5

"Get back," Cassian said, already moving past me toward his truck.

"Get back from what, it's a locked door..."

"It's a door somebody already tried to force open once," he said, digging through a toolbox in his truck bed. "That means either they came back to finish the job, or they got what they needed and left.

 I'd rather find out which one from a distance than up close."

"Jesus." I stepped back anyway, scanning the tree line at the edge of the property, feeling suddenly, stupidly exposed standing out in the open. "You think someone's still here?"

"I think you don't know, and I don't know, and that's a shit combination to be standing next to a broken door about."

He came back with a crowbar and a flashlight, worked the crowbar into the seam by the lock, and put his whole body weight into it. The door groaned, resisted, then gave all at once with a metal shriek loud enough that a flock of birds exploded out of the trees behind us.

"Fuck," I hissed, heart slamming. "Warn a girl next time."

"Warn you and lose the element of surprise on whoever might still be in there? No thanks."

He went in first, flashlight sweeping the dark, and I followed close enough behind him that I nearly walked into his back when he stopped dead just past the entrance.

"What?" I whispered. "What is it?"

He didn't answer right away. He crouched down and picked something up off the concrete floor, turning it over in the flashlight beam.

A cigarette butt. Fresh enough that it hadn't gone soft with damp yet.

"Somebody was in here recently," he said.

 "Standing right here. Smoking. Not in a hurry."

"That doesn't sound like breaking and entering," I said slowly. "That sounds like somebody who wasn't worried about being caught."

"Or somebody who already knew nobody was watching this place." Cassian swept the light further in, across old crates against one wall, a rusted generator, a hallway leading deeper that neither of us had gone into yet. "You said your family forgot this place existed."

"They did," I answered.

"Then who told this guy it was here."

I didn't have an answer, and the silence sat heavy between us.

We moved further in, footsteps echoing off concrete that hadn't heard a human voice in years.

 The deeper we went, the less it looked like a forgotten bunker and the more it looked like someone's half-finished project, left mid-thought, decades ago. Exposed wiring. A ventilation shaft with the grate still bolted on. Then, at the end of the main hallway, a thick steel door with a wheel lock, the kind you'd see on a ship.

"That's not original," Cassian said, running his flashlight over the hinges.

 "Everything else in here is thirty, forty years old. This door's new. Ten years, maybe less."

"Someone added it, and didn't want it easy to open," he said.

I reached for the wheel lock before I'd fully thought it through. It turned easier than I expected, and the door swung inward with a low groan.

The room beyond it was small and empty except for one steel shelf bolted to the far wall. 

On the middle shelf sat one thing, placed dead center like somebody wanted it found.

A manila folder, thick with paper, tied shut with string.

"Don't touch it," Cassian said, but I was already reaching for it.

"If somebody hid this behind a door that shouldn't exist, in a building my family thinks is empty, I am one hundred percent touching it."

I untied the string with hands that weren't quite steady. The folder fell open across my palms.

Photographs. A lot of them. Emeric, in places he had no business being, meeting men I didn't recognize outside buildings I'd never seen before. And in almost every photo, Marisol stood beside him like she belonged there.

Some of the photos had dates written in the corner. The earliest one, faded and slightly out of focus, was dated four years back.

Four years.

Before the proposal, before the first dinner, before he ever looked me in the eye and told me I was the woman he wanted to spend his life with.

He'd been lying from the beginning.

I flipped to the next photo and my whole chest went cold.

It wasn't Emeric and Marisol this time. It was Yvaine, standing between them, one hand on Marisol's shoulder, posing for a picture nobody was ever supposed to see. Under it, in handwriting I didn't recognize, someone had written one short line.

She's known the whole time.

"Whoever left this," I said slowly, "knew about them before I did."

Cassian took the folder gently out of my hands and kept flipping through it, his jaw tightening with every page.

 Near the bottom, he pulled out a single sheet, different from the rest, typed instead of a photo, and held it up to the light.

I read it once, then again, because the first time didn't make sense.

It was a shipment log.

 Dates, quantities, a facility code I didn't recognize. And at the top, a date only six days out.

[DEVIATION DETECTED.]

[RECORD NOT PRESENT IN HOST MEMORY.]

I went very still.

"What?" Cassian said, watching my face. "What now."

"This," I said, tapping the paper. "This exact shipment. This exact date. It didn't happen in my old life. I would know. I remember everything about the ten days before the wedding, every single thing, and this was never part of it."

Cassian's eyes moved from the paper to me and back again, slower this time.

"You keep saying things like that," he said. "Like you've lived through this before."

I didn't answer right away, and this time he didn't push.

"Whoever built this file," he said instead, "knew about your fiancé years before you did. Knew about the affair. Knew about your stepmother. And now we're standing here holding proof of something that, according to you, was never supposed to exist at all."

He closed the folder and looked straight at me.

"So the real question isn't who broke in trying to get this out," he said. "It's who's still out there adding to it."