Ten Thousand Reasons I Refuse To Be Your Luna

CHAPTER 11: Reason #11

I could not stop thinking about the door.

It was not the gunshots that kept replaying in my head. It was not the masked men either, or even that creepy anonymous message telling me to stay away from Morrette, which, by the way, only made me want to get closer to the mystery, not further from it. Sue me.

No. It was the way he had moved that night. Fast. Calm. Certain. The more I replayed it all in my mind, the less any of it made sense. Mechanics did not fight like trained soldiers. Security guards did not vanish every single time something strange happened around this building. And ordinary men certainly did not make me question everything I thought I knew about the world.

I sat alone in my office long after everyone else had gone home for the night. The city outside buzzed with lights, cars, life, all of it completely indifferent to the fact that my brain refused to shut off.

There had to be an explanation. There is always an explanation, I told myself, mostly to feel like a functioning adult and not someone who had developed an unhealthy obsession with her own mechanic.

And if there was an explanation, I decided I would find it myself.

The next morning, I walked into Star Global’s security department for the first time in years. Genuinely, years. I think the last time I set foot in there was to complain about a parking sensor.

The employees shot up from their chairs the second they spotted me. “Good morning, Miss Star,” one of them said, a little too quickly. “I need a favor,” I said, skipping the small talk entirely.

Daniel, the head of security, hurried over like his chair was on fire. “Anything,” he said. “I want every surveillance recording from the Sky Crown Hotel, from the night of the investment summit.”

He blinked at me. “The police already requested copies,” he said. “I know,” I said. “I want ours.” He looked surprised, understandably. “May I ask why?” he asked. “I cannot sleep,” I said, which was not the real reason, but was not exactly a lie either.

Within fifteen minutes, Daniel had everything set up in a private monitoring room. Rows of enormous screens lined one entire wall, showing hundreds of camera angles. Every hallway, every elevator, every entrance, every level of the parking garage.

I sat down in front of them. “Play everything from thirty minutes before the power outage,” I said.

The footage started rolling. Guests arrived in their expensive suits, employees hurried around doing employee things, waiters weaved between tables carrying trays of tiny food nobody actually eats at these events. Everything looked completely ordinary.

I watched in silence, flipping between cameras. Then there he was. Morrette. Still in that black security uniform, walking through a service corridor like he owned the place. He looked nothing like the carefree, slightly annoying mechanic who liked arguing with me over absolutely everything. His expression was cold. Focused. Almost like he was hunting someone.

“Pause it,” I said. Daniel froze the screen. “Can you enlarge that hallway?” I asked. He did. Morrette had stopped outside a heavy emergency security door, one I actually remembered, the corridor leading to the underground parking garage.

A few seconds later, two armed men rushed in through the opposite side and locked the steel door from the inside. Morrette reached it moments after.

I leaned forward without meaning to. “He is going to need a key,” I muttered. Instead, he looked once at the lock, stepped back, and drove his fist straight into the center of the door.

The screen shook. The steel lock exploded inward. The entire door bent open, not cracked, not loosened, bent, like it was made of tin foil instead of reinforced steel.

The men inside spun around in shock before bolting. Morrette chased them through the broken entrance like nothing unusual had just happened at all.

I stared at the frozen screen for a long moment. “Replay it,” I said quietly. Daniel rewound the footage. The same thing happened. Again. And again. Each replay made even less sense than the one before it.

“Can someone fake this?” I asked. Daniel frowned. “The video?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered.

He shook his head immediately. “Our surveillance system stores everything directly onto encrypted servers,” he said. “It has not been edited.”

I stood and walked closer to the screen, staring at the ruined door frozen mid-collapse. “How thick was that door?” I asked. Daniel checked another file. “Industrial reinforced steel,” he said. “Designed to delay intruders until police arrive.”

“So no one can break it with their bare hands,” I said, more to myself than to him. “No one,” he said carefully. “If someone could, they would not need tools at all.” My heartbeat stumbled a little. There had to be another explanation. There had to be.

I left the security room carrying a copy of the footage, and instead of going back to my office like a sensible person, I drove straight to the hotel. Because apparently sleep and sensible decisions were both off the table for me today.

The damaged corridor had already been repaired. A brand new steel door stood exactly where the old one used to be, gleaming and smug, like it had not just replaced a door that got punched into scrap metal.

I found the hotel operations manager and did not bother easing into it. “I would like to ask about the emergency door that was damaged during the attack,” I said.

He sighed like I had just asked him to relive his worst day. “It cost a fortune,” he said. “So it really was damaged,” I said. “Completely destroyed,” he admitted. “How?” I asked. “We still do not know,” he said. “The police assumed explosives at first.”

“But there were no explosive marks,” I guessed. “None,” he confirmed. “And no heavy equipment either. Nothing.”

“What did the cameras actually show?” I asked. He started to answer, then stopped himself entirely, his face suddenly very careful. “Showed what?” I pressed.

He forced a smile that did not reach anywhere near his eyes. “I am sorry, Miss Star,” he said. “The investigation is still ongoing.” Then he walked away before I could get another word in, which honestly felt like the universal signal for *I know something and I am absolutely not telling you.*

He knew something. Or somebody had told him to keep his mouth shut.

That evening I went back to my penthouse and put the copied footage on my laptop, watching it loop over and over until the image practically burned itself into my eyes. Morrette. The door. One punch. Steel folding inward like paper. Impossible.

I paused the video at the exact second his fist connected with the lock, then zoomed in as far as it would go. There was something strange there, something I had not caught the first ten times. The image blurred, just barely, for less than a second. Not the whole screen. Only his hand, like the camera physically could not process what it was seeing.

I replayed it five more times. The same distortion showed up every single time. I leaned back in my chair and said, out loud, to an empty apartment, “What exactly are you?”

Without really thinking about it, I opened my notebook. On the next blank page, I wrote: *Reason Number Eleven.*

*You keep doing impossible things, and I cannot stop trying to understand you.*

I stared at the words for a long moment. And for the first time since I started this ridiculous list, it did not sound like a reason to keep him at arm’s length.

It sounded like the beginning of an obsession, and honestly, a slightly inconvenient one, considering the man in question could apparently punch through military-grade steel like it was drywall.

Right then, my laptop screen flickered. The surveillance video closed on its own. A black screen replaced it, and one sentence slowly typed itself across the display, letter by letter, like something out of a horror movie I would have laughed at yesterday. **STOP LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH, MELISSA.**

Then the screen went completely dark. Someone was watching me watch Morrette. And suddenly, my ridiculous little list of reasons felt a lot less ridiculous, and a lot more dangerous.