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His jaw tightens for half a second, barely there, the kind of thing I’d miss if I weren’t watching closely. He doesn’t raise his voice. That’s somehow worse than if he did, because I keep waiting for the anger and it never shows up, just this steady, level attention like he’s got all night and nowhere else to be.

“Who’s Denise?” he says.

“My supervisor. She’ll tell you the same thing. Call her.” I yank against the restraint on my right wrist out of pure reflex, and it does nothing except dig the plastic into my skin. “This is insane. You do get that this is insane, right? I clean toilets for a living. I found your creepy monitor wall and your guns, and I didn’t touch any of it. I didn’t call anyone, I didn’t post it online, I just finished the job and tried to leave, and somehow that’s the part where I end up zip-tied to a chair.”

“You fought like someone trained you to.”

“I did taekwondo for six years starting when I was eleven. My stepdad signed me up because I got picked on in middle school, not because I moonlight as a spy.” My laugh comes out thin, more air than sound. “You’d be surprised what a decade of getting punched in a gym by a fourteen-year-old named Kaylee will do for your reflexes.”

He doesn’t laugh. I didn’t really expect him to.

“What’s your name?”

“Harper. It’s on the tag you already took off my caddy, so I’m guessing you already know that.”

“Harper what?”

I give him my full name, my address, even offer up my Social Security number just to see if it makes him blink. He doesn’t take the bait, just watches me list off my own life like he’s checking it against something in his head. It’s the strangest kind of interrogation I could’ve imagined, calm and quiet and somehow more frightening than if he’d screamed at me the whole time, because screaming I’d know what to do with. This, I don’t.

“How long have you worked for this company?”

“Two years. Almost three.” I shift in the chair, testing the give in the restraint at my left wrist, and there isn’t any. “You can call and ask them yourself. Or ask whoever you already sent to ask them, since I’m guessing that’s already happening whether I agree to it or not.”

“It is.”

“Cool. Great. Good to know my consent’s really factoring into any of this.”

He doesn’t rise to that either, and how unbothered he is starts to feel worse than if I’d gotten a reaction out of him.

I’ve spent my whole life reading people fast, knowing which supervisor to avoid on a bad day, which client’s about to complain before they open their mouth, and I can’t get a single read on him beyond the obvious.

Controlled. Watching. Waiting for something I haven’t given him yet.

“I need you to believe me,” I say, and my voice cracks right on the word ‘believe,’ which annoys me more than the restraints do. “I have nothing to do with whatever you think this is. I want to go home. I have work tomorrow, or I did; I don’t even know what time it is right now. I don’t know how long I’ve been out. I don’t know anything, and you’re just sitting there staring at me like I’m supposed to have answers I don’t have.”

“I have people checking your story right now,” he says. “Your supervisor. The company records. All of it.”

“Great. Fantastic. Can they check it faster, maybe? While I’m not tied to a chair?”

“No.”

Just that. One word, flat, and something in the way he says it tells me arguing further isn’t going to move him an inch. I pull against the restraints again anyway, because apparently, I haven’t fully accepted that yet, and my wrist stings where the plastic’s already rubbed it raw.

“You can’t just leave me like this.”

“I can.” He stands, and the chair legs scrape against the floor. For a second, I think he’s about to say something else, something that might actually explain some of this, and instead he just looks at me a beat longer than feels normal before he turns for the door.

“Wait.” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to, panic finally catching up to everything else. “You can’t just walk out. At least tell me how long. An hour? A day? Give me something.”

He stops in the doorway with his back to me. “When I know something, you’ll know something.”

“That’s not an answer.”

The door closes behind him, and the click of it locking is quieter than I expect, barely a sound at all, and somehow that’s worse than if he’d slammed it.

I sit there in the silence that comes after, testing the restraints one more time out of pure stubbornness, and they hold exactly as well as they did the first four times.

I don’t cry. I get close, my throat tightening around something I refuse to let out, and I focus instead on breathing slowly through my nose, counting the seconds the way my old taekwondo instructor taught me to when a match got too loud in my head.