Chapter 5: The Viral Incident
The lights hummed their eternal, grey complaint. Eric stared at the spreadsheet on his monitor, a column of numbers that refused to mean anything, and wondered if Sophia was having a better morning than he was. She usually was, these days. She woke with a stretch and a grin, already planning her day like it was a covert operation. He found it endearing. And terrifying.
His phone buzzed.
Then buzzed again.
Then it began a frantic, rattling chorus against the surface of his desk, a percussion of notifications that made the analyst in the next cubicle, a man named Perkins, look over with raised eyebrows.
Eric picked it up. The lock screen was a waterfall of messages. A group chat with his old university friends. A text from Perkins. Another from a woman in accounting he'd spoken to exactly once. And scattered through it all, a cascade of links, images, and video thumbnails.
"Isn't that your girlfriend's gallery?" Perkins said, already leaning over the partition, his voice a mix of curiosity and glee.
Eric didn't answer. He'd found the video. It was blurry, shot on a phone at a bad angle, but the figure in the middle of the chaos was unmistakable. Dark hair in a perfect ponytail. A tailored blazer that cost more than his monthly rent. Emerald eyes that were narrowed with a focus he'd only ever seen when she was deciding between two shades of paint for a feature wall.
Sophia.
The headline scrolling beneath the video read: "MUSEUM MIRACLE: CURATOR STOPS ARMED GANG IN BROAD DAYLIGHT."
"What the hell," Eric whispered.
The video played. Three men in balaclavas, one carrying a crowbar, had burst through the main entrance of the Calthorpe Gallery. A security guard was already on the ground, clutching his arm. Sophia had been standing near the ticket desk, a coffee in one hand and a catalogue in the other. She'd set the coffee down, very deliberately, and walked toward the men.
"Don't be a hero," Eric muttered at the screen.
She wasn't a hero. She was something else. The man with the crowbar swung it at her head, a wide, clumsy arc. Sophia ducked under it, her movement fluid, and then her leg swept up and around in a spinning back kick that connected with the side of his skull. He went down like a sack of wet laundry. The phone camera shook, and someone in the background screamed, but the footage kept rolling.
"WTF mate," Perkins said, his voice high with disbelief. "She kicked that guy in the head."
Eric couldn't respond. The video cut to another angle, this one from a security camera, grainy and elevated. It showed Sophia sliding under a lowering security gate in the gallery's service corridor, her body parallel to the floor, inches of clearance. She rolled to her feet and kept running.
"I need to see the rest," Eric said, but his hands were shaking, and he kept scrolling through the notifications instead. There were dozens of videos. Dozens of angles. Each one showed a woman he knew, a woman he'd made breakfast for this morning, doing things he had no idea she could do. In one video, she whirled and threw the crowbar she'd confiscated, spinning it end over end across the marble floor. It hit a second gang member in the knee. He collapsed, his leg bending in a way that made Eric wince. In another, she was leading a cluster of schoolchildren out a side door, her hand on the shoulder of the smallest one, while behind her a fourth man lay crumpled on the ground, unconscious. She'd hit him with a rapid series of strikes to the neck and shoulder. A technique he'd only ever seen in old military manuals.
"Eric." Perkins's voice had lost its glee. "That is your girlfriend, right?"
"She's an art curator," Eric said, numbly. "She curates art."
"Yeah, mate, I think she also curates arse-kicking."
The open floor plan had gone quiet. The click of keyboards had ceased, the low murmur of phone calls had died. Fifteen analysts were staring at him. One of them, a woman named Singh, held up her phone, showing the same video.
"Is this real?" she asked.
Eric opened his mouth to answer, but his phone buzzed again. A single text message, from an unknown number.
I'm fine. V.L.
His heart stopped. Then it started again, pounding hard against his ribs. He typed back immediately, fingers clumsy with adrenaline.
ARE YOU OK? WHERE ARE YOU? WHAT HAPPENED?
The message showed as delivered. Then it showed as read. And then nothing. No typing indicator. No reply. Just silence, a void where her laughter should have been.
"Eric."
He looked up. Aldrich was standing at the edge of the work floor, his hands clasped behind his back. Carl Aldrich, station chief, a man built like a filing cabinet and with about as much warmth. Eric had never spoken to him directly in three years. No one spoke to Aldrich directly. He just stood there, in his immaculate grey suit, watching the world from behind a pair of glasses that reflected the fluorescent light into a blank white gleam.
"My office," Aldrich said. "Now."
Perkins made a low whistle. Eric pushed his chair back, and the sound of it scraping against the floor filled the silence like a gunshot.
"Sir," he managed, as he followed Aldrich across the floor. "I can explain. It's a misunderstanding. She's not, I mean, she's a curator, she works with paintings, she has a tote bag with a cat on it that says 'Espresso Yourself'."
Aldrich didn't slow down. He didn't laugh. He didn't even acknowledge the tote bag. He just held the door to his office open, waiting, and the look on his face was the look of a man who had seen everything and was still, somehow, disappointed by all of it.
Eric stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him, a sound like a lock engaging, and he realized with a creeping, sinking feeling that he had absolutely no idea what came next.
Aldrich's office was a monument to beige. Beige walls, beige carpet, a beige desk so polished it reflected the ceiling lights in a dull shimmer. There were no photographs on the walls, no personal touches, nothing to suggest Carl Aldrich was a human being with a life beyond this room. Eric had always suspected the man was assembled in a warehouse somewhere and shipped to work in a crate.
"Sit," Aldrich said.
Eric sat. The chair was as comfortable as it looked, which was to say, not at all.
"There's a video on the internet," Aldrich said, settling into his own chair with the creak of expensive leather. "It shows a woman neutralizing four armed assailants in under three minutes. The woman in question appears to be your girlfriend."
"Partner," Eric said, weakly. "We've been together for over a year."
Aldrich stared at him. The glasses caught the light, wiping out his eyes entirely, leaving just two blank white discs aimed at Eric's soul.
"The woman in the video is not just any civilian," Aldrich continued, as if Eric hadn't spoken. "She is a member of your immediate social circle. She is a person you have been living with for the past month. And she is currently the most viral person in London."
"I don't think she's viral, exactly, I think it's just a few videos, people share things all the time, it'll blow over by—"
"She was on the BBC lunchtime news," Aldrich said. "They're calling her the 'Museum Maestro'."
Eric's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"The Agency is a private firm," Aldrich went on, leaning back. "We don't appear in the news. We don't get mentioned in passing. We don't exist in the public consciousness at all. Our clients rely on our invisibility. And you, Jones, have just become visible."
"I haven't done anything," Eric said, his voice climbing toward a pitch he didn't like. "She's an art curator. She has a tote bag."
"Yes, you mentioned the tote bag. Is it a defense mechanism? Or are you hoping I'll be charmed into forgetting that the man who processes our most sensitive intelligence reports is romantically entangled with a woman who just demonstrated combat proficiency on an international stage?"
Eric's throat was dry. "She wasn't trained. She's just, she's athletic, she goes to the gym now, she's been going a lot, she's really committed to her fitness journey."
"Her fitness journey," Aldrich repeated. The words hung in the air like a bad smell. "Jones, I don't care what she is or isn't. What I care about is that people are going to start asking questions. Journalists, police, curious bystanders with too much time on their hands. And eventually, someone is going to connect her to you. And someone is going to connect you to us."
Eric opened his mouth. Aldrich raised a hand, and Eric's mouth closed.
"You're suspended," Aldrich said. "Effective immediately. Indefinitely. You will leave this building, you will go home, and you will not do anything that draws attention to yourself or this company. No press. No interviews. No social media. And for God's sake, tell your girlfriend to stop kicking people in the head."
"She wasn't kicked in the head," Eric said. "She kicked him. In the head. The other way."
Aldrich's face, if it was possible, became more stony. "Out, Jones."
Eric stood on legs that felt like borrowed stilts. He made it to the door, then paused. "Sir, I want you to know, I had no idea she could do any of that. It's a shock to me. I woke up this morning, and she was her usual self, and now she's on the news and my phone is melting and I just, I don't understand what's happening."
Aldrich didn't look up from his desk. "That's the first honest thing you've said since you walked in. Now leave before I start asking follow-up questions."
Eric left.
He drove home in a daze, the radio turned off, the silence of the car filled with the echo of Aldrich's words. Suspended. Indefinitely. His career, his carefully constructed life of quiet, unremarkable competence, reduced to ash by a woman who had apparently discovered she could knock out armed men with pressure point strikes.
He let himself into the flat with his spare key, already rehearsing the speech he would give Sophia. A gentle but firm talk about restraint, about how she couldn't just take out four armed assailants and become a viral sensation, about how he was now suspended from his job and would she please explain where she'd learned to throw a spinning back kick—
"Eric!"
Sophia was standing in the living room, in his flat, her hands clasped under her chin, her eyes wide and glistening. She was wearing a soft cashmere jumper and looked, in every possible way, like a woman who had been through a terrible ordeal and was so, so glad to see her safe, gentle boyfriend.
And standing behind her, in crisp dark suits, were two people Eric didn't recognize. A man and a woman, both with that particular posture that marked them as official. Detectives. He could feel it from across the room.
"Oh, Eric," Sophia breathed, and she crossed the room in three quick steps and threw her arms around him, pressing her face into his chest. "I was so scared. I didn't know what to do. I just, I just reacted."
"Scared," Eric echoed, his arms frozen at his sides. "You were scared. Of course. That makes sense."
She looked up at him, her emerald eyes wide and vulnerable. And then, just for a heartbeat, her gaze flicked to the side, toward the detectives, and she winked.
Eric's brain short-circuited.
"This is Detective Inspector Hargreaves," Sophia said, pulling back and dabbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. "And Detective Sergeant Okafor. They've been so kind. They came all the way here to talk about what happened."
The detectives approached. The man, Hargreaves, was in his fifties, grey-haired, with the bone-tired look of a man who'd seen every kind of nonsense London could throw at him. The woman, Okafor, was younger, sharper, her eyes missing nothing.
"Mr. Jones," Hargreaves said, offering a hand. Eric shook it automatically. "Ms. Rossi has been telling us about this morning. You must be very proud."
"Proud," Eric repeated. "Yes. Proud. Very proud. I'm proud of her."
"I was just telling them," Sophia said, settling onto the sofa with a grace that seemed almost rehearsed, "that when the alarms went off, I knew there was a tour group coming down the elevators. They'd have been trapped right inside the gallery with those men. I couldn't let that happen."
"And the crowbar?" Okafor asked. Her voice was neutral with the barest hint of curiosity or maybe suspicion.
Sophia tilted her head, a picture of innocent reflection. "The man swung at me. I ducked. I suppose I just... reacted. I used to do martial arts, years ago. When I was at university. I never thought I'd use it."
"You used a spinning back kick," Okafor said. "That's not a first-weekend self-defense class move. That's something you develop over years."
"It was in the moment," Sophia said, her voice soft, almost apologetic. "I didn't think. My body just moved. I'm still not sure what happened, to be honest. It all seems like a blur now."
She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. A single, perfect tear rolled down her cheek.
Eric stared at her. He had seen her do exactly this, the whole repertoire of it, and every single word coming out of her mouth was seamless. She wasn't lying. She was performing, and it was flawless.
Hargreaves cleared his throat. "You've been very helpful, Ms. Rossi. We've got statements from the security team, and the CCTV is pretty clear. Looks like you saved a lot of people from getting hurt."
"I just did what anyone would do," Sophia said.
"I don't know too many anyone's who'd be able to knock out a man with three pressure point strikes," Okafor said. "That's a very specific skill set."
Eric's heart seized. But Sophia just gave a small, self-deprecating laugh.
"I'm lucky," she said. "And maybe a little bit more stubborn than is good for me. My mother always said the Rossi girls were trouble."
She smiled at them, a warm, open smile, and Eric watched as something shifted in the detectives. Hargreaves, who had been all business, suddenly seemed softer, almost paternal. Okafor, who'd been probing, let her shoulders drop, a hint of a smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
"That she was," Hargreaves said, and he was nearly laughing now, like he'd forgotten he was on the clock. "Trouble, indeed."
"Please," Sophia said, rising gracefully to walk them to the door. "If there's anything else I can do to help, anything at all, don't hesitate to call."
"Thank you, Ms. Rossi," Okafor said, and her voice had lost its edge entirely. "You take care of yourself. And maybe leave the heroics to the professionals, eh?"
"Oh, I plan to," Sophia said, laying a hand on Okafor's arm, an intimate gesture that had no business being so effective. "This was all just a bit of bad luck."
The door closed behind them. The lock clicked.
Eric stood in the middle of the living room, processing what he'd just witnessed. Two Scotland Yard detectives, seasoned professionals, had been reduced to puddles within minutes. They'd walked out without a single arrest, without a single doubt, without even a second glance back.
Sophia turned to face him. The vulnerability was gone. The trembling lip was gone. The single tear was gone. In its place was a sly, knowing smile.
"See?" she said, sauntering toward him. "No man or woman can resist the charms of Agent Velvet Lullaby."
"Sophia," Eric began, his voice tight. "We need to talk about what happened. I got suspended. My boss thinks you're some kind of combat trained operative. And those detectives—"
She reached him, slid her arms around his neck, and kissed him, deep and thorough, before he could get another word out. He tried to protest, tried to pull back, but her body was warm against his, and her hands were in his hair, and—
"They were lovely," she murmured against his lips. "But they're gone now. And you're here. And I had a very, very stressful morning."
"Sophia, I really think we should—"
She kissed him again. His knees buckled a little.
"After," she said, guiding him backward toward the bedroom. "We can talk after."