Chapter Seven: Somewhere With a Lock

Sable

I made it to the third-floor stairwell before my legs gave out.

The door hissed shut behind me, and I slid down the cinder block wall until I was sitting on the cold landing, the letter opener digging into my wrist. Somewhere below, an engine idled, then faded. Whoever held that camera had decided I wasn't worth chasing tonight.

That was almost worse.

I stayed there for a minute, counting my breaths, listening for footsteps on the stairs below. None came. Only the hum of the fluorescent tubes and the distant, patient beep of a monitor somewhere on the floor above.

I did not read the paper there. *Somewhere with a lock,* Hollis had said, and I had spent five years learning to obey exactly that kind of warning. I climbed to the pediatric floor and opened the door of Room 12. Pip slept with one arm flung over her rabbit and her mouth open, a curl of dark hair stuck to her cheek. I stood there until I was sure her chest was rising and falling on its own, then straightened her blanket, which did not need straightening. The night nurse gave me a tired nod. I nodded back like a woman who had only gone for coffee.

The family bathroom at the end of the hall had a deadbolt. I turned it, sat on the closed lid, and unfolded the square of paper under the fluorescent hum.

It was a page torn from a ledger. Columns of dates in a clerk's tidy hand, each line ending in a figure and a pair of initials. Most of the entries were ordinary: supply orders, council stipends, a payment for repairs to the south fence, but one line near the bottom had been circled in faded red ink.

Oct. 14. Cash disbursement, $50,000. Authorized: M.T. Received by: E.P. Purpose: "discretionary."

October fourteenth was the night of the ceremony.

I read it three times. I had spent five years reading contracts for a living, hunting for the clause that would hurt me, and my eyes did it on instinct now. The ink in the date column was a shade darker than the ink in the rest of the line. Written later, then, or by a different pen. Someone had come back to this page and filled it in.

M.T. and E.P. Magnus Thorne and Edmund Pryce. Fifty thousand dollars had left the Ironwood accounts in cash, authorized by Magnus and received by a clerk who, according to what Tamsin's contact in the county office had whispered to her, had been dead two months by that date.

A dead man could not receive cash. Either the line had been written long before the date it claimed, or someone had built the whole story on paper and counted on nobody checking.

At the bottom of the page, in a smaller pencil, someone had added a note.

Ask who actually carried the envelope.

I pressed my knuckles against my mouth.

An envelope. The black car at the gate. The gloved hand. *Mr. Thorne asked me to give you this.* I had always assumed the driver meant Caelum. I had built five years of hatred on that sentence, brick by careful brick, and never once asked which Mr. Thorne.

There were two of them and one of them had stood at a second-floor window that night, one hand on the frame, watching me pack my life into a duffel bag.

The bathroom walls seemed to lean closer. I thought of Caelum's face in the corridor that afternoon, the way he had looked at me as though I were a word on the tip of his tongue. I thought of the boy behind the garden wall, choosing the worst word available, and I wondered for the first time who had taught him which words to choose.

I did not feel *good* now. I felt something far more dangerous, and I did not want to name it.

My phone, still powered off, was in my pocket. I turned it on. It buzzed three times in quick succession.

Tamsin, twice. *Where are you? Call me.* And a number I didn't recognize, with a single picture attached.

I opened it.

The image was grainy, shot through a windshield with a long lens. It showed a woman in a gray coat standing under a flickering light on level three of a parking structure, one arm thrown across her face. Me, thirty minutes ago.

Under the photo, a message.

Does the Alpha know you meet strange men in the dark, Ms. Vale?

My stomach turned over. Another buzz.

Or should I say Miss Hart?

I stared at the screen. Whoever had taken that picture had not been following Hollis. They had been following me, and they had known my real name before I stepped onto level three.

A third message appeared, typed out as I watched.

Tomorrow. Monday committee. Sit where I can see you. Say nothing about the paper, and I will say nothing about the child.

The phone slipped from my fingers and clattered against the tile.

*The child.* Not *your daughter,* not *Pip.* Just the child, as if she were a piece on a board. Everything in me went cold and very quiet, the way it had on the playground, and my wolf rose behind my ribs with her teeth already bared. I pressed my palm flat against my sternum and told her *not yet.*

I snatched the phone up, my hands shaking, and typed three furious words before I could think. *Who are you?* The message sat there, delivered, unread.

Then the dots appeared, vanished, appeared again. Whoever it was, they were enjoying this.

One final line arrived.

Look behind you.

I turned. The bathroom was a locked box, four walls and a ceiling, a mirror over the sink. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

But in the mirror's reflection, high in the corner above the door, a small black dot caught the light.

A lens.

It had been there the whole time. Every breath I had taken in this room, every whispered word, every time my face had crumpled over that page.

I did not scream. I folded the ledger page into my fist, climbed onto the closed lid, and looked straight into it. A tiny red light blinked once, patiently, like an eye that had never needed to close.

"Monday," I said to it, ver

y softly. "I'll be there."

Then I put my hand over the lens, and the light went out.