Silence fills the enclosed space. Leather seats, her perfume, mandarin and rose with something warmer underneath that I've never been able to identify. Nowhere for her to run, which means she'll have to talk to me.
Or she'll shut down completely. Fifty-fifty odds.
She's staring straight ahead through the windshield, her breath shallow and controlled. Counting, maybe. Her fingers find the St. Christopher medal at her throat, sliding the worn silver back and forth.
"Who was he?"
Her jaw tightens. "Nobody."
"Try again."
The words come out harder than I intended. Too much command, not enough patience. She doesn't respond well to commands. I know this, have watched her bristle at them for years, have catalogued exactly how her back stiffens when someone tries to tell her what to do.
Adjust. She's scared. Scared people need space, not pressure.
But I can't give her space on this. Not when her hands are still trembling.
"An old mistake." She answers anyway, her voice flat. "Someone who doesn't matter anymore."
"He mattered enough to make you stop breathing for six seconds."
Long pause. The medal slides between her fingers, back and forth. Traffic sounds filter through the windows, muffled and distant.
"Adrian." She swallows, and the name comes out like it costs her something. "Adrian Montrose."
Adrian.
The name slots into place with an almost physical click. Married. Divorced. Chesca's father, though his name appears nowhere in the birth records I've accessed.
The man who came before me, who had her when I walked away, who touched her and married her and then somehow lost her badly enough that she erased him from her daughter's life entirely.
Seven years of surveillance and I never ran his name through proper channels. Never really dug into why her marriage ended, what made her leave, why there are no photographs of him anywhere in her home.
Coward. You didn't want to know. Knowing meant admitting she moved on, that another man had her, that your noble sacrifice gave her to someone else.
I just focused on the fact that she was single. Chesca was hers. The past was filed undernot my problem.
"He's on DeLuca's defense team."
"I noticed."
"Diplomatic credentials." I pull up the information I gathered between the courthouse and the garage. "Republic of Salvencia. Special Legal Attaché."
She finally looks at me, eyes meeting mine directly for the first time since we left her chambers. "It was over before you started watching. He's not a threat."
The lie sits between us, obvious and fragile as spun glass. Her reflection in the passenger window tells the truth her words deny. Lips pressed tight, breathing shallow, fingers still working that medal like a rosary.
Liar. But you know you're lying, don't you? You're not trying to convince me. You're trying to convince yourself.
I start the car.
Diplomatic immunity. The reason his information wouldn't have been readily available in my search. The kind of shield that makes a man feel untouchable. The kind of protection that lets someone hurt without consequences.
I've punched through shields like that before.
The drive home takes forty minutes through rush hour traffic. Neither of us speaks.
I use the silence to think. To plan. To run scenarios and calculate variables and build a threat profile for a man I didn't know about three hours ago.