Chapter 42 The Fitting Room

Chapter 42 The Fitting Room
They reached the venue in eleven minutes, a drive that should have taken twenty. Marco did not speak once, both hands on the wheel, the focus of a man converting fear into speed instead of letting it slow him down.

The venue was a converted textile hall near the Marais, all exposed beams and glass, the kind of space fashion people loved because it photographed like history and functioned like a warehouse. Staff moved through it in the controlled chaos of final preparations. Racks of clothing. Ladders. Someone testing lights that swept across the empty runway in slow, deliberate arcs.

Gia found the creative director near the entrance, arms crossed, watching the door.

“He’s gone,” the creative director said, before Gia could ask. “Whoever he was. He left twenty minutes ago. Security walked him out when he couldn’t produce a badge number that checked against anything.”

“What did he want?” Gia said.

“He said he needed to verify the designer’s identity for a federal matter. He asked which fitting room was yours. He asked what time you’d be here.” The creative director’s voice was steady, but her hands were not. “I told security to hold him. He left before they got there.”

Marco was already moving toward the fitting rooms at the back of the hall.

Gia followed.

The room was small, mirrored on three sides, the final look already hanging on its form in the corner. White dress. Red slash across the chest. The piece that had started as a mistake and become the reason any of this mattered.

Nothing looked disturbed.

Marco checked the door frame, the window latch, the seam where the wall met the floor, moving with the same methodical patience he had used on the kitchen landline weeks ago.

He found it behind the mirror. Small. Newer than the device from the house. Professional grade, angled to catch the room, not the corridor.

“Audio and visual,” he said, turning it over in his palm. “Whoever placed this wanted to know what happens in here. Not who walks past.”

Gia looked at the dress on the form. At the mirror. At the small dark lens that had been pointed at this room since sometime before she arrived.

“He wanted to watch me get ready,” she said. “Not stop me. Watch me.”

“Or he wanted proof of exactly where you’d be tonight,” Marco said. “Down to the minute.”

Reyes arrived twenty minutes later, having been called from the car, and examined the device with the same focused stillness she’d used on the one from the kitchen.

“This isn’t Hale’s usual method,” she said. “Hale hides. He builds cover, he uses institutional distance, he lets other people take the risk. This is someone taking the risk himself. Showing up in person. Getting caught by security and leaving anyway, because he already had what he came for before anyone stopped him.”

“He’s not protecting Hale anymore,” Marco said slowly. “He’s improvising.”

“Or he’s not answering to Hale at all right now,” Reyes said. “Hale is missing. If his own security contractor doesn’t know where he is either, the man isn’t following orders. He’s covering his own exposure. Which makes him less predictable, not less dangerous.”

Gia sat down in the single chair facing the mirror, the dress hanging behind her reflection.

“He knows I’ll be here tonight,” she said. “He knows what time. He was in this room.”

“Yes,” Reyes said.

“Then we don’t cancel,” Gia said. “We change what happens after.”

They worked out the new plan standing in a fitting room with a hidden camera Marco had already disabled, the four of them close together, voices low even though the device was dead.

The show would go forward. Cancelling would tell whoever this was that the threat had worked. It would also strip away the one thing they still had left. A public room full of witnesses and cameras, people who had no idea what was happening around them. That kind of ordinary, crowded space had always been safer than any private room for something no one could afford to lose.

The café drop would happen as planned, eleven o’clock, the portfolio changing hands without a word between them.

But Reyes would not be alone at that table.

“I’ll have two agents in the café before I arrive,” she said. “Nothing obvious, nothing near me. Just present. If he’s watching the venue, he may be watching everywhere connected to you tonight. I walked into this venue today not knowing what I’d find. I’m not doing that again tonight.”

Marco looked at Gia.

“You still walk the show,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but it wasn’t quite a statement either.

“I still walk the show,” Gia confirmed.

Backstage, an hour before doors opened, Gia stood in front of the mirror in the white dress with the red slash, and for the first time all day, let herself be still.

Marco was in the doorway. Not the corner chair this time; there wasn’t room for one. Just the doorway, the way he had first stood in it in a studio in the Hollywood Hills, watching her turn pages in a dead woman’s portfolio.

“Are you scared?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m also not going to let him decide what this night means.”

He crossed the small space and put his hand against her face, careful of the makeup, careful of everything except the honesty of the gesture itself.

“Whatever happens tonight,” he said, “you already won something he can’t take back. The records exist. The testimony exists. Ivy’s name exists on a federal record now, in her own words, through people who loved her enough to say it out loud.”

“That’s not nothing,” Gia said.

“It’s not everything either,” Marco said. “But it’s real. And real is the one thing he’s spent twenty years trying to make sure never survived him.”

There was a knock at the door. Ten minutes.

Gia looked at herself in the mirror one more time. The dress. The hem. The mistake that had become the point of everything.

Her phone buzzed on the table beside the mirror.

The number wasn’t Reyes. It wasn’t the creative director either.

An unknown number, this one not blocked, not routed through any careful channel.

A single photograph, no caption.

The café. The table by the window. Taken from across the street, close enough to see the exact chair Reyes would be sitting in three hours from now.

Gia stared at it.

He was not just watching the venue.

He already knew about the café.