Chapter Four

I don't sleep.

I lie in bed running Celeste's voice over and over in my head — Route 9 data, before the audit, if Marcus finds out — until the words stop sounding like English and start sounding like a lock I don't have the shape of the key for yet. By four in the morning I've decided I'm done waiting for the shape to come to me.

I drive to Route 9 myself.

It's stupid. I know it's stupid while I'm doing it, the same way you know a lot of things are stupid in the exact moment you're doing them anyway. But I remember what these four warehouses become in four months — the last open corridor east of the river, the difference between a city that eats and a city that doesn't — and I can't make myself wait for daylight to find out what Celeste needed pulled from a file before anyone with real authority looked at it.

The district's exactly as empty as I remember it being for a decade. Chain-link fencing gone soft with rust, sodium lights buzzing over cracked asphalt, not another car in sight. My own footsteps sound too loud walking up to the parcel I bought yesterday morning, the one with my name freshly inked onto paperwork nobody's supposed to care about yet.

There's a padlock on the gate that wasn't there yesterday.

I stand there a second too long, staring at bright new brass on ten-year-old rust, feeling the particular cold that has nothing to do with the hour.

"That's new," a voice says behind me.

I spin around so fast I nearly go down on the cracked pavement, heart slamming so hard I taste it, and it's not until the second full second that I recognize the coat, the stillness, the low unhurried voice that hung up on me twelve hours ago.

"You scared the hell out of me," I say, which comes out angrier than I mean it to, mostly because I'm furious at my own hands for shaking.

"You shouldn't be out here alone at four in the morning." Damian's not even looking at me — he's looking at the padlock, head tilted slightly, the same stillness from the title office lobby, except now it reads less like calm and more like a man doing math he doesn't like the answer to. "That's not city hardware. Somebody put that on today."

"How would you know what city hardware looks like."

"Because I own the parcel next to it, and the city's lock is still hanging open on my gate because nobody's cared enough in ten years to lock it properly." He crouches, runs a thumb along the padlock's edge without touching the shackle. "This is somebody protecting something. Recently. Today, maybe."

"I think I know what."

That gets his full attention, dark eyes coming up to mine in the buzzing sodium light. "Tell me."

"You first," I say. "You never told me why you want the west parcels."

"And you never told me why you bid on all four before you'd even seen them." He straightens up. "We can keep doing this all night, Ms. Sterling, or one of us can be first."

I open my mouth to say something sharp, and that's the exact moment the dog starts barking — not a stray, not the ordinary background noise of a bad neighborhood, but close, deliberate, the kind of bark that means a handler somewhere gave a command.

Damian's hand closes around my wrist before I've even processed the sound as a threat.

"Move," he says, low, already pulling me back toward the fence line, away from the gate, away from the light. "Now."

"What—"

"Guard dog means a guard. Somebody's paying to keep people away from four empty warehouses nobody's supposed to care about, which means somebody already knows exactly what we both figured out this week." His voice stays flat and fast, no panic in it, which somehow scares me more than panic would. "We are not the only two people who know what's coming, Ivy."

It's the first time he's used my first name. I notice it even with my pulse hammering in my ears, even with a dog closing distance somewhere in the dark behind us, some small stupid corner of my brain filing it away like it matters.

We hit the fence line at the edge of the lot just as a flashlight beam sweeps across the pavement where I was standing thirty seconds ago. Damian pushes me down behind a rusted shipping container, close enough that I can feel him breathing, close enough that for one long moment neither of us moves at all, the beam of light sliding past us and away.

"Anyone out here?" a man's voice calls, bored, unconvinced, the voice of someone doing a job he doesn't think matters. The dog barks once more, then subsides, and after a moment I hear boots crunching away across gravel, back toward wherever they came from.

We stay behind the container a long time after the sound's gone, longer than we need to, both of us breathing too hard for two people who never actually got caught.

"Somebody's guarding an empty warehouse district," I say finally, quiet, "on the same day my stepsister got caught on the phone talking about pulling files before an Ashford audit."

Damian goes very still beside me.

"Say that again," he says.

"Celeste. My stepsister. I heard her on the phone last night, talking about Route 9 data, and an audit, and making sure someone named Marcus doesn't find out she pulled files before it happens."

"Marcus Ashford."

"You know him?"

"I know of him." Something's changed in Damian's voice, something careful, and when he looks at me now it isn't with the wary curiosity of the title office lobby, it's with the focused attention of a man who's just found the second half of an equation he's been trying to solve alone. "Ivy. What do you actually know about what's coming? Not guesses. Not instinct. What do you know."

I look at him in the dark, this stranger who pulled me out of the path of a flashlight beam an hour ago, who's asking me the one question I haven't let myself answer out loud to a single living person since I woke up three months in the past gasping for air.

Somewhere behind the warehouse, the dog starts barking again — closer this time, urgent, the kind of bark that means the handler's noticed the beam of light found nothing and is bringing the dog to check for himself.

"We need to move," Damian says, already pulling me up by the wrist. "You're going to tell me everything, Ivy Sterling. Just not here."

The flashlight beam swings back around the corner of the warehouse, closer than the last one, catching the very edge of the shipping container we're crouched behind, and for one frozen half-second before Damian yanks me sideways into the dark, I watch the light climb the rusted metal wall six inches from where my face just was.