Chapter Seven - Power Cut
838 Words
"Walk with me," Adrian said, already moving toward the elevator before Julian had finished catching up to him.
"Your instincts were right, boss. It was a shell company that acquired the unit."
"The name."
"Conman Oil."
Adrian's eyes came off his phone and settled on him.
"What else."
"Bought out last year by a private investment firm, after it liquidated everything else it owned. The man watching her building looks like one of their people." Julian handed over a folder as the elevator doors opened onto Adrian's floor. "It's all in there. Surveillance stills, ownership trail, the works."
Adrian flipped it open and skimmed, jaw tightening by degrees as he read.
"These came from the building's own cameras?"
"Yes, boss."
"Good work." He closed the folder. "Leave it with me."
"How do you want to handle it? Bring the rest of the team in?"
"No. Watch. Don't move on it." Adrian held his gaze to make sure it landed. "Not yet."
"Understood."
"That's all for now."
Julian hesitated at the door, just long enough that Adrian looked up again.
"Something else?"
"Just — you sure about not moving on it? If they're already inside her system, waiting costs us time."
"I'm aware of what waiting costs." Adrian's voice didn't rise, but something in it closed the conversation anyway. "Move too early and they'll know we're watching back. I need them comfortable a little longer."
"And her?"
"Not your concern."
Julian nodded once and left.
Adrian stood at the window a long moment after the door shut, the city spread out below him doing nothing to hold his attention. The reports on his desk might as well have been blank. One thought kept circling back, refusing to resolve into anything simpler.
How far in was Nora Bennett already.
Nora got back to her apartment a little after nine and opened her laptop to keep working through the contractor list. A notification blinked in the corner — a new file, uploaded automatically overnight. She opened it.
Displacement records. And a name she recognized instantly, tied straight to her father's accident.
The lights went out before she'd finished reading it.
"Hello?" She stood, more out of instinct than expectation, and checked the switch by the door. Nothing wrong with it that she could find.
She took the stairs down to the utility room to check the source herself, phone already in hand, thumb hovering near the emergency line in case whoever she found down there didn't have a good reason to be.
The door to the room was open. Not fully — just enough to suggest someone had been careless, or hadn't cared whether it looked that way.
She stepped in. The main line had been pulled loose from its housing.
A voice behind her made her flinch. "Sorry — didn't mean to startle you."
Austin, from the fourth floor, already elbow-deep in the wiring.
"You're fixing it?"
"Found it like this ten minutes ago. Should've called down first, but figured I'd just handle it." He glanced at her over his shoulder. "You didn't touch this, did you?"
"No. I was never even down here."
Something in his face paused at that — not suspicion exactly, just the small hitch of a man doing math that didn't add up. He let it go.
"Well. Should be back on in a minute."
"Thank you, Austin."
"Anytime."
She went back upstairs slower than she'd come down, the quiet of the stairwell suddenly louder than it had any right to be.
Her apartment door was exactly as she'd left it. Her laptop screen was dark — asleep, she assumed, until she touched the trackpad and the screen woke to an empty folder where the displacement file had been just minutes ago.
Gone. Not moved, not renamed. Erased, cleanly, like it had never existed at all.
She stood and checked the room out of habit more than hope, then the hallway, then the elevator bank. Empty, all of it. Nothing to see, which somehow felt worse than something would have.
If a file could vanish off her own machine in the minutes her power was out, it hadn't been a glitch.
Someone had been inside her system. Watching in real time. Waiting for the exact moment she opened the one document that mattered, and cutting the lights the second she got there.
She thought of Adrian's voice in the hallway two nights ago. You weren't supposed to notice the pattern at all.
She hadn't noticed the pattern. She'd walked straight into the middle of it.
Across the street, inside a car parked with its lights off, a laptop screen lit a man's face pale blue. On it, a live feed of her apartment door, angled just enough to catch anyone coming or going.
He watched her shadow cross behind the curtain once, then go still.
"She saw the file," he said, quiet, like the walls of the car might be listening too.
No one answered him. He didn't need them to. He was already typing.
- Writer
