LOGINAmelia stared at the screen until the words blurred, her own name sitting there in black and white beside her grandmother's, beside Marcus's, a private grief turned into something the whole city could scroll past on their way to bed."Who posted this," she said, and her voice came out flatter than she expected, exhaustion finally burning through fear and landing somewhere close to numbness."I don't know," Selene said, still staring at her phone like it might change if she looked hard enough. "It's not attributed to anyone. Just an account created tonight.""Convenient," Ryan said, his jaw tight.Gregory hadn't moved from where he stood near the door, his hand still pressed against the empty pocket where the recording used to be, like his body hadn't caught up yet to what his mind already understood. "Someone was in this building the entire time," he said slowly. "Not just Lucas. Not just Selene. Someone else, moving through all of this while we chased shadows."Marcus finally spoke,
Selene stood in the doorway, her gala dress catching what little light spilled from the hallway, and for a moment Amelia's mind simply refused to accept what her eyes were telling her."You," Amelia said, the word barely more than breath.Selene's expression held none of the sharp, brittle composure from the fountain twenty minutes earlier. Something colder had replaced it, something that looked almost relieved to finally stop pretending. "I did tell you not to make this worse," she said quietly. "I meant that as a warning, Amelia. Not an apology.""You were never actually sorry," Amelia said, understanding landing on her like a physical weight. "By the fountain. That whole conversation. You were stalling me.""I was giving Lucas time," Selene said. "He needed the notebook found before I finished my part. It had to look like your own doing, not something we arranged between us."Ryan's hand tightened around Amelia's arm, and she could feel the fury radiating off him even in the dark,
For one terrible second, nobody breathed.The darkness came down so completely that Amelia lost every edge of the room at once, the chair, Marcus's shoulder still under her hands, the doorway where Gregory had been standing. All of it was swallowed whole. Somewhere close, she heard Ryan's voice, low and urgent, saying her name like he was trying to find her by sound alone."I'm here," she said, and her own voice sounded strange to her, thin and too loud in the sudden black. "I'm right here.""Don't move," Ryan said. "Nobody moves until we know what happened.""The breaker," Gregory said from somewhere near the door, his voice tight with something that wasn't quite panic yet but was close enough to taste. "There's a panel down the hall. If someone tripped it on purpose—"He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.Amelia's hands were still on the cord around Marcus's wrists, and she made herself keep working at it, fingers clumsy in the dark, because stopping felt more dangerous
Nobody spoke first. They just moved, all three of them, like the decision had already been made somewhere between one heartbeat and the next.Gregory reached the door before Amelia could, then stopped himself, forcing the words out through gritted teeth. "Security. We call security.""No." Amelia's voice came out steadier than she felt. "If we bring people running with radios and flashlights, whoever's holding him hears it coming. We don't know how many rooms they've been watching tonight. We go quiet first.""Quiet doesn't mean safe," Gregory said."Neither is loud," she said. "Not tonight."Ryan was already studying the photo again, zooming in, searching the edges for anything the frame might have accidentally caught. His jaw tightened the moment he found it. "That carpet. That's not this floor, Gregory. That pattern changes two levels down."Gregory's face went the color of ash. "The old records room. Sealed years ago when everything went digital. Nobody has a key except me and bui
Gregory's office door stood wide open when they reached it, and that alone was enough to turn Amelia's stomach. He never left it open. Not for coffee. Not for anything.She stepped inside first, ignoring Ryan's hand reaching for her sleeve, and for one breath she let herself believe everything was fine, because Gregory was standing right there behind his desk, alive, upright, safe. Then she saw his face and the relief drained out of her all at once.Drawers hung open. Papers covered the floor like someone had swept an arm across the desk without caring what fell. Gregory stood in the middle of it looking like a man who'd just watched thirty years of careful order come apart in ten minutes."They took the file," he said. His voice had none of its usual calm. "The letter. The financial records from the hearing. Gone.""Not gone," Ryan said, crouching to check the scattered papers. "Copied, probably. Whoever did this wasn't stealing. They were reading."Amelia's mind went straight to the
"Ten minutes," Amelia said again, like saying it a second time might make it less absurd. "She's giving me ten minutes.""Then we don't have time to argue about it," Ryan said, already moving toward the door. "I'm coming with you.""She said alone.""She said to you alone," Ryan said. "She didn't say I couldn't be standing somewhere she couldn't see me."Amelia almost laughed, except nothing about tonight felt remotely funny anymore. She looked at Gregory, whose face had gone tight and pale again, and at Lucas, who was already pulling his jacket straight like he intended to follow no matter what anyone told him."If this is real," Gregory said slowly, "if Marcus really left something behind before he vanished, that changes things. He wasn't planning to disappear tonight. Something forced his hand.""Or he wanted it found," Lucas said. "Depending on what it is."Amelia didn't have the energy left to weigh every possibility against every other possibility. She just knew the clock in her







