She lay awake for an hour before she stopped pretending she was going to sleep.
The room was dark. The knife was on the nightstand, exactly where she left it. She did not look at it. She looked at the ceiling and listened to the house settle into its deep-night quiet — the particular stillness of a building past two in the morning, when the operational layer goes dormant and all that remains is the structure itself. Stone and silence. The temperature of a place that exists whether anyone is in it or not.
She had been here before. This specific wakefulness, this specific hour. But it was not the same — before, the sleeplessness had something to push against. The Alessio intelligence, the Tracker's model, the Viper's compound still working its way out of her blood. There had always been a problem to hold.
