave it back to Marco and said nothing.

The flowers came a week after that.

Delivered to the front entrance of the new property by a legitimate courier service whose records showed the order had been placed in cash at a branch location by a man whose description matched no one in any of Felix's databases. White flowers, the kind carried at funerals. No card.

Then a card, separate, slipped under the front door forty minutes after the flowers arrived, while every camera on the property was being reviewed for the delivery:

For the table. I know you prefer white.

He was right. I did prefer white. I had mentioned it once, briefly, in passing, in the bunker kitchen while Amaya was making coffee and the conversation was about nothing at all, the kind of detail that meant nothing and that Martin had apparently stored with the same precision he stored everything.

Felix, when he
saw the card, said nothing for a long time.

Then he doubled the security.