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There was an unspoken taxonomy to the arguments they'd overheard, a ranking system that had developed organically over months of shared walls and mutual nosiness that neither of them had ever acknowledged out loud as a hobby.
At the very bottom sat the multitude of couple's spats, raised voices over dishes left in the sink, passive-aggression about money, the occasional door slam that sent a shudder up the stairwell. Memorable enough to whisper about, forgettable by morning. They were the background noise of apartment living. Above those were the neighbor feuds, which tended to have more longevity and recurring characters. The man on the third floor, for instance, had developed what could only be described as a personal philosophy about the shared laundry machines. He believed, deeply and without room for negotiation, that using the machines after eight in the evening was an act of aggression. He'd once delivered a seven-minute monologue through the wall about it, his voice cycling through different levels of disbelief and righteous indignation in a way that had kept Mc's hand pressed flat over her mouth the entire time. They'd given it a four out of ten. Passionate, yes. But lacking a coherent third act.
The crown jewel of their collection, the undisputed, unanimous ten, had happened six weeks ago on a Tuesday night when neither of them had been planning to be awake at all.
A woman two floors up had discovered, in real time and on a phone call loud enough to rattle the ceiling, that her sister had not in fact been spending the money she'd borrowed over three months on medical bills. The revelation had arrived via a tagged photo. A beach. Sunglasses. A drink with an umbrella in it. The sister had apparently forgotten how public social media was.
Mc had knocked on Xavier's door within thirty seconds of hearing it start. They'd lifted his couch as close to the window as they could and crammed onto it with the window cranked open and the lights off, barely breathing, communicating entirely in wide eyes, hand gestures, eventually finding the post themselves. The ending was pretty unfullfilling, sadly, one party just hung up mid-sentence. Still, it was enough to make them sit in silence for a full thirty seconds.
"That", she had finally whispered, "was a masterpiece."
Xavier had nodded, solemn as a pallbearer. "A classic for the ages."
She knew it was strange, if she looked at it from the outside. Two hunters, people who tracked Wanderers, filed incident reports and operated under the jurisdiction of an organization that very much expected a certain level of professional gravity, spending their off hours pressed against windows listening to their neighbors fight about who forgot to return a borrowed casserole dish. It didn't exactly fit the profile. But there was something she'd never quite found the words for in how it felt. The city was loud and largely indifferent. Her job asked a lot of her in ways she couldn't always process. And there was something grounding, almost tender, about turning the noise of the building into something shared. A running story. Familiar characters. A reason to knock on someone's door at ten o'clock at night and not have to explain yourself.
Xavier never needed an explanation. He'd just appear, quiet and already paying attention, and settle in beside her like the invitation had always been open.
She'd given him her door code after the third time. He'd handed her his over a cup of coffee the following week, the exchange so casual it hadn't even warranted its own conversation.
She hadn't thought much about that until tonight.
The lamp on her nightstand placed everything in a low amber wash, the kind of light that softened edges and made the room feel smaller than it was. Mc had one leg tucked under her, phone balanced on her knee, a half-read article on her screen that she'd stopped absorbing about twenty minutes ago. Her head was tilted to the side against Sylus's shoulder, slightly deafening her to the faint hum of the string lights she'd hung along the top of her bookshelf. Outside, the city made its usual sounds: distant traffic, someone's music two buildings over, the occasional voice bouncing off concrete.
Her room, she was privately aware, looked nothing like the space of someone who hunted Wanderers for a living. It looked like someone's idea of a cozy disaster. There were the string lights. The knitted blanket tossed over the back of her desk chair. The stack of books on her nightstand that kept growing because she kept buying them and not finishing them. And the stuffed animals that had slowly but steadily accumulated, each one with a name she would sooner retire from the field than admit to, all arranged on her bed in a configuration that had been slightly disrupted by the current situation.
The current situation being Sylus.
Sylus didn't comment on any of it. He never did, though she'd caught him looking once, something quiet and amused in his expression that she hadn't been able to fully decode.
He'd rested on her pillows with the confidence of someone who had decided a space was his and hadn't felt the need to announce it. One arm was folded around her, thumb tracing lazily along the exposed skin under her shifted shirt. His phone was in his other hand, tilted at a lazy angle. He hadn't bothered with a shirt after the second hour, and she had long since stopped pretending she wasn't aware of that. The lamp caught the lines of him in a way that she was handling entirely normally and with complete composure. One of her stuffed animals, a round little bear, more worn than the others, was wedged unceremoniously against his ribs where it had gotten caught when he'd shifted earlier. He hadn't moved it.
She was focusing very hard on the article she wasn't reading.
Sylus in her space had been her idea. She'd decided to finally ask. She planned it carefully, casually, over one of the late dinners she'd gotten used to eating in his kitchen in the N109 Zone while he watched her with that expression she'd still hadn't fully decoded, the one that made her feel simultaneously observed and entirely safe. She'd made a reasonable case: the frequency of her disappearances was starting to generate questions at work. It was a logistical concern. A practical adjustment. She'd kept her voice even the whole time.
He had listened, said nothing for a moment, and then, "If my kitten wants me to come to her, I'll come to her."
She hadn't dignified that with a response. She'd also not been able to stop smiling for the rest of the evening, which she thought she'd hidden reasonably well and was almost certainly wrong about.
Having him here was different. Easier in some ways, sharper in others. She knew his world, the particular weight of the N109 Zone, the way the air felt different there, the way everything around him operated at a specific frequency she'd had to learn to read. Here, he was in hers. Her apartment room, her string lights, her ridiculous stuffed animals. She kept expecting it to feel like a collision and instead it just felt like...him. Like he took up whatever space was available and made it seem like the space had always been shaped that way.
It was, frankly, inconvenient. In a way that she loved but wouldn't admit.
It was nearly nine when the sound broke through.
It started low. The quality of a voice that was trying to maintain control and wasn't quite winning. It was still measured, still choosing words, but with a current running underneath it that was making the whole structure vibrate. Then a second voice cut through, younger and not bothering with control at all, and the first voice gave up the effort entirely.
Mc was on her feet before she'd consciously decided to move.
She crossed her room in three steps, muscle memory carrying her straight to the window. She pressed the heel of her hand against the sill and tilted it open, and cold air spilled in immediately, carrying the voices up with it. Below, under the orange wash of the streetlights, a woman stood beside a parked car with her arms folded tight across her chest. On the front steps of the building across the street, a teenage girl stood with the rigid posture of someone who was furious and wanted to make sure the posture communicated it.
Mc leaned in slightly, focusing.
"What's gotten the kitten so worked up?" The voice came from behind her, unhurried and warm with private amusement. "A flock of pigeons fly by?"
She turned just long enough to level a look at him that read quiet, I mean it and caught the slow, satisfied curl of his smile before she turned back. He wasn't even looking up from his phone. She could feel the amusement from across the room.
She tuned back in. The daughter was talking about friends. A house. "It would only be an hour, it's not even that far." The mother's response had the exhausted cadence of someone explaining a decision they'd already made twice and were losing patience with having to justify a third time. She didn't see why she should make an entire trip just to bring her back in an hour. She didn't understand why this was the hill her daughter kept choosing to die on, on a school night, at this hour.
Xavier, she thought suddenly. Xavier is definitely going to hear this.
The thought landed with the clean, decisive quality of something catastrophic.
She turned from the window. The math worked itself out automatically, the way threat-assessment did when the situation was familiar enough. Xavier lived one floor directly above her. His balcony and hers were angled in roughly the same direction. They had never, not once, failed to converge on a fight this loud and this close. He had her door code. She'd given it to him herself.
And Sylus was in her bed.
Sylus, infamous leader of Onychinus. Sylus, who the Hunter's Association had entire files on and not a single reliable photograph of. Sylus, who was currently shirtless, occupying her pillows, and flanked on one side by a bear named Mr. Paul, looking like he had absolutely nowhere else to be in the world.
The image was, in isolation, almost unbearably endearing.
In context, it was the single most stressful thing she had ever seen.
She ran through her options in approximately one and a half seconds. She could text Xavier, but he never had his phone volume on when they were doing this, he found the notifications distracting. She could go up to his apartment, but she'd already heard the argument and once she'd heard an argument she couldn't unhear it, it was a compulsion, and also going upstairs would take time she didn't have. She could just-
The soft electronic chime of her door lock disengaging cut through the room.
Every muscle in her body made a decision simultaneously.
The door swung open. Xavier moved his way through like always- quietly, no greeting, body angled toward the window already because he'd heard it on the way down and his feet had brought him here and his attention was already fixed on the street below. He had a sweater on that he'd clearly grabbed in a hurry, or was already sleeping in as the collar was slightly askew. He crossed the room toward her and she stepped automatically sideways to make space and then stopped, because his eyes had gone to the bed.
He looked at Sylus.
Sylus looked up from his phone.
The two of them regarded each other with the particular quality of two people who had just become aware of each other's existence and were each, in their own way, processing it.
Mc stood between them and felt something in her chest try to exit through her sternum.
She had no idea if Xavier knew what Sylus looked like. That was the thing-nobody did, not really, not reliably. The Association had extensive documentation on Onychinus: the organization, its reach, the network of dealings and influence that had made it what it was. But Sylus himself was a deliberate absence in all of it. A shape that everyone described differently. Tall, they said. Dark. Something about his eyes. Something that made people want to stop looking and leave the room. The descriptions she'd encountered never quite converged, which was either coincidence or extremely careful management, and knowing Sylus, she had her suspicions.
What she didn't know was whether Xavier had seen something that the others hadn't. Whether he'd gotten closer to an answer than the files showed. He was good at his job, quietly exceptional at it, he's the reason she even managed to get in the N109 Zone in the first place and that was not a reassuring thought to be having right now.
She crossed the room. Her fingers found the sleeve of Xavier's sweater before her brain had issued the specific instruction, and she tugged him gently but decisively toward the window, putting herself between the two of them in a way she hoped looked casual and wasn't.
"Xavier." Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to. She kept her eyes forward, facing the window, making this feel like the most normal possible version of what was happening. "This is my boyfriend...Sy." She said it easily, like a small name, like it was nothing. "Sy, this is Xavier. We work together at the Hunter's Association."
A beat of silence. Just long enough.
"Nice to meet you."
"Likewise."
She genuinely could not have told anyone who said which. Her heartbeat had taken up residence directly in her ears and was making listening difficult. She kept her gaze fixed on the street below, on the mother still standing by the car, on the daughter still stiff-shouldered on the steps. She breathed. She waited.
Nothing happened.
The air in the room shifted into a quiet resettlement, like something that had been held under tension had been set back down. Mc became aware of Xavier moving to stand beside her at the window, falling into the familiar position, and she exhaled slowly through her nose.
Then he leaned in, his voice dropping to the careful murmur they always used, the barely-there whisper designed not to carry, "I think that's the same mother and daughter. From last time. The car ride argument."
Something in her chest released like a pressure valve.
Right. Yes. The argument. The reason they were both here. She was supposed to be paying attention to the argument.
She turned back to the window and actually let herself look.
The daughter wanted to go to a friend's house. That much was clear. It was past nine, she could see the timestamp on her phone screen when she glanced down, 9:12, the numbers feeling strangely significant, and it was a school night, which the mother was pointing out with increasing specificity. The daughter kept insisting it would only be an hour, maybe less, that she'd be back before eleven, that it genuinely wasn't a big deal. The mother kept coming back to the logistics: the drive there, the drive back, the hour of sleep she'd be losing, the homework that still needed to happen, the particular exhaustion of being the person who always had to do the driving when the destination never seemed worth it.
It had the quality of a conversation that had happened before. Many times. In this same configuration, with these same points, each of them so familiar with the other's position that they were barely listening anymore, just cycling through their established lines.
Then the mother got in her car.
Mc and Xavier both straightened slightly, the way they always did when one party disengaged. Departure usually meant things were wrapping up.
The car pulled away from the curb. Moved forward. Turned the corner.
Xavier murmured, "She went around the block."
Mc squinted into the dark. The headlights hadn't disappeared, they'd just shifted angle, and she could see them stopped at the corner, idling.
Oh, she mouthed.
The daughter slammed the front door. Apparently operating under the assumption that the audience had left, said several very sincere things about how she felt regarding the situation. The specific words weren't entirely audible but the sentiment was clear. Honest and unfiltered and full of the particular anguish of being fifteen or sixteen and certain that nobody understood anything about you and that this specific injustice was a perfect symbol of every injustice that had come before it. She said what she thought about the decision. She said what she thought about the reasoning. She possibly said a few other things that she would, in retrospect, regret.
The car reversed.
Slowly. Back down the street.
Oh no, Mc mouthed.
The mother got out. And stood there. And listened.
Xavier made a sound beside her that was not quite a laugh, quickly suppressed.
The mother went back inside. The daughter, apparently not having registered the car's return, continued.
Mc and Xavier were definitely not breathing.
Then the mother's voice came again, from inside now, and it was quoting. Directly quoting. Every word her daughter had said, repeated back to her at conversational volume, each sentence landing like something measured. And then the controlled quality cracked, and the real volume arrived, and it covered the lack of respect and the late hour and- "those same friends", said the mother, "the ones you want to go see tonight", and she said something that Mc and Xavier both leaned forward for - "they left you at the mall. In January. And you still-"
Something being carried down stairs. Several somethings.
A car door. Two. Three.
The engine.
Silence.
Total, ringing silence.
Mc and Xavier stood perfectly still for another five seconds. Then she exhaled, long and slow, and felt her shoulders drop two inches.
"She took the electronics," Xavier said quietly.
"She documented the speech and then took the electronics," Mc corrected.
He made the small sound that served as his version of genuine appreciation. "The reversal with the car was good. Structurally."
"Unexpected. You don't see a lot of mid-argument staging that clean." She paused. "The callback about the mall friends elevated it significantly."
"Agreed. Retroactive context." He considered for a moment. "Eight and a half."
She thought about it. The car maneuver had been impressive. The direct quotation had been bold. The ending was abrupt but earned. "Eight and a half," she confirmed.
They gave it the usual grace period, a quiet few minutes to see whether there was a second act, a part two, a rebuttal coming from inside. The building held its quiet. No voices. No doors. The streetlights burned steadily and the street below was empty again, the whole scene returned to its ordinary state as if none of it had happened.
Xavier stepped back from the window. He glanced toward her bed, just once, a brief and unreadable sweep, and then turned toward the door.
"Night," he said, quiet and easy, the same way he always said it.
"Night," she managed.
The door clicked shut. She listened to his footsteps in the hall, the sound of him heading for the stairwell, and then nothing. Just the ambient sounds of the building returning to normal.
She stood at the window for another moment before she turned around.
Sylus hadn't moved. That was the thing about him, the quality that she'd never entirely gotten used to, the absolute lack of restlessness. He occupied space the way a fixed point occupied space. One arm now folded behind his head, phone still in his hand, eyes tracking something on the screen. A couple of her stuffed animals had been rearranged at some point, she noticed, shifted into a new configuration on his side of the bed. The round bear that had been wedged against him was now sitting slightly more upright, propped carefully against his arm like it had been placed there with intention.
He didn't comment on it. He didn't comment on a lot of things, and she had spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about what the things he didn't comment on said about him.
He looked up when she crossed back to the bed. His head tilted slightly, and there was something in the amber-lit quality of his gaze that she recognized like attention. The particular way he had of looking at her that made her feel like he was reading something she hadn't handed him.
One eyebrow lifted.
"Funny thing," he said, unhurried. "Kittens tend to avoid danger." A brief pause, his eyes moving over her face. "You seem to be in the habit of collecting it."
The corner of his mouth curved, just barely, and she understood from the specific shape of it that he meant both things at once-the argument, the fifteen minutes of controlled chaos, and also, generally, himself.
She exhaled and dropped onto the bed, reaching for the nearest pillow and pulling it over her face.
It came out muffled, the explanation. The whole system, the rule, how it had started. The taxonomy, the ranking, the history of the good ones and the mediocre ones and the undisputed ten. The way the building had become a kind of ongoing story that she and Xavier shared between floors. It was easier to explain with the pillow over her face. It was easier not to be looked at while she described something that she knew sounded, from the outside, completely unhinged.
Sylus listened. He didn't interrupt, didn't ask questions yet, just let her talk. It was another thing about him that had surprised her early on and hadn't stopped surprising her, the quality of his attention when he chose to give it. Most people listened in order to respond. He listened like the listening itself was the point.
When she got to the door code, she felt him shift.
"He has your door code." Not a question. Careful, neutral.
She moved the pillow far enough to look at him. "We both do. It's a mutual thing. For emergencies and-this."
He held her gaze for a moment. His expression didn't change significantly, which told her very little, because his expression rarely did.
"Are you jealous?" she asked.
The sound he made was low and genuine- a deep laugh when something caught him off guard enough. He looked at her with an expression that was somewhere between fond and quietly certain of itself.
"I'm the one in your bed," he said. "Surrounded by-" he glanced at the bear propped against his arm, "-all of these." His eyes came back to her. "Tell me exactly what I'd have reason to be jealous of."
She opened her mouth. She had a response. It was a reasonable response, even.
He moved. The man was always unhurried right up until he wasn't, and by the time she registered the shift she was already on her back, looking up at him, the stuffed bear bumping off somewhere into the dark. He kissed her in a way that didn't leave room for the response she'd been preparing, or for independent thought in general, the kind of kiss that she felt from her throat to her fingertips and that made her hands find his shoulders without making any conscious stops along the way. When he finally pulled back she was aware that her breathing had done something embarrassing and that she couldn't quite recall what she'd been about to say.
He looked down with an expression of warmth and intention and something that sat underneath both of them like bedrock. Then his mouth found the curve of her throat, and she felt the slow deliberate press of his teeth, and the warmth that followed it, and she made a sound that she would be taking to her grave.
"Besides," he murmured against her skin, "as far as I know, I'm the only one who can get my kitten purring quite as much as she does."
She didn't answer. She was, at that particular moment, not in a position to answer.
Outside, the building settled back into itself. Somewhere above them, a door closed, Xavier's, probably, the familiar sound of him returning upstairs. The streetlights burned orange through her curtains. The city made its ordinary sounds. And in the amber-lit quiet of her cozy room, her stuffed animals observed everything with their usual dignified silence and kept her secrets, as they always had.