CHAPTER 07

ELARIS POV

I told Kaiven about the note, because I had promised myself that I would never again walk into a locked room without someone knowing where the door was, but I also told him the one condition written on that scrap of paper, that I come alone and keep the Thornevale name out of it, and I watched his hands curl against the arm of his chair as he weighed my safety against my right to decide. He did not forbid me, and he did not pretend that he wasn't afraid, and in the end we reached an agreement that neither of us liked and both of us could live with: Dorian would park two streets away with the engine off, Kaiven would stay at the estate with his phone in his hand, and I would carry the small phone he had given me with its location switched on, so that if I did not message him by nine-thirty, he would come, whatever the note said about names. I accepted it because it was not a leash but a lifeline, and the difference between the two had become the most important thing I knew.

The Greywell bus depot sat at the edge of the old industrial quarter, a long concrete shed with a flickering sign and a smell of diesel and rain-soaked cardboard, and by nine o'clock the last bus had gone and the place had emptied into shadows and puddles that held the broken light of one failing streetlamp. I walked along the back wall with my hands in my coat pockets and my shoulders pulled tight, listening to every drip and scrape, and I thought about the prison yard at dusk, how I had learned to feel danger on the back of my neck before I ever saw it. When a thin figure stepped out from behind a stack of pallets and whispered my name, I nearly jumped out of my skin, though it was only the young woman from the hallway, her pale blue lab coat replaced by a dark hooded jacket that made her look even smaller and more afraid.

Her name was Nessa Calloway, and she was thirty now, though she looked older around the eyes, and she kept glancing past my shoulder as if the walls themselves might be listening. She had been twenty and new to the county laboratory when the Ashbourne samples came in, and she told me in a low, rushed voice that the first sample arrived properly sealed, logged, and labeled, exactly as the trial documents said. The second one came to her late on a Friday evening, brought by a man who did not give his name but wore a bureau badge, and it sat in an ordinary glass jar with a screw lid, the kind people kept jam in, still smeared with what looked like scrambled egg. She had asked why it had not been collected properly, and the man had smiled and told her that a good technician knew which questions were helpful and which were career-ending.

"I signed the intake form because I was scared," Nessa said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "I watched him take a sample from that jar and put it in a proper vial, and he told me the vial was the only thing that existed. But I kept the jar's lid, Miss Veyne, because something felt wrong, and I couldn't make myself throw it away. It has a number scratched into the underside with a pin, and I've kept it in a shoebox for ten years, waiting for someone to ask."

My breath left me in a rush, and I pressed a hand against the cold wall to steady myself. A lid, a scrap of tin the size of my palm, was the first solid thing anyone had handed me in a decade, and it was proof that a second sample had existed and that someone had taken pains to rewrite what it was. I asked her why she had waited so long, and she looked at me with an expression of such raw shame that I almost regretted the question, then said that she had a mother who needed her paycheck and a supervisor who reminded her every year how easily a technician could be blamed for contaminated evidence. When she saw my face in a news article last week, she told me, she had not slept for three nights, and today, in that hallway, her courage had finally outweighed her fear.

She reached into her jacket and drew out a small padded envelope, and just as her fingers brushed mine, I heard it: the low, unmistakable crunch of a boot on gravel somewhere behind the pallets. Nessa froze, her eyes wide and glassy, and I pushed the envelope deep into my coat, grabbed her wrist, and whispered that we were leaving, now, but before we had taken three steps a black sedan swung around the corner of the depot with its headlights off and rolled toward us with a slow, deliberate patience that turned my blood to ice. A door opened, and a man stepped out with a hat pulled low over his face, and in the dim light I saw the bureau badge pinned to his coat flash once like a warning.

"Miss Calloway," he called pleasantly, as though greeting an old friend. "Director Sable was so sorry to hear you weren't feeling well today. He asked me to make sure you got home safely."

Nessa made a small, terrified sound, and I stepped in front of her without thinking, my hand closing around the phone in my pocket, my thumb finding the button Kaiven had shown me that would send a single silent alert. I pressed it, and then I lifted my chin and met the stranger's eyes with the same stillness I had used on a hundred threatening women in a hundred narrow corridors, and told him in a perfectly even voice that Miss Calloway was going home with me. He smiled slowly, the way a cat smiles at something it has already caught, and answered that he was afraid I did not understand how this worked, then took one long step forward as the sedan's engine growled behind him and two more doors opened in the dark.