CHAPTER FOUR
1421 Words
I do not move.
My phone is still warm in my hand. The three dots are gone. Marcus Reid's message sits on my screen like something that cannot be unsaid.
Outside my door, silence.
Then the footsteps again. One step. Two.
Moving away.
I let out a breath very slowly. I barely feel it leave my body.
Then I get up, cross the room, and open the door.
The hallway is empty.
Of course, it is.
The corridor stretches in both directions, with cream walls, low evening lighting, and the same Persian runner that has lined this hallway since before I was born. Everything exactly as it has always appeared.
I close the door, and I lock it, which I have never done before. I realize this only after I hear the click of the bolt. I stand there with my hand still on it, aware of what that small action just revealed about where I am tonight.
I go back to the window seat.
I do not sleep.
Morning comes the way it always does in this house, quietly, with discipline.
By seven, the staff is rising through the lower floors. By seven fifteen, the smell of coffee has reached the second landing.
By seven thirty, the mansion has its public face on, the way it does every day: polished, composed, and giving nothing away.
I shower and put on my dress. After that, I spend slightly longer than usual on my reflection.
Same face I have always had—dark hair, hazel eyes, the bone structure that my mother's friends always compliment at galas.
"You look just like your father's side," they say.
I used to love hearing that.
Damien is already at the breakfast table when I come downstairs.
Suit pressed. Coffee poured.
The morning paper opens in front of him—an actual paper, not a phone, because Damien Voss still reads the physical paper every morning like it is 1987 and he has somewhere important to be.
He looks up when I walk in.
"You slept," he says.
It is not a question. It is an assessment.
"Good morning to you too," I say.
I pull out my chair and sit. The housekeeper, Maria, appears with coffee before I have to ask. I wrap both hands around the cup and let the warmth do what warmth does.
"You locked your door last night," Damien says.
I look at him over the rim of my cup.
"I don't know what you are talking about," I say.
"The security system logs every door in the house." He turns a page of his newspaper. Calmly. Completely.
"You never lock your door," he says.
“The coffee is very good,” I say.
Because there are some conversations I'm not supposed to prolong; instead, I just let them slide or change the topic completely.
I focus on that—the specific, grounding fact of good coffee on a Tuesday morning in a house where everything is monitored, including my bedroom door.
"I wanted privacy," I say.
"You have always had privacy."
"Clearly not."
He looks up from the paper.
That expression again—the controlled one, the one that sits just on the warm side of something colder.
"I am not your enemy, Elara," he says.
"I did not say you were."
"You did not have to."
The thing about Damien is that he is never wrong about small things.
That makes him so difficult to argue with. He collects small observations—the locked door, the way I hold my coffee, the things I do not say—the way other people collect evidence.
Because to him, that is exactly what they are.
I have watched him do this my entire life. The way he catalogs the people around him.
The way he files their patterns and turns them into a system he then uses—always quietly, always precisely—to stay three steps ahead.
He has been doing it to me since I was four years old.
I used to think it was because he knew me better than anyone.
I am beginning to understand that knowing someone and mapping someone are not the same thing.
"I want to talk about Marcus Reid," I say.
Damien closes his newspaper.
He folds it precisely along the original crease and sets it beside his plate.
"No," he says.
"He sent me a message last night."
"I know."
My cup stops halfway to my mouth.
"You know," I say.
"The corporate email server is monitored. Any message from a terminated employee to a Voss family member is automatically flagged. " He picks up his coffee. "Standard procedure."
"Standard procedure," I repeat.
"Yes."
I set my cup down on the saucer with a sound that is slightly louder than I intend.
"He said the slide four error was not an accident," I say. "What does that mean?"
Damien looks at me for a long moment.
Outside the dining room windows, Manhattan is waking up—the park coming into color, early-morning runners appearing on the paths below, and the sky shifting from grey to something brighter.
The city always looks cleanest from up here.
From a distance.
"It means a terminated employee is trying to create a narrative that protects his reputation," Damien says.
"It means nothing more than that."
"And if I do not believe that?"
"Then I would ask you," he says very quietly, "What reason do you have not to?"
I think about that on the car ride to the Voss Corporation.
The city moves past the window—Columbus Avenue giving way to the park, the park giving way to Midtown, Midtown building itself up around me until the glass towers are pressing against both sides of the street and the sky is just a strip of pale blue above them.
I have made this drive my entire life.
Same route. Same car. Same skyline assembling itself around me like a stage set.
What reason do you have not to believe me?
The answer Damien wants is none. The answer he has spent twenty-two years building toward is none.
Every school he chose. Every friend he approved. Every person who got too close quietly, efficiently disappeared.
All of it constructed so that when moments like this one arrived—when someone handed me a thread and asked me to pull it—I would look at the thread and then look at Damien and choose Damien.
Because who else would I choose?
Who else has there ever been?
My phone buzzes as the car pulls up outside the tower.
I look at the screen.
Unknown number again.
I answer it before I think about it.
"Miss Voss." Marcus Reid's voice is lower than last night's and careful, like someone speaking in a room where they are not sure who else is listening.
"I only have a minute. I need you to look at something."
"I am outside my building," I say quietly. "This is not a good time."
"There is no good time," he says. "There is just now, or not at all."
The driver opens my door.
I do not get out.
"What is it?" I say.
A pause.
Then—
"The slide four error was not a mistake someone made," he says. "It was a number someone changed. And I can prove it."
The morning traffic moves around the car.
Horns. Voices. The city is doing what it always does—pressing forward, indifferent, alive.
"Send me what you have," I say.
"I already did," he says. "Check the email address you used last night."
The line goes dead.
I sit in the back of the car for three full seconds.
Then I get out.
I walk through the lobby of the Voss Corporation building—marble floors, the family name pressed in steel letters above the reception desk, security cameras in every corner—and I think about what it means when the numbers inside the most trusted company in your life have been changed on purpose.
And by whom.
The elevator doors begin to close.
In the last second before they shut—
Through the gap, across the lobby, half hidden behind a pillar—
I see him.
Damien.
Still as a photograph. Watching me with an expression I cannot read from this distance.
The doors close.
I face my own reflection in the polished steel.
He was not at the tower this morning.
He was not supposed to be here at all.
- Writer
