Now she’s gone and I can’t breathe.
I never told her what she meant—no. What shemeansto all of us. What she means to me.
There. I said it. I have feelings for Phoenix fucking Jones. I’m not fucking made of code after all.
The hotel moves as usual on the other side of the wall—elevators gliding, lights cycling, people living their lives like gravity still applies. In here, I take that rhythm apart. One screen shows camera tiles from the service corridors while another shows a timeline of every door opened, every badge swipe, every elevator call. The third holds the power log. A straight line means normal. Dips mean someone touched something they shouldn’t have.
I trace the pattern again. Camera 18B went dark at 11:12 p.m. The hall lights never flickered, which tells me it’s not a building-wide outage. Camera 18C, two corners away, stayed up. Camera 17A is down. 17B is up. Off, on, off, on—like someone was picking threads out of a sweater without pulling the whole thing apart.
You can’t do that from a laptop in a guest room. You have to stand in the hallway with a maintenance key and open the panel. You have to flip the switch with your hand. You need to know which panel is which. You need to belong—or look like you do. Because otherwise, I’d catch you.
There’s no more doubt. No room to question the facts sitting right in front of me. Someone who works for us is working against us. Someone we trusted enough to have access somehow managed to steal into our building and take the most valuable thing in this building.
One person alone can’t be responsible. It would take one person to cut cameras and cause the security blackout. Someone else walks her through the blind spots in our system. Someone else keeps Security busy with a noise complaint down the hall at the right minute for the right reason. That’s at least three roles. Probably more, because whoever did this didn’t leave behind a trace.
My team didn’t catch the dry run for this. That sits wrong in my bones. My team should have caught this. My team…
My fucking team.
“Maverick,” I say loudly, voice steady. “Now.”
When he steps into the open office door, Maverick looks more presentable than I feel. Dressed in trousers and a white button-down that he has the sleeves of which rolled up on his forearms, he’s holding the tie he must have taken off in one hand.
“Yeah.” He takes one look at the screens, then at me.
“You hear from Con or Storm?” I ask.
“Storm just checked in.” He plants his hands on the back of the chair across from me. “Zeus’s rear leg is broken—they said it’s a clean break, and they’re gonna set the bone. He’s going in for surgery now. Conrad’s staying with him. Storm will pry him away in a couple hours if there’s any update.”
I should be relieved. I’m not. Relief and dread can live in the same space. They do now.
Mav watches me. “He’s close to the edge.”
“Of course he is.” The words come sharper than I want. I take a breath. “We all are. Con found the dog injured and no Phoenix in sight. He’s allowed to be on that edge, man. I’m surprised he hasn’t gone straight over and into the darkness yet.”
“It’s not just him,” Maverick says, quiet and carefully neutral.
I angle my chair so that I can give him a look. “Meaning what.”
“Meaning if he doesn’t get to say what he needs to say to her, it’s going to eat him alive.” He pauses. “And you’re going to be right behind him, chewed up by the fact that you kept her at an arm’s length until it was too late.”
My expression tightens. “We’re not doing that tonight.”
“Didn’t say we were.” His mouth almost curves into that goddamn sardonic smile he wears when he’s manipulating people around him. “Just calling the hand the way I see it.”
I turn back to the monitors because looking at him makes me too aware of what he’s right about. We’re not braiding each other’s hair and baring our souls. We have work to do. “Watch this,” I say, and highlight the dead feeds. “These weren’t killed from my system. Someone physically opened the panel and shut them off after I removed all the remote access to the system. That takes a badge, a key, or a friendly hand that could get close enough.”
“Security,” he says.
“Bingo. We need to start there.” I bring up the roster. “We need to find everyone who was on from eleven to one with accessto those corridors. Cross that list against anyone who took a smoke break or lunch break or vanished right before midnight. Pull every record of every single fucking door that was propped open, even briefly. If an alarm was reset too fast, I want to see it. Because the answer is in the details. In the code.”
“I’m already running housekeeping, banquets, and night engineering.” Maverick stares down at his phone. “Two housekeepers used the exact same phrasing to explain why they were in the service hall. You know that doesn’t just happen. I’ve got them separated. We’ll see who remembers their script without the other.”
“Good.” The power log clock ticks a minute forward. I trace the dip again with my finger. “There’s a two-minute wobble near Camera 18B. Then a manual reset. Whoever did this knows the system and our halls and our building like it’s their own body.”
“We can put our own team on the board too,” Mav says. “Nobody is off-limits as far as I’m concerned.”
I nod. It tastes like swallowing a blade, but I nod. “Do it.”
