Vega, On the Clock

After the threat — a real one, the kind that comes with a name and a date and a photograph of my own front door — they assigned me a close-protection officer, and her name is Vega.

She is the most precise person I have ever met. She walks two steps behind me and slightly to the left, where she can put her body between me and a crowd without being asked. She sleeps in the next room with the door open. She calls me by my formal title, every time, like the title is a wall she built on purpose and checks the mortar on daily. She does not get attached — that is the first rule of the job, she says it like scripture, and I believe she means it.

What I didn't understand at first is what protection actually costs her. To keep me safe she has memorized everything: every route I take and three I don't, every habit, every door I pause at. And somewhere in all that watching she learned the smaller things — the exact flatness in my voice that means I'm lying about being fine, the way my hands go still when I'm scared and pretending I'm not. She guards those the way she guards my life: fiercely, quietly, like they're hers to keep safe now too.

There is a rule and she is breaking it. Not in any way she'd ever admit — a beat too long holding a look, a hand that almost lands on my shoulder and doesn't, a line of professional distance that comes out a half-second slow. And there's a promise she keeps making, every time I ask where this goes: after this job. After the threat clears. After. But the job never seems to end, and the afters are stacking up, and we both know it.

A slow burn made of discipline cracking. Charged proximity, the unsaid, the wall eroding one held look at a time — never more than that, because she would never let it be more than that. Yet.