Chapter Six: Level Three

Sable

The text said to come alone, so I brought a knife.

It was a small one, a letter opener from my desk at Vale & Associates, and it sat in my coat sleeve like a bad idea. Pip was asleep two floors above me, her rabbit tucked under her chin, with the night nurse humming in the corridor. I had told the nurse I was getting coffee and thought that I would be gone for only ten minutes.

The parking structure smelled of oil and cold concrete. My heels echoed off the pillars, and every echo sounded like someone walking a half step behind me. Level one, empty. Level two, a single sedan with a dead dome light.

Level three was dark except for one flickering fixture at the far end.

A man stood beneath it, in a cardigan too thin for the weather. He held a leather satchel against his chest with both arms, the way you hold something that might be taken from you.

"Turn off your phone," he said.

I did not move. "Who are you?"

"Please." His voice cracked on the word. "Off. Not silent. Off."

I held the button down until the screen went black. He watched me do it, and some of the tension left his shoulders, but not much.

"Hollis," he said. "I keep the night archive for Ironwood. Kept it. I suppose I still do." He tried to smile and failed. "You wouldn't remember me. I was never anyone anyone remembered."

I remembered him. A gray figure in the basement of the pack house who handed out ledgers and never raised his eyes. When I was twelve, he had slipped a peppermint into my hand once and pretended he hadn't.

"You said you'd tell the Alpha," I said.

"I said that so you would come." He swallowed. "I would never tell him. I have been trying not to tell anyone anything for five years."

My fingers closed around the letter opener. "Then why am I here?"

"Because you are Sable Hart." He said it softly, the way you say the name of someone dead. "And because I have watched you walk through that hospital for a week as Ms. Vale, and you carry yourself so differently that I almost doubted it. Then you hung your coat on the hook outside Room 12, and you smoothed the left sleeve flat before you let go. You always did that. Even at seventeen."

I had not known anyone noticed. Not Caelum, not Elspeth, not even Tamsin. A man who never raised his eyes had kept a detailof the one habit I had forgotten I owned.

A shiver went down my spine. "Who else knows?"

"No one. I made sure." He glanced over his shoulder at the dark ramp. "But someone is looking, and it is not only the Lane girl. Things move in that archive at night. Files that should be where I left them are not. I have started marking the shelves with a hair, the way old clerks do."

"Moved by whom?"

"I don't know. I have never seen a face." He pressed the satchel tighter. "But the shelves they disturb are always the same ones. The council votes. The clerk records. Anything with Edmund Pryce's name."

At the name, my pulse slowed and then jumped.

"Pryce signed a receipt that said I took fifty thousand dollars," I said carefully. "Does the archive say otherwise?"

Hollis closed his eyes. For a moment I thought he might cry.

"The archive says a great many things," he said. "I have read them all. I have spent five years reading them in the dark, telling myself it was not my place."

"Hollis."

"I know something about the Alpha." The words came out in a rush, as though he had been holding them behind his teeth. "About Caelum. About that night. Something that would change how you look at him, and at the girl in silver, and at all of it. I came here to tell you. I have rehearsed it for months."

"Then tell me."

His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"I can't," he whispered. "Not yet. I am sorry. When I try to say it, I see the study window, and I see who stands behind it, and I forget how to breathe."

I stepped toward him. He flinched, and I stopped, and I made my voice gentle, the way I would for Pip after a nightmare.

"You don't have to do it alone anymore," I said. "Whatever it is."

"You don't understand." His eyes were wet. "If he learns I spoke, he won't punish me. He will simply ensure I was never here. That is how he works. No blood, no noise. Only absence."

I thought of Pryce, dead two months before he signed a page. I thought of a clerk who had resigned and vanished.

"Magnus," I said.

Hollis did not answer. He did not need to.

"Then give me something," I said. "Anything. A place to look. A name."

He hesitated, and I watched him weigh whether his fear was bigger than five years of silence. Then he reached into the satchel and drew out a folded square of paper, soft at the creases, as if it had been opened and closed a hundred times.

"This is not the secret," he said. "But it is the door to it. Don't read it here. Read it somewhere with a lock."

I took it. The paper was warm from his hands.

"Next week, same level, midnight," he said. "By then I will have found my courage, or I will have lost it for good."

"And if someone's watching you now?"

"Then you had better hurry home."

He turned and walked into the dark, small and stooped, and the sound of his footsteps was swallowed by the concrete.

I stood there with the paper in my fist and my pulse loud in my ears. Somewhere below me an engine turned over.

Then headlights flared on across the level, white and sudden, pinning me in place like an insect on a board.

I threw an arm over my eyes. Behind the glare, a car sat idling, windows black, and through the open driver's side a long lens poked out into the cold air.

The shutter clicked once.

Twice.

Three times.

I ran for the stairwell with Hollis's paper burning in my hand. The door slammed be

hind me, and the car came after me, as if whoever sat behind it already knew exactly where I would go.