Page 37 of Mister St. James

I pick up the photo, study it, turn it over as if maybe the secret is on the back. It’s clean. My fingers are not.

He’s waiting for me to speak. Instead, I look up, eyes bright, and say, “Who else knows?”

“Officially? Just the sender, and me. Unofficially? If you can see this, anyone who wants to connect the dots could find you. Or me. Or both.”

I want to scream, but instead my voice comes out level, like I’m reading a script: “You think it’s an internal threat?”

“Has to be,” he says. “Every timestamp lines up with nights we were both at the club. Every access attempt on our systems came from someone who knows the building, knows the protocols. There’s more…” He hesitates, then lays out a folder like it’s a tarot card. “Three other PDI execs got similar threats. All of them have something to lose. Two paid. One is waiting it out.”

He flips open the folder. The paper inside is covered in highlighter and sticky notes, more photos, more demands. “I traced the message origin to an apartment block three blocks from Vantage Systems. Guess who lives there?”

He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Brenden Hale. Systems analyst. I fired him last year for unauthorized data copying. He bounced around, landed at Vantage. Their entire business model is weaponized grudge.”

I feel sick. Not about the blackmail, not about the job, I’ve lost jobs before. I think about my mother, who still has my confirmation photo on her fridge, and my father, who cried at my college graduation and told me he’d never been so proud. My nieces, who call me their cool aunt. I look at the photo again. My birthmark. My wild hair. My face, tipped toward Aiden’s like a compass finding north. I am not ashamed of this. I am not. But I am terrified of having to explain that I’m not.

“He’s the one targeting us?” I ask. “He’s the blackmailer?”

“He’s the puppet master,” says Aiden, voice tight. “But there’s more. He’s got a direct line to the club’s membership. Someone’s feeding him the schedule, giving him access to moments when we’re most exposed. I’m ninety percent sure he was at the last event. Masked, but the gait, the body language. It matches.”

I let this settle. The entire time I’ve been fighting for air, the water’s been rising around my ankles. “You were going to handle this alone?”

“Not anymore.” He closes the file, looks at me with a kind of exhausted relief. “I can’t close the loop without you.”

“Why?” I ask, genuinely curious. “What’s left?”

He pulls up a file on his screen. “The last step is proving he was in the club on the same nights as the breach attempts. But the club’s internal event calendar isn’t digitized. The only copy is in their admin archive, which you…” he stops, corrects himself, “which we scanned last audit cycle.”

“Eight months ago,” I say slowly. “The Voss project.” The irony lands on me like a delayed slap. I spent three weeks indexing and encrypting that archive, setting every access code, never once knowing I was building a vault around my own secrets. “I had no idea what I was actually securing.” I almost laugh. “I thought it was a private events company.”

“No one else knows the structure well enough to get in and out without triggering alarms,” says Aiden. “If I try, it flags security. If you do it, you can move invisibly.”

I roll the blackmail photo between my fingers. There’s my birthmark. There’s his jaw. I want to be furious at him, I was furious two minutes ago, but the anger keeps slipping sideways into something that feels uncomfortably like relief. I set the photo face-down on the desk.

“Fine,” I say, and uncross my arms. I sit down without waiting for him to invite me, drag the laptop toward myself and start typing.

He hovers, a presence behind me that’s both distracting and oddly steadying.

I pull up the internal comms archive and set to work. It’s so easy to slip back into old habits, my fingers finding shortcuts, bypasses, kill commands. In twenty seconds, I’m inside the vault.

“Tell me what to look for,” I say, and he does, precise, clipped instructions, like always. But this time, every word is a lifeline.

He sits on the edge of the desk, legs braced, head bent to watch my hands fly. I feel the anger in me cool, replaced by something like anticipation.

“You know what I kept thinking about?” I ask, still typing. “The Hendricks audit. March. You made me redo the entire index because one timestamp was off by four minutes.”

He’s quiet.

“Four minutes,” I say. “Out of six hundred hours of records.”

“It mattered.”

“It did.” I hit enter, watch the directory populate. “That’s the thing. It always mattered to you. Every detail. Every variable.” I pause, fingers hovering. “Except apparently this one.”

He doesn’t answer. I can hear him breathing behind me.

“I would have helped you,” I say. “From the beginning.”

“I know,” he says. Just that.