By Heidi Christensen
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The moon over Savannah hung low and syrup-sweet, silvering the Spanish moss like an old promise. Alegría moved through the city as if she had always belonged to its humid nights — a ghost in a sundress, a question in perfume. They called her Leggy when they spoke of the ways men faltered at the sight of her: long limbs, a laugh that could untether prudence. What they did not know, and what they rarely suspected, was the precise and terrible faith that chartered every step she took. Her hunger was not for kisses or for the clumsy ownership of lovers; it was for justice — a final tally, counted in the currency of malefactors’ downfall.
She had learned to work in two registers: one soft and disarming, the other cold and inevitable. Belle taught her how to kneel and mend a torn skirt. Jerome taught her how to listen for truth in the half-sentences of old men. Daniel Boone Pride — Charley — had taught her, without meaning to, how to make the world answer for what it had taken. He had been taken in battle; the map of that absence was the constellated grief in her chest. Kill a girl’s father in battle, and she would lay down her life to get home to him.
Sven Olsen found her on another midnight street corner, leaning against a lamp-post, a cigarette gone to a dutiful nub in her fingers. He had the bulk and quiet of someone who had been trained to wait. He had the face of a man who could see both a threat and the cost of removing it. He was her anchor — sometimes her conscience — and today the set of his jaw told her he had come to deliver a final insistence.
“Stop this,” Sven said without ceremony. He smelled of rain and gun oil, of earnest things. “You’ve got a family that loves you. You’ve got a life that can still be ordinary, Alegría.”
She let the cigarette burn between them a long breath. “Ordinary is for people who can afford not to mend the world,” she said. Her voice was an edge; she did not ask, she stated. “You held the river when it flooded you once, Sven. You know what it means to choose.”
He stepped closer, the city shrinking to the distance between their bodies. “I don’t know what good it does to brand yourself in blood,” he said. “The men you chase — they make a market of grief. You’re not the only one who can catch them.”
“And yet,” she said, and the moon listened, “they do not always meet the end their bargains deserve. The military has teeth. Team USA has laws and muscle and a wrong-headed, blessed appetite for justice. I lure them in — I make them see home as an easier lie than exile. They welcome the soft face of a woman and they bring their ruin with them. If I walk away, who will lead them to the place where justice can—” she stopped, because any further words would make her a prosecutor instead of a daughter.
Sven’s hand found her wrist. For a long beat he was the man she might have married in another life — patient, stubborn, practical. “You think you can play bait and not be eaten, Leggy?”
“I think,” she said, and in the small syllable lived a long list of funerals, the metallic scent of soil, the way a flag folds in the hands of someone who cannot be brought back, “that I can take the risk instead of letting them go free.”
He flinched, not from the logic but from the reckoning. “Alegría — there are other ways to serve. You don’t have to become what you hunt.”
She let the lamp-post light wash her face into a softer argument. “Tell me how to serve, Sven Olsen, and I’ll consider it. But I will not step back into a life that pretends my father’s absence was tidy.”
He closed his mouth on more words and let out a breath that could have been a prayer. “Then let me at least be with you. Let me be the one who writes the plan, who carries the weight with you.”
She studied him. He had never liked the things she did; he thought them unbecoming of the woman he loved. Yet he offered himself in the practical geometry of a partner. “No,” she said finally, gentle and unyielding. “This is the distance I have to walk alone. If you insist on walking at my side, you will be forced to witness the worst of me. I will not let you inherit that.”
Sven’s eyes held the faint bright of a man who had nearly given up the fight of persuasion. “So you’ll go on,” he said, a statement that had the dull, terrible acceptance of a man who loved someone brave enough to break herself for a cause. “And I’ll tell you this: do it smart. Don’t let the mission swallow the girl.”
She smiled then — a small, private thing. “You always were the moralist, Olsen.”
Her next job was the sort that smelled faintly of money and worse hearts: a contractor in Savannah who trafficked in counterfeit visas and the bodies that needed them. He kept late hours and long habits, because that’s where shame hides — in repeated actions. Alegría became his mirrored ease, his welcome to a false sense of safety. She laughed at his jokes, let her hand linger against his palm, and promised him another night if he would only…”
She learned his patterns as sure as a reader learns a favorite book. The man believed in his illusion of control. He believed, as all predators do, that charm could be measured and purchased. He believed his own invincibility.
On the night the plan closed, the military team moved like a tide. Alegría had written the map in her mind: a wink created, a route given, a promise that tasted like sugar. When the men came — some bristling with the small cruelty of smugness, some resigned — they came into the arms of the law. Team USA took the rest. The contractor saw dawn with cuffs and a new, legal clarity.
Alegría watched from a distance as the world she had baited folded in on itself. There was a blood-price behind every arrest: the truth that a woman unmoored could never recover. She felt it in the hollow that night made in her chest — a familiar, aching faith.
Sven met her on the riverwalk when the team left. He looked at her without accusation, his own soul visibly bruised. “You did it,” he said simply, as if that were praise and also an indictment.
She let the river decide how to answer. “For Charley,” she said, because sometimes a life needed only a single, true dedication to make sense. “For every father who didn’t come home. If that makes me monstrous, then let me be monstrous on the right side of the ledger.”
Sven wrapped an arm around her shoulders like someone trying to thread a life back together. “Then come home with me,” he urged, soft and practical as always. “Come home before you lose so much of yourself you cannot find your way back.”
She rested her head against him, the city breathing around them. “Maybe one day,” she whispered. “When my ledger is balanced.”
They stood there, two figures against the indifferent stars, and for once the decision was not about action but about the possibility of return. Alegría knew the bargain she had made. She had traded pieces of herself so that killers would find their way to a proper, terrible justice. That trade might one day leave her empty. But until the ledger read even, until night yielded to a kind of peace that felt like arriving, she would keep walking the thin line between seduction and salvation.
And if she should fall in the process — if a man’s hand closed around hers with blood on it — she would expect Sven Olsen to carry her home, or else bury her where she had chosen to plant herself, under that same magnolia-scented sky that raised and remembered fathers.
