His Bite Stole My Tomorrow

The Fourth Name

Micah crossed the room to the wall panel by the door and pressed his palm against it, a section of paneling sliding back to reveal a keypad she hadn't known was there. He entered a code too fast for her to catch, and a soft chime answered him, followed by silence.

"No devices," he said. "Nothing transmitting in or out of this apartment. I built this floor specifically so that wouldn't be possible."

"Then how did a stranger quote your own words back at me thirty seconds after you said them."

"I don't know." He said it flatly, without performance, and that honesty scared her more than a denial would have. "There are perhaps four people alive who know enough about what I am to send a message like that. Two of them I trust with my life. One's been dead for sixty years. That leaves one name, and I haven't spoken to her in longer than I'd like to admit."

"Her."

"Elva." He said the name like it cost him something to spend it. "She was the last person I told everything to. Before tonight, before you, she was the only one."

Marlowe's grip tightened on the folder against her chest. "What happened to her?"

"She learned what I am, and for a while, that knowledge made her reckless in ways I should have anticipated and didn't. She started testing what she could get away with, believing my existence made her untouchable by extension. It didn't. She's not dead, if that's the question underneath your question. But she isn't someone I speak to anymore, and she has reasons to want people to distrust me before I finish telling them anything myself."

"That's not an answer. That's a summary with the details filed off."

"It's the only version I'm willing to give you tonight. I've spent sixty years making sure her name and mine don't appear in the same sentence anywhere that matters, and tonight it already has, twice, in under an hour. That should tell you how quickly this is moving even without my help." His voice held steady, but something in his shoulders had drawn in, defensive in a way she hadn't seen from him yet. "You should go home, Ms. Quill. Lock your door. Don't answer numbers you don't recognize, and don't come back to this building until daylight, when at least the people watching will have to do it in the open."

"You think someone's watching me specifically now. Not just you."

"I think whoever sent that message knows you were in this room tonight, which means they know your name, which means you stopped being an auditor the moment you walked in here and became something else to them. I'd rather you were angry with me for saying that than unprepared for it."

She wanted to argue with him on principle, if only because agreeing felt like handing him something she hadn't decided yet whether he'd earned. But the folder in her arms suddenly felt heavier than paper should, and the memory of her own name possibly sitting inside someone else's file, just as those nineteen names sat inside hers, made arguing feel like a luxury she couldn't currently afford.

She left without saying anything else worth remembering, the elevator ride down feeling shorter than the one that had brought her up, though the numbers ticked the same distance in reverse. She caught herself watching her own reflection in the mirrored panel the entire descent, half expecting to find someone standing behind her again, exactly as Micah had three hours earlier, and made herself stop looking only when the doors finally opened onto the lobby. Whatever version of her had walked into this building expecting a straightforward audit meeting felt very far away by then, and the night doorman waved her out with the same bored nod he probably gave everyone, unaware he'd just watched someone leave holding a folder full of nineteen deaths and one dangerous new suspicion about her own place among them.

Her apartment felt smaller than usual when she got home, a smallness that had nothing to do with square footage. She checked the lock twice, then a third time, hating herself a little for it, and sat at her kitchen table with the folder open in front of her under a light too dim for the work it deserved.

Her phone buzzed once, briefly, before she'd even opened her laptop. Micah.

Are you home? Locked in. Tell me you're not still reading that folder at your kitchen table.

She almost smiled, despite everything. I'm home. Reading the folder at my kitchen table.

Of course you are. A pause, then one more line. I don't have the right to ask you to be careful. I'm asking anyway.

She set the phone face down before she could examine how much that landed, and made herself focus on the folder instead of the warmth sitting oddly in her chest where the alarm should have been.

Nineteen names. She'd memorized most of them weeks ago without meaning to, numbers that stuck to a person after enough hours spent with them. She pulled up her laptop and cross-referenced each policyholder against public records again, looking now for something she hadn't thought to search for the first four times: any connection between them beyond the insurance claims. A shared address. A shared employer. Anything that explained why these nineteen and not some other nineteen.

She found it around one in the morning, buried in a probate filing from eleven years earlier. Two of the names, a married couple three claims apart on her list, had both once been named in the same civil suit. A wrongful death suit, filed against a woman named Elva Rourke.

Marlowe sat back from the screen slowly, the coffee beside her laptop gone cold an hour ago without her noticing. Elva Rourke. She typed the name into three more databases before she trusted the coincidence enough to keep pulling on it, and each search returned less than the one before, as if someone had gone through the record ahead of her with careful, patient hands.

The suit had been dismissed for lack of evidence. The plaintiff's attorney of record had withdrawn from the case less than a month after filing it, no explanation on the public docket. She searched the attorney's name next and found an obituary from the following year, cause of death listed simply as heart failure, no further detail, a clean explanation that used to satisfy her before tonight and now read exactly like the paperwork that had buried her father's real story.

Her phone buzzed against the table, and she nearly knocked over her coffee reaching for it, expecting the unknown number again.

It wasn't. It was Marsh. Finally answering, hours late, a single text with no greeting attached.

Don't come into the office tomorrow. Don't call me again on this number. We need to talk somewhere they can't listen, and I don't have long to explain why.