Page 5

“Then it really was a scheduling mistake, and we’ve got a bigger problem than her.” I glance at the hallway, back toward the front of the house where the gate sits dark against the road. “If a random contractor can walk into my building unescorted for four hours, the building’s not half as secure as I’ve been telling myself it is. That failure has nothing to do with her. It’s on us.”

Yuri doesn’t argue that. He knows the layout of that building better than anyone outside of my own head, knows exactly how many hands touch a key card before it reaches a cleaner’s palm, and I can see him already running the same list I’ve been running since I stepped off the elevator. “I’ll pull the front desk logs first. See who signed the card out to her.”

“Do that tonight.”

He pockets the tag and picks up her phone, already thumbing through the lock screen settings with the kind of ease that tells me he’ll have it open within the hour regardless of what password she’s set. “I’ll have something back to you by tonight. Maybe sooner if the phone gives up anything easy.”

“Good.”

He looks at her once more on his way out, longer than the tag or the phone required, and something in his face says he’s already running his own version of the same two possibilities I’ve been circling since the elevator.

He doesn’t say anything else. He knows better than to ask what I’m planning to do with her once he’s confirmed whichever answer he finds. That’s not a conversation either of us wants to have before we know what we’re dealing with.

The door clicks shut behind him, and it’s just the two of us again, the house quiet enough that I can hear her breathing settle into something slower, the dose wearing further into her system.

I pull a second chair over and sit down across from her, elbows on my knees. I study her face while she’s still out. There’s still that smear of dried cleaning solution on her sleeve she never got the chance to wash off.

A thin white scar along one eyebrow, old, healed years ago, nothing to do with tonight. Her jaw is slack in sleep in a way that makes her look younger than she probably is, and none of it, not one detail, looks like something built to survive a background check.

I don’t like how much that settles something in me before I’ve got any actual proof to back it up. I’ve been wrong about people before, always in the direction of trusting them too soon, and every one of those mistakes cost me something I couldn’t get back. I’m not making that one again over a stranger with a scuffed name tag and an elbow that connects harder than it should.

Her fingers twitch against the restraints, just barely, some small motion under the surface of whatever she’s dreaming through the last of the dose working itself out of her system.

I watch her hand go still again and lean back in the chair, arms crossed, and wait for her to wake up.

4

HARPER

Something drags me up out of the dark, my body responding before my mind does. The taste hits me first. Sweet, sharp, chemical, sitting on the back of my tongue like I’ve been sucking on a coin, the same cloth, the same smell, still coating the inside of my mouth.

I try to swallow it away, and my throat feels lined with the same thing, dry and wrong.

The room comes in slowly, in pieces, the way a picture loads on bad WiFi. A ceiling first, plain white, no light fixture I can find, just a soft glow coming from somewhere I can’t place without turning my head.

A wall. Another wall, painted the same flat gray as the first. I try to lift my hand to rub my eyes, and it doesn’t move. That’s the thing that finally drags me the rest of the way awake, my wrist catching against something that isn’t skin.

Restraints. My wrists are zip-tied to the arms of a chair bolted to the floor, and my ankles are the same. The second my brain catches up to that fact, my whole body goes rigid, pulling against all four points at once like that’s going to do anything.

It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t.

My head throbs somewhere behind my eyes, a dull pressure that gets worse when I try to focus on anything too fast, and my mouth is so dry, I can only whimper.

“You’re awake.”

I know the voice before I find the face it belongs to. He’s sitting across from me in another chair, close enough that I could reach him if my hands worked, elbows on his knees, watching me the way you’d watch weather rolling in. Not with fear. Just with the patience of someone waiting to see how bad it gets.

The last clear thing I remember is the fight. His wrist under my hand. The wall against my back. After that it goes soft at the edges, a cloth, a smell I can still taste now, and then nothing, a gap where a chunk of my night should be.

“Where am I?” My voice comes out rough.

“Somewhere private.” He says it like that’s an actual answer. “I need you to tell me who you work for.”

“I told you already, I clean.” The words shake more than I mean them to, and I hate that, hate that my sass is apparently powered by adrenaline and it’s running low. “I work for a contract company. Denise sends me wherever they need me that day. Today it was your building. If something got mixed up, it’s not my fault at all.”

“That’s the story.”

“That’s the truth. There’s a difference, believe it or not.”