Jane overslept on Wednesday, burned her toast, and arrived at her nine o'clock lecture twelve minutes late, which was not, in the grand scheme of things, a disaster. She slid into a seat near the back, pulled out her notebook, and tried to focus on Professor Kelland's breakdown of Victorian narrative structure rather than the strange, unsettled feeling that had been sitting in her chest since Tuesday night.
It wasn't anything, she told herself. A man had looked at her across a room. People looked at people. That was what eyes were for.
"You're distracted," Maya noted at lunch, pointing a fork at Jane accusingly. "You have the look."
"What look?"
"The thinking-about-something-but-refusing-to-think-about-it look. Which, ironically, means you're thinking about it very hard indeed." Maya tilted her head. "Is this about That Man?"
"No," Jane said immediately.
Maya smiled with deeply unsatisfying smugness.
"I Googled him," Maya said. Jane looked up. "Volkov. I Googled him last night when I couldn't sleep. And Jane—" She set her fork down. "He's not just rich. He's like... architecturally rich. The kind of rich that has its own weather system. His company — the Volkov Group — it's international, legitimate, massive. But there are also these rumours—"
"Maya."
"—online forums, Reddit threads, a couple of those investigative journalism pieces behind paywalls—"
"Maya."
"—about organised crime connections. Nothing proven. Nothing charged. But the kind of rumours that tend to have a body of water behind them, you know? Like, there's a reason the rumours exist—"
"Maya." Jane's voice was quiet but firm. "It doesn't matter. I'm never going to see the man again. He looked at me at a party. That's all."
Maya looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone who had read enough fiction to know when a protagonist was being dramatically incorrect about something. Then she picked up her fork again.
"Okay," she said mildly.
"Okay," Jane agreed.
~ * ~
She was not, it turned out, never going to see him again.
Three days later, walking home from the university library at half past seven with a bag heavy with books and a mind still half-submerged in a chapter about Hardy's use of fate imagery, Jane felt it again. That weight. That particular, deliberate pressure.
She stopped on the pavement and looked.
Across the road, parked in front of a coffee shop, was a black car. The kind of black car that was too clean and too still and too there in a way that made something at the back of Jane's neck go sharp and alert.
The windows were tinted. She couldn't see inside.
She stood there for a moment — long enough to feel slightly foolish — and then the car pulled away, smooth and silent as shadow, and disappeared around the corner.
Jane stood on the pavement and told herself it was nothing. A coincidence. A black car on a London street.
She walked home faster than usual.
She checked that her door was locked twice.
She did not tell Maya.