Chapter Thirteen

Damian picks up before the first ring finishes.

"Tell me," he says, no greeting, and I realize he already knows something's wrong just from the fact that I'm calling instead of texting.

"They took Tobias. Company security, four men, they came to my house twenty minutes ago." I'm already moving up to my room, already pulling out the small bag I packed three days ago without fully admitting to myself why I was packing it. "Celeste thinks they're going to make him disappear."

Silence on the line, long enough that I check the screen to make sure the call didn't drop.

"Damian."

"I heard you." His voice has gone very quiet, very controlled, the way it went quiet in the car this morning right before he told me his source worked two floors below Julian's office. "There's a secondary building. Not the main tower — a research annex on the east side, older building, minimal staff, the kind of place a company puts things it doesn't want anyone looking at too closely. If they're processing an internal security matter off the books, that's where it happens."

"How do you know that."

"Because it's the building Tobias described to me eight months ago, the first time he reached out. He said if anything ever happened to him, that's where I should look first." A pause, and something in his voice shifts, tightens. "I'm coming to get you. Ten minutes."

He makes it in eight.

*

The research annex sits three blocks off the main Ashford Biotech campus, a squat gray building with none of the glass-and-steel polish of the tower, the kind of building that's easy to walk past without ever wondering what's inside it. Damian parks two streets over, out of sight of the single security camera mounted over the loading entrance, and we go the rest of the way on foot.

"You've done this before," I say, watching him move — quiet, deliberate, checking angles I wouldn't have thought to check.

"I've watched people who do this for a living. It's not the same thing, but it's better than nothing." He stops at a service door on the building's east side, examines the lock for a moment, then produces a small tool from his coat that I decide not to ask too many questions about. "Tobias gave me the after-hours code to this door four months ago. In case."

"In case of what?"

"In case exactly this happened." The lock clicks. He looks back at me, dark eyes serious in the shadow of the doorway. "If we're wrong about this, we're trespassing on private company property and I'm about to make an enemy out of the family your entire life is currently entangled with. Last chance to say no."

"He said my name instead of hers," I say. "When they took him. He looked right at me and said my name."

Damian doesn't answer that. He just pushes the door open, and we go inside.

The annex is mostly dark, emergency lighting only, a maze of narrow corridors that smell like old carpet and something faintly chemical underneath it. We move fast and quiet, Damian leading, until we reach a records room on the second floor — unlocked, which should be reassuring and instead makes my skin crawl, because nobody leaves a room like this unlocked unless they don't expect anyone left alive to come looking through it.

"This is his," Damian says, low, crossing to a desk shoved into the corner, drawers half open, papers scattered like someone searched it in a hurry and didn't care about being tidy. "This is Tobias's desk."

I start going through the drawers while he checks a filing cabinet against the far wall, and for a few minutes neither of us says anything, just the quiet rustle of paper and the distant hum of building systems that shouldn't be running this late if the annex is as empty as it looks.

I find it folded inside a manila envelope taped to the underside of the bottom drawer, the kind of place you hide something you expect someone to search for eventually.

A single printed report, eight months old, header reading Containment Incident 0347 — Internal Review, Confidential.

I skim it once, fast, and then I go back and read it again slower, because the first time through I don't believe what I'm reading.

"Damian."

He crosses the room in three steps and reads over my shoulder, and I feel him go very still beside me.

The report isn't describing an accident. It's describing a projected release scenario — modeled, deliberate, timed against a patent filing date for an experimental antiviral compound that, according to the numbers laid out in cold clinical language across three pages, would see its valuation increase by a factor of nearly forty once a contained outbreak created sufficient public demand for treatment.

Signed off, at the bottom, by a name I recognize instantly because I've had dinner across a table from the man who shares it every Thursday for the last year.

M. Ashford.

"This isn't a cover-up of an accident," I say, and my voice comes out strange, hollowed out, because some part of me that's been operating on the assumption that I'm racing a natural disaster is recalculating everything at once. "This is a plan. Someone engineered this. Marcus knew this was coming because Marcus arranged for it to happen."

"Ivy." Damian's voice is very careful, very controlled, the voice of a man holding something back because he doesn't trust himself to say it any other way. "If that report is real, and if Marcus Ashford actually authorized a release scenario to manipulate a patent valuation—"

"Then the outbreak that killed me," I say, finishing it for him, because I need to hear it out loud in my own voice before I can believe it, "wasn't an accident I woke up early enough to survive. It's a murder weapon somebody built on purpose, and I've been engaged to the son of the man who built it."

Somewhere down the hall, a door opens.

Footsteps, slow and unhurried, the particular confident rhythm of someone who belongs in this building and has no reason to expect anyone else does.

Damian's hand closes around my wrist, and he pulls me down behind the filing cabinet just as a shadow falls across the doorway of the records room, and through the gap between the cabinet and the wall, I watch a pair of polished shoes stop directly in the threshold, and a voice I know better than almost any voice in my life says, quiet, almost amused, into the dark.

"I know someone's in here," Julian says. "You might as well come out."