I Found His Secret, Now He Won't Let Me Leave

The Sister

Three days into whatever this was, Noa started keeping a list. Not written down anywhere, she wasn't stupid, just a mental one, a running tally of every small contradiction that didn't fit the man from the office that first night. Kieran remembered she took her coffee black, though she'd never told him that, someone must have, or he'd noticed on his own, which was somehow worse. He'd had her desk moved closer to the window without asking, and when she mentioned it, he said the old spot got too much glare on the monitor in the afternoon, like that was a completely normal thing for a captor to track.

She wasn't calling him that anymore, not really, not in her head. Captor felt too simple for whatever this actually was. She didn't have a better word yet. That bothered her more than she wanted to admit.

The girl showed up on a Thursday.

Noa was in the break room refilling her coffee, badge clipped crooked on her blazer, when the elevator opened and a young woman walked out like she owned the floor, dark hair, quick eyes, moving with the kind of ease that meant she'd been here a hundred times before and never once needed permission.

"You're new," the girl said, stopping in the doorway, studying Noa with open curiosity instead of the careful blankness everyone else on this floor seemed to practice. "Nobody told me there was someone new."

"I'm not exactly new," Noa said. "More like temporarily relocated."

"That's a very corporate way of saying kidnapped." The girl grinned, and something about the shape of it, the exact tilt of the mouth, made Noa's stomach do something strange and recognizing before her brain caught up.

"You're Talia," Noa said. It wasn't a guess anymore, not once she saw that grin.

The girl's eyebrows went up. "He talks about me?"

"No," Noa admitted. "I found a lease agreement. Old file. I wasn't looking for you specifically." That sounded worse out loud than it had in her head, and she winced. "I'm an auditor. Old habits."

"An auditor who found my brother's paperwork and then remembered my name three days later." Talia leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, still smiling, but something sharper had entered it now, something that made Noa understand exactly whose sister this was. "That's not old habits. That's interest."

"It's not what you think."

"I didn't say what I thought." Talia's smile widened, delighted now, like she'd caught something rare. "You did that part yourself."

Noa opened her mouth to argue and then closed it, because there wasn't actually a good comeback for that, and lying to this particular face felt suddenly, uselessly pointless.

"Does he know you're here," Noa asked instead, mostly to change the subject.

"He doesn't know half of what I do." Talia pushed off the doorframe and wandered further into the break room, opening the fridge like she'd done it a thousand times, which she probably had. "He thinks I still believe the version of the family business he tells me. Security consulting. Executive protection. Very boring, very legal." She said the word legal like it tasted strange in her mouth. "I stopped believing that a long time ago. I just never had proof. You have proof, don't you. That's why you're locked up here with better furniture and a worse view."

Noa's pulse spiked, hard, fast, because this was exactly the kind of conversation Kieran had warned her against having, except she hadn't started it, and she wasn't sure how to end it without either lying badly or confirming something that could get this girl hurt.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Noa said, which was the worst lie she'd told all week, and judging by Talia's expression, they both knew it.

"Okay," Talia said easily, not pushing, which somehow felt like more pressure than if she had. "We'll do it your way. For now." She grabbed a can of something from the fridge and headed for the door, then stopped, half turned back, something more serious sliding under the humor in her face. "For what it's worth, whatever you found. He's not what people think he is. He's worse in some ways. Better in ways nobody gives him credit for." A beat. "I don't know which one you've met yet. Maybe both."

She left before Noa could ask what that meant.

Kieran's office door was open when Noa walked past it twenty minutes later, and she almost didn't stop, almost kept walking straight to her own desk like a sensible person who wasn't currently spiraling about a nineteen year old with her brother's exact smile. But he looked up before she could decide, and something about his face made her stop anyway.

"Talia was here," he said. Not a question. Of course not a question.

"You have cameras on the break room too."

"I have cameras everywhere on this floor." He said it without apology, like apologizing for surveillance would be a strange, foreign concept to him. "What did she say."

Noa considered lying again, briefly, and discarded it just as quickly, because apparently she'd used up her capacity for that particular skill for one day.

"She said you're worse than people think in some ways," Noa said. "And better in ways nobody gives you credit for. I don't think she was talking about the security consulting."

Something flickered across Kieran's face, fast, gone almost before it landed, but Noa was getting better at cataloguing these small cracks, and this one looked almost like fear. Not fear of her. Fear for someone.

"She doesn't know everything," he said quietly.

"She knows more than you think she does." Noa hadn't meant to say it that gently. It surprised her coming out of her own mouth. "She's not stupid, Kieran. She's figured out enough to be scared for you, even if she doesn't have the specifics."

He was quiet for a long moment, looking at something on his desk that wasn't actually there, some middle distance only he could see.

"She's the only person in this whole business I never wanted touching any of it," he said finally, and his voice had lost some of its usual flatness, just for a second, just enough that Noa felt it land somewhere she didn't expect. "Everything I've built, all of it, it was supposed to keep her out. Not pull her in."

Noa didn't know what to say to that. She stood in his doorway holding a truth she hadn't asked for, watching the coldest man she'd met in years look, for just one unguarded moment, entirely human.

"That's the first true thing you've told me since I got here," she said quietly.

He looked up at her, and neither of them said anything else for a while.