His Bite Stole My Tomorrow

The Warning

Marlowe read the message twice before she trusted herself to speak.

"Someone closed the files," she said. "This afternoon. Before I ever stepped into that elevator."

"Then someone knew you were coming before you did." Micah hadn't moved from his chair, but his posture had sharpened, careless stillness turning into something closer to alert. "Who sent it?"

"My compliance officer. DeWitt Marsh." She turned the phone toward him, though she doubted he needed to read it twice like she had. "He assigned me this audit six weeks ago. He wouldn't close nineteen files without approval from someone above him, and nobody above him signs off on anything at eleven at night unless they're trying to bury it before morning."

"Call him."

"I intend to."

The line rang four times and went to voicemail. She hung up and tried again. Same result. She tried his office extension, then the line for his assistant, a young man who usually picked up on the second ring even after hours because Marsh paid him well enough to expect it. Nothing there either. Not even the automated system answered, which on its own meant little, but combined with everything else tonight it stopped reading like coincidence and started reading like a pattern she recognized from her own line of work. Silence in this many places at once was rarely accidental.

She set the phone down and looked at Micah properly, the folder still cracked open on the glass table between them. Six weeks of work sat inside that folder, spreadsheets and death certificates and actuarial projections she'd built line by line, and somewhere underneath the professional distance she'd trained herself to keep, she felt the specific dread of watching a paper trail vanish while she was still holding the last copy of it. She'd felt that dread exactly once before, in a lawyer's office at twenty-two, listening to a settlement offer that explained nothing and closed everything.

"This is convenient for you," she said. "The files close themselves the same night I confront you about them. My officer goes unreachable the same hour I'm sitting in your penthouse. You'll forgive me if I don't hand you the benefit of the doubt."

"You think I closed them myself."

"I think you've had a hundred years to learn how to make evidence disappear, and I have no reason to believe tonight is the first time you've used that skill."

Something close to insult crossed his face, quick and gone, replaced almost immediately by a stillness that unsettled her more than anger would have. "If I wanted those files gone, Ms. Quill, they'd have vanished before your firm ever assigned you to look at them. I don't sabotage evidence after someone's already found the pattern. That's clumsy, and I've survived this long by never being clumsy."

"Then who."

"I don't know yet. That worries me considerably more than you not trusting me does."

She stood, gathering the folder against her chest, and started for the door. Whatever this building was, whatever he was, she wasn't going to sit in a stranger's penthouse at midnight waiting to be told which parts of the truth she was allowed to have.

"I'm leaving," she said. "I'll find Marsh myself. In person, tomorrow, where there are witnesses and cameras and none of whatever just happened in that elevator. I have a guess about what you are, Mr. Shade, and I'm not ready to say it out loud, but I'd like to know exactly what you're capable of before I decide how afraid to be."

"That's the right instinct." He didn't stand to stop her, didn't reach for her arm, simply watched her cross the room with an expression she couldn't quite name. "Leave. Go somewhere with people in it. Don't come back here alone again until you understand what you're actually investigating."

"Are you warning me off, or warning me away from you specifically?"

"Both, and I'd rather you took either one seriously." He finally rose, unhurried, and crossed to stand near the window rather than near her, keeping distance she hadn't asked for but noticed anyway. "I've told you more tonight than I've told anyone in decades. I don't intend to tell you more than that until I understand why those files closed themselves without my involvement, because right now I can't promise you I'm the only danger in this building."

"You could have let me walk out of that elevator not knowing any of it. You chose to tell me what you did instead."

"I know. I've been asking myself why since the doors opened, and I don't have an answer that satisfies me yet." He said it plainly, without the practiced weight he'd used on everything else tonight, which was somehow worse. A man performing mystery she could dismiss. A man genuinely confused by his own behavior was harder to walk away from.

That admission landed harder than anything else he'd said, precisely because he hadn't dressed it up as reassurance. She'd spent six years learning to distrust people who tried too hard to sound safe. Micah wasn't doing that. He sounded, if anything, like a man laying out a threat assessment rather than a seduction, and that honesty unsettled her more than charm would have. It also meant she couldn't file him under liar and walk away clean, which was, she suspected, exactly the problem. A liar would have been easy to leave.

Her phone lit up again on the table she'd just left behind. Not Marsh's name this time. An unknown number, no caller ID, a single line of text glowing against the low gold light of the room.

Ask him what happened to the last person he told the truth to.

Marlowe froze with her hand on the door.

"Micah." Her voice had gone quiet in a way she didn't like. "Who is this number, and why does it already know what you just said to me thirty seconds ago."

He crossed the room fast enough that she barely registered the movement, and when he looked at the screen over her shoulder, whatever composure he'd kept since the elevator finally cracked.

"That's not possible," he said. "Nobody hears what's said inside this apartment. Nobody has, ever, not in the hundred years I've owned it."

"Someone just did."

For the first time since she'd met him, Micah Shade looked like a man who didn't know what came next.