# Chapter 2: The Safe Life
Anna Vance had spent five years building a life so unremarkable that no one would think to look for her here, and most mornings she almost believed it herself.
The alarm chimed at 7:00 AM, a gentle piano melody that wouldn't startle Leo awake in the next room. Aria—no, Anna, always Anna now—silenced it and lay still for three breaths, listening to the sounds of a quiet Tuesday morning in Beacon. No sirens. No shouting. No gunfire echoing off brownstone walls.
Just the hum of the refrigerator downstairs and the distant rumble of a garbage truck making its rounds.
She'd chosen this life deliberately: the modest two-bedroom rental in a neighborhood full of young families, the sensible sedan instead of anything that might draw attention, the carefully constructed normalcy that felt like armor most days and a cage on others.
This morning, it felt like both.
Aria pushed back the covers and padded down the hall to Leo's room, easing open the door painted with glow-in-the-dark stars. Her son slept sprawled across his twin bed, one arm flung over his stuffed elephant, dark hair messy against the pillow. He had her hair, her nose, her olive skin.
But those eyes—those impossibly dark, intense eyes—those were all his father's.
She'd known it the moment the nurse placed him in her arms. Known that someday, someone would see him and recognize.
Not yet. Not today.
"Leo, baby." She smoothed his hair gently. "Time to wake up."
He mumbled something unintelligible, burrowing deeper into his blankets.
"Come on, sweet boy. Ms. Rodriguez made those cinnamon muffins you like for morning snack."
That got him. Leo's eyes blinked open—dark and alert even in sleep-fog—and he sat up. "The ones with the cream cheese?"
"Those exact ones." Aria kissed his forehead. "Fifteen minutes, okay? Brush teeth, get dressed, and I'll make pancakes."
"Chocolate chip?"
"Don't push your luck."
But she made them anyway, because what was the point of building a safe life if she couldn't spoil him a little? Leo ate at the kitchen table while she packed his lunch, chattering about the ant farm his class was building and whether ants had friends or just coworkers.
"I think they're more like coworkers," Aria said, slipping his sandwich into his Spider-Man lunchbox. "They all have jobs to do."
"That's sad." Leo frowned, syrup on his chin. "Everybody needs friends."
"You're right." She wiped his face with a napkin, chest tight. "Everybody does."
Bright Horizons Preschool occupied a converted Victorian house on Maple Street, all cheerful yellow paint and playground equipment that met every safety standard Aria had obsessively researched. She walked Leo to his classroom at 8:15 AM, watching him join the cluster of four-year-olds building block towers.
His teacher, Ms. Rodriguez, smiled from the reading corner. "Morning, Anna! We're doing butterfly life cycles today."
"He'll love that." Aria crouched to Leo's level. "Be good. I'll pick you up at three-thirty."
"Okay, Mama." He hugged her neck, that unselfconscious grip of childhood that made her want to bundle him up and run. "Love you."
"Love you more than the sky."
"Love you more than dinosaurs."
Their ritual complete, she forced herself to walk away, resisting the urge to look back. In the parking lot, she sat in her car for a full minute, breathing through the anxiety that spiked every single morning when she left him.
Five years. Five years of this routine, and she still expected someone to be waiting when she turned around.
The drive to VanceTech Securities took twelve minutes, long enough for NPR to deliver headlines about trade negotiations and weather patterns, nothing about organized crime or missing Grimaldi daughters. Downtown Beacon was waking up: coffee shops opening, joggers on the riverside path, a normalcy so profound it sometimes felt like mockery.
Her office occupied the second floor of a renovated textile mill, shared space with a graphic design firm and a CPA. Sarah Chen was already there, two coffee cups from the good place steaming on Aria's desk.
"You're an angel." Aria shrugged out of her jacket, accepting the cup.
"I'm really not." Sarah settled into the chair across from her, iPad balanced on her knee. "I scheduled the Monroe Manufacturing follow-up for two PM, and Jenkins Pharmaceuticals wants a quote on their new data infrastructure. Also, someone from the Beacon Business Council called about sponsoring that cybersecurity awareness seminar in May."
Aria pulled up her calendar, scanning the day's commitments. Three client meetings, two proposals to finish, one conference call with a potential vendor. A Tuesday so ordinary it made her teeth ache.
"The Monroe pitch went well?" Sarah asked.
"They signed yesterday. Full security audit, implementation package, eighteen-month contract."
"Hell yes!" Sarah raised her coffee in mock toast. "That's three major clients this quarter. We're killing it."
We. As if this business was built on partnership rather than necessity, as if Aria had chosen this path instead of stumbling into it while pregnant and desperate, teaching herself network security from library books because it was something she could do from anywhere, something that required brains instead of connections.
She'd gotten good at it. Better than good. VanceTech Securities had a reputation now, small but solid, the kind of firm that mid-sized companies trusted with their data because Anna Vance delivered results and didn't ask uncomfortable questions.
It was a good life. A safe life.
So why did her chest feel tight?
"Hey." Sarah leaned forward. "You okay? You've been weird since last week."
"Weird how?"
"I don't know. Jumpy. You've checked the locks on the office door like six times this morning."
Aria forced a laugh. "Just being careful. There's been an uptick in phishing attempts regionally. Did you see the FBI alert?"
"Yeah, but that doesn't explain why you've been staring at the parking lot like someone's going to—" Sarah's phone buzzed. "Hold that thought. Client call."
She ducked out, and Aria exhaled slowly, pulling up her security logs. The blocked intrusion from six weeks ago still nagged at her. She'd traced it to a shell company in Brooklyn, and the attack pattern matched Grimaldi front operations with sixty percent probability.
Sixty percent wasn't certainty. Sixty percent was paranoia talking.
Except Aria had survived five years by trusting her paranoia.
She ran the shell company through three more databases, finding layers of corporate obfuscation that screamed organized crime. The attack had been sophisticated, probing her clients' systems, looking for...what? Weaknesses? Connections?
Her?
The office phone rang, making her jump.
"VanceTech Securities, this is Anna."
"Ms. Vance, this is David Monroe from Monroe Manufacturing. Just wanted to say thank you again for yesterday's presentation. Your team really knows their stuff."
Team. Just her and Sarah, but she'd learned to let clients imagine a larger operation.
"We're glad you're pleased, Mr. Monroe. Your IT director mentioned some concerns about regional threats?"
"Yeah." Monroe's voice dropped. "Between you and me, he's been seeing some weird probe attempts on our network over the past two months. Nothing's gotten through—your security protocols handled it—but the volume's increased. Corporate espionage, maybe. He wanted your opinion on whether we should escalate to the FBI."
Aria's grip tightened on the phone. "What kind of probes?"
"Advanced persistent threat pattern, he said. Whatever that means. Sophisticated enough to make him nervous."
"I'll have Sarah reach out to coordinate a deeper analysis. In the meantime, keep those monitoring protocols active."
She hung up and immediately pulled up regional threat assessments. There—buried in industry reports from the past eight weeks—a pattern of coordinated data probes targeting mid-sized firms in upstate New York. Too sophisticated for amateur hackers. Too careful for opportunistic criminals.
Too deliberate.
Someone was looking for something. Or someone.
Aria picked up Leo at 3:30 PM, finding him covered in finger paint and bubbling with excitement about butterfly metamorphosis. They stopped for groceries, then drove to Riverside Park because he'd been good and the afternoon was warm and she needed the illusion of normalcy like oxygen.
Leo played on the jungle gym while she sat on a bench, one eye on him, one eye on her phone, running that Brooklyn shell company through another database.
The black SUV pulled into the parking lot at 4:17 PM.
Tinted windows. New York plates. Engine running. No one got out.
Aria's pulse spiked. She forced herself to stay seated, watching Leo swing from the monkey bars, counting seconds. The SUV sat there for three minutes. Five. Ten.
She pulled out her phone, casually angling for a photo of the license plate. The moment her camera focused, the SUV's engine revved.
Seventeen minutes after it arrived, it pulled away. Slow. Deliberate.
Leo ran over, breathless and happy. "Mama, did you see? I went all the way across without falling!"
"I saw, baby. You were amazing." Her voice sounded normal. How did her voice sound normal? "Ready to go home?"
In the car, she memorized the license plate and ran it through a civilian database on her phone at the next red light. Registered to a corporate fleet service in Manhattan. Primary client list: unavailable.
Manhattan.
The word echoed in her skull like a death knell.
That night, after Leo fell asleep clutching his elephant, Aria went to her bedroom closet and pulled down the box from the top shelf. Inside: fifty thousand in cash, three sets of forged documents, Leo's birth certificate with no father listed, and a burner phone that she'd kept charged for five years.
Just in case.
She checked the cash. Confirmed the documents were current. Tested the phone.
Everything ready to run.
But run where? She had no family, no friends except Sarah who knew nothing, no connections that weren't built on the foundation of Anna Vance's carefully constructed lies.
And someone in Manhattan knew enough to send a surveillance team to Beacon.
Aria opened her laptop and accessed VanceTech's security logs, searching for breaches she might have missed. The code scrolled past, familiar and clean. No intrusions. No back doors. Nothing.
But nothing didn't explain the SUV.
Her hands shook as she opened an encrypted messaging system she hadn't touched in five years, a relic of her old life when the Grimaldi family still owned her. The dead-drop protocol was simple: coded phrases sent through a network of burner accounts, designed to be untraceable.
She'd kept one contact active. One person who might warn her if the past came hunting.
Aria typed carefully: The daughter asks: is the family hunting?
Her finger hovered over send. This was the gamble. Reaching into her past meant exposing herself, confirming she was alive, giving them a trail to follow.
But if they already knew...
She hit send.
The message disappeared into encrypted darkness, and Aria sat in her quiet bedroom in her safe house in her normal life, listening to Leo breathe in the next room, and waited for the past to answer.