Chapter 7 — Another SSR
When Luca came back into the living room, Mathilda had fully settled in.
She'd found the remote, navigated to a cartoon channel with the confident efficiency of someone who'd done this in other people's apartments before, and was now cross-legged on his couch watching an X-Men rerun with the focused attention of a person who had opinions about it.
She looked up when he walked in and held out the paper bag.
"I almost forgot — these are for you." She pushed it toward him. "I made them this afternoon."
Luca took the bag. Still warm at the bottom, which meant she'd come straight from the oven. He opened it: cookies shaped like cartoon animals — stars, dogs, what might have been a dinosaur — with an actual pleasant buttery smell that suggested she knew what she was doing.
"Good timing," he said. "I was trying to figure out what to do for dessert."
Mathilda looked satisfied in the way that people looked when they'd done something they were proud of and someone had noticed without making a big deal out of it.
She clocked the apron he was still wearing. "You're cooking?"
"Just finished. You staying?"
She looked at the TV, then at the kitchen, then back at him with a twelve-year-old's attempt at casual deliberation. "What are you making?"
"Something from back home. Fair warning — it's spicy."
"How spicy?"
"You'll be fine," Luca said, which was not actually an answer to the question.
The answer, as it turned out, was: extremely spicy.
He'd dialed it back from his instinctive calibration and it was still, by any objective measure, a significant amount of chili. The dish was solid — layered, complex, genuinely good — and also capable of causing a person's lips to go briefly numb.
Mathilda stared at the plate when he set it down. She looked at the ratio of red to everything else. She looked at him.
"Is this normal?" she asked.
"For where I learned it, yes."
She took one bite with the considered caution of someone defusing something, chewed, and then sat very still for three seconds while her face ran through several distinct phases.
"Okay," she said carefully.
"You don't have to—"
"I'm fine." She took another bite, reached for her milk, drank half the glass, and kept going with the stubborn determination of someone who had decided finishing the plate was now a matter of personal principle.
Luca, for his part, was also drinking more water than he'd planned. The body he was working with hadn't grown up on this level of heat, and his tolerance was still catching up to his memory of what the dish was supposed to taste like.
They ate in companionable suffering, both of them sweating slightly, occasionally exhaling through their mouths, the kitchen warm and smelling like chili and butter cookies.
At some point Mathilda looked up and caught him wiping his forehead, and they both started laughing at the same time — the involuntary kind, the kind that happened when two people simultaneously recognized the absurdity of the situation they'd walked themselves into.
"You put that much chili and you can't even handle it," she said.
"It's about authenticity. The experience has to be correct."
"The experience is my mouth is broken."
"But authentic."
She drank more milk. "Your restaurant would go out of business in a week."
"Two weeks, minimum. The second week people would come back to confirm it was as bad as they remembered."
That got a real smile — not the controlled, surface-level expression she'd been deploying all evening, but an actual one, brief and unguarded, before she pulled it back.
There it is, Luca noted. That's what it looks like when she's not performing.
After dinner, while Luca cleared the table, Mathilda migrated back to the couch. The X-Men rerun had ended and she'd found a Spider-Man cartoon, which she was watching with the same focused attention as before, occasionally glancing over at him.
He caught her looking a few times. She didn't pretend she hadn't been.
"Question," she said, when he came back from the kitchen.
"Go ahead."
"What do you actually do? Like for work."
"Community administrator."
She stared at him with the flat expression of someone who had been lied to before and knew exactly what it felt like. "You threatened my father with a knife on your first day here and it looked like you'd done it a hundred times. Community administrators don't look like that."
"Some do."
"Luca."
He sat down in the armchair across from her. "What are you looking for?"
She thought about it — genuinely thought, not just performing consideration. "I'm not looking for anything specific. I just want to know if I'm right about you."
"Right about what?"
"That you're like my father's associates. Except — more. Like you're several levels above them." She paused. "I'm not scared of you. I just want to know if I'm reading it correctly."
He looked at her for a moment. Twelve years old, sitting on his couch with a glass of milk and accurate threat-assessment instincts that most adults never developed.
"You're reading it correctly," he said.
She nodded once, satisfied, and turned back to the TV. Spider-Man was currently upside-down on a building.
"Okay," she said. "Then you're a good person who does complicated things. I can work with that."
Luca: "..."
A twelve-year-old had just given him a character summary and moved on.
They watched Spider-Man in silence for a few minutes.
"Luca," Mathilda said, without looking away from the screen.
"Yeah."
"You're a good person." She said it with the directness of someone stating a thing they'd thought through and arrived at carefully. "People who bother to care about things that aren't their problem can't be all bad."
He didn't say anything to that.
On the TV, Spider-Man saved someone who hadn't asked to be saved, and swung away without explaining himself.
When it was time to walk Mathilda back across the hall, Luca had been quietly running through possible pretexts for getting inside the apartment. He needed maybe three minutes in there — long enough to place the remaining transmitters in the positions he'd mapped out mentally. Norman wasn't home, which was the only window he was likely to get for a while.
He hadn't figured out the angle yet when the door opened before he knocked.
Isa had changed clothes. The yoga pants were gone, replaced by a dress that communicated intent clearly enough that Luca didn't need to interpret it.
"I was hoping you'd come over," she said, in a tone that had been rehearsed at least once. "I put together a little something — welcome to the building, you know? Nothing big."
Behind him, Luca heard Mathilda make a sound that was technically not audible but communicated volumes.
The living room had been rearranged. Drinks on the coffee table, snacks in bowls, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit coming from somewhere, which was an interesting choice for a seduction attempt but also very 1996. Isa had clearly spent the last ninety minutes on this.
"Sure," Luca said pleasantly. "Thank you."
Mathilda, filing in behind him, shot him a look that said you're walking into this voluntarily?
He gave her a small nod that said I know what I'm doing.
She sat down on the far end of the couch and crossed her arms with the energy of someone at a movie they didn't choose.
Luca didn't drink anything Isa poured.
He accepted the glass Mathilda handed him — the one she'd gotten herself, from a sealed bottle, with the careful instincts of a kid who'd grown up around people who couldn't be fully trusted — and held onto that one for the evening.
The double standard was not subtle.
Mathilda noticed. She didn't say anything, but the corner of her mouth did something small and satisfied.
Isa noticed too. She recalibrated with the practiced flexibility of someone who was very used to adjusting mid-approach, and kept the energy light and social.
Luca was perfectly pleasant. He answered questions, laughed at the right moments, and over the course of forty minutes found excuses to move through most of the apartment — helping carry snacks from the kitchen, checking out a framed photo Isa pointed out, stepping down the hall to use the bathroom.
Each stop took him approximately thirty seconds longer than it needed to.
By the time he was back on the couch, all six transmitters were placed.
The Continental Hotel's equipment was exceptional. Each unit was the size of a coat button, voice-activated, with a two-week battery and a range that covered the whole floor. He'd used one gold coin for the set — a Continental gold coin, the currency that ran the underground economy's service layer. Cash bought things in the regular world. Gold coins bought things that didn't exist in the regular world: clean intelligence, medical services for injuries that couldn't go to a hospital, weapons with no paper trail, and the kind of body disposal that left no follow-up questions.
Luca had a modest collection of gold coins and spent them carefully.
The Continental was, of all the institutions he'd encountered in this world, the one he respected most. Neutral ground. Strict rules. A genuine commitment to the principle that some spaces needed to exist outside the chaos. No business on Continental grounds wasn't just policy — it was enforced absolutely, which made it the only rule in this city that actually meant something.
One of his long-term goals, sitting quietly at the back of his plans: open a branch. Put down roots in this ecosystem at the institutional level, not just the street level.
That was years away. First things first.
He stayed another twenty minutes, then made his excuses.
Isa walked him to the door with the careful poise of someone who hadn't gotten what they wanted but was committed to leaving the door open.
"You should come by again," she said.
"Sure," Luca said, warmly noncommittal.
He was halfway across the hall, key in hand, when he heard it through the thin wall — Isa's voice, a different register now, the social performance dropped.
"Matilda. Hey. Come sit with me a second."
A pause.
"I'm not going to yell at you. I just want to talk."
Luca stood very still.
"The remote's yours," Isa said. "All week. No arguments. I just — look. Is there anything you want? I'm asking seriously."
Another pause, longer.
Then Mathilda's voice, flat and guarded: "Why."
"Because I want to know more about him. And you know him better than I do."
"So you want to use me to get to Luca."
"I want—"
"That's a no," Mathilda said. "And if you touch me I'll tell him."
A silence.
Then the sound of Isa sitting down heavily on the couch, not hitting anyone, just — sitting.
[A domestic dispute was averted. Due to your presence, Isa chose restraint instead of violence. You defended the peace of your neighbors' home.]
[+1 Skill Point]
Luca looked at the notification for a moment.
He was standing in his own hallway. He had not intervened. He had not said a word. He was, at this exact moment, on the wrong side of a closed door.
And he'd apparently still defended peace.
He stared at the ceiling briefly.
With my face, he thought. I'm literally doing this with my face now.
He pocketed the key and turned to go inside.
Then he stopped.
Footsteps in the stairwell. Even, unhurried, the particular cadence of someone who moved like they'd permanently solved the problem of how to exist in a space without drawing attention to themselves.
The stairwell door opened.
The man who came through it was tall, lean through the shoulders, carrying a rectangular hard case in one hand and a single paper grocery bag in the other. Long coat. Round-framed tinted glasses. A houseplant — a medium-sized Aglaonema in a plain terra cotta pot — tucked carefully under his arm like it was the most natural thing to be carrying.
He moved through the hallway with the quiet economy of someone who had long since made peace with the idea that the world was something to navigate carefully rather than engage with.
He didn't look at Luca.
The panel lit up.
[Character Card Discovered: Léon][Rank: SSR][Source: Léon: The Professional (1994)]
[Skills: The Cleaner | Glass Act | Shadow Strike | Lone Wolf | Guardian's Oath]
[Bond: Stranger]
Léon stopped at the door two down from Luca's. Set the plant down with care. Produced a key.
Five skills. SSR. Same tier as Mathilda.
Luca kept his expression completely neutral.
Both of them, he thought. Both of them are in this building.
He gave Léon a single, brief nod — the kind neighbors exchanged when they had no particular reason to talk but also no reason to be rude.
Léon looked at him for exactly one second through those tinted lenses. Said nothing. Picked up his plant. Went inside.
The door closed without a sound.
Luca stood in the hallway for a moment.
Two SSR cards. Same floor. Separated by one apartment.
The long game, he reminded himself, was still very much a long game.
He went inside and started thinking about how to approach a man who had professionally eliminated all reasons for anyone to approach him.
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