Chapter 28 — The Access Log

POV: NIKOLAI

I didn’t have my security team pull the footage. I went straight to the server room myself, late at night, and sat down at the terminal to watch it with my own eyes.

By 11 p.m., the building felt empty. Most residents were asleep; hallways quiet except for the occasional porter’s footsteps somewhere above.

My head of security offered twice to handle it in the morning, spare me the trouble, and summarize the findings in a report I could read over coffee.

I declined both times. Some things didn’t belong in a summary written by someone else. This was one of them.

I had built my entire career on delegating whatever I could, trusting my team to handle problems so I could focus on the ones only I could solve. This did not feel like a problem I was willing to hand to anyone else, not with Beatrix sitting beside me, waiting for an answer.

She kept her arms wrapped around herself against the chill of the server room, silent and focused like she always gets when she’s bracing for something big.

The room was small and windowless, with rows of monitors and humming equipment stacked along one wall, the kind of place built for function rather than comfort.

Neither of us had bothered to sit anywhere except the two chairs nearest the main terminal.

I pulled up the footage from the exact window the access log flagged: 2:30 p.m. I started scrubbing through the lobby cameras, watching ordinary people living out an ordinary afternoon. Delivery driver, the old woman walking her dog twice (she always does that, the doorman says), nothing odd.

Then, at 2:31, a figure came in through the side entrance rather than the main lobby, moving so quickly that it suggested she already knew which door avoided the most cameras.

I had reviewed enough security footage over the years to know the difference between someone unfamiliar with a building, hesitant and glancing around for signage, and someone who had clearly cased the entrances in advance.

A woman of medium height, wearing a dark coat, with her hair pulled back.

She kept her face turned away from every angle, angling it to the side at the exact moments the cameras would have caught a clear shot, as if she had studied the layout in advance and planned her route around it.

It wasn’t luck. Luck couldn’t explain six consecutive camera angles avoided with such precision.

Someone had either carefully studied the security layout or already known it from personal experience.

"She knows this building," I said softly.

Beatrix did not respond immediately.

I glanced over and saw her staring at the screen with an expression I couldn’t immediately place, something between recognition and refusal to accept what she was seeing.

"Beatrix."

"Give me a second." Her voice came out tight, controlled, the way people control it when they’re trying not to fall apart in front of someone else.

I advanced the footage even further.

The woman walked straight down the residential hallway, past the elevator, and directly toward my office without ever stopping to check a door number or hesitate at an intersection.

No confusion. No wrong turns.

She walked it the way someone walks a path they have already memorized.

I counted the seconds it took her to cover that distance and, in my head, compared it with how long it would take any of my staff to walk the same route.

She was faster. She didn’t need to think about where she was going at all.

It was the kind of familiarity that could come only from actually living in a space or from studying it closely enough over repeated visits to have it fully memorized.

"That is not someone who has never been in our apartment before," Beatrix said at last, her voice low.

"Look at the way she moves. She's been there before. She knows exactly where everything is."

I paused the footage on the clearest frame I could find, where the woman's shoulder and the edge of her jaw were barely visible before she turned away again.

It was not enough to make a positive identification.

It was enough to watch the particular set of her shoulders, the way she held her coat closed with one hand, to feel something cold and certain settle into my chest anyway.

I had spent enough family dinners across the table from Serena Holloway to recognize the way she carried herself even from behind, that stubborn tilt to her posture unchanged since the night she had tried to seat herself beside me against her niece's careful arrangement.

I said nothing about it at first, wanting to see whether Beatrix reached the same conclusion on her own before I influenced her with my suspicion.

****

POV: BEATRIX

I recognized the coat before I let myself notice anything else.

It was navy and tailored, the brand my sister had worn constantly for the past year, ever since she decided navy made her look, in her own words, more serious.

I had seen that exact coat across a dinner table three weeks earlier, draped over the back of a chair while its owner tried to press her foot against my husband's leg under the tablecloth.

I had teased her about that coat once, years ago, before everything between us turned into something neither of us knew how to fix.

She had bought three in different colors, convinced that each made her look like a different, better version of herself.

I didn’t say her name out loud. Neither did Nikolai.

We sat in that cold server room, both watching the same faceless figure move through our home like she owned it. Neither of us wanted to be the first to say it, as if speaking it would make the possibility more real than just thinking it.

Some small, stubborn part of me still wanted to be wrong, to believe my own sister had not actually walked into my home uninvited and gone through my husband's things like she had every right to be there.

"It could be anyone," I said, though I didn't believe it even as the words left my mouth.

"It could," Nikolai agreed, in a tone that made it clear he didn't believe it either.

"A coat is not proof," I said, as much to myself as to him. "Plenty of people own navy coats."

"Plenty of people do not know the exact layout of my apartment well enough to avoid every camera in the building without hesitating once."

I did not have an answer for that.

He turned to look directly at me, something careful in his expression, as if weighing whether to say what came next.

"I am not going to sit on this," he said. "I do not want you finding out later that I already suspected something and kept it from you to handle the situation quietly on my own. That is not who I want to be with you."

I thought about all the ways the men in my life had handled problems for me before, quietly, without consulting me, as if my own understanding of my situation were somehow optional to solving it.

This was different. He was giving me the whole truth, uncertain and unfinished as it was, instead of a version he had already decided I could handle.

Something in my chest loosened a little at that, even with everything else weighing heavily in the room.

"Thank you for telling me tonight."

He nodded once, as if the gratitude embarrassed him a little, and turned his attention back to the screen rather than linger in the moment any longer than necessary.

"We do not have proof," he said. "Not yet. A build, a coat, the way someone walks down a hallway, none of that holds up as evidence of anything."

"I know."

"But we both have a guess."

I looked back at the frozen frame on the screen: the woman's shoulder, the familiar coat, the confident, unhesitating path straight to Nikolai's desk.

"Yes," I said softly. "We do."

Neither of us said the name; we didn't need to.

It sat in the room between us, heavy and unmistakable, waiting for whatever came next to give it a voice.

Whatever Serena had come here looking for, we still had no idea what she had actually found.

I sat in the cold of that small room, watching Nikolai's jaw tighten with the same controlled fury I had seen the night he laid his hands on Julian, and I understood, without either of us saying it aloud, that this was far from over.