FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

9

Chapter 9

The room was in the east wing of the administration building.

Sub-level two. A floor that did not appear on any campus map I had ever seen. Axel knew it existed because it was his job to know every inch of this campus. He had never had a reason to go there until tonight.

Kane met us at the service entrance with River beside him. The four of us stood in the cold under a light that buzzed and flickered and nobody said anything for a moment. Then River looked at me and said: You doing okay.

Ask me after, I said.

He nodded. Fair enough.

Kane had the code. He had matched the number sequence to an old administrative filing system, a physical room designation from before the university digitised its records. The room had been decommissioned eight years ago. Officially it did not exist. Unofficially someone had been using it.

Draven was waiting inside the building when Axel got the door open. He was leaning against the wall in the stairwell with his arms crossed and that focused stillness he carried everywhere.

I stopped when I saw him. How did you know.

Kane called me, he said. And before you ask, yes we have spoken. It was brief and unpleasant and we are functioning.

I looked at Kane.

Acknowledged, Kane said, which from him was practically a formal apology.

The five of us went down.

Sub-level two smelled like old paper and sealed air. The corridor was narrow and the lights came on in stuttering intervals as Axel moved ahead with a torch. Four doors. All of them padlocked. All of them except the third one, which stood an inch open, light bleeding from the gap.

Axel went first. Always. He put his hand flat on the door and pushed it wide and scanned the room before any of us crossed the threshold.

Then he stepped back and let us see.

The room was not empty.

It was a workspace. A desk covered in printed documents, photographs, handwritten notes pinned to a board that took up the entire back wall. At the center of the board was a name I recognised because it was on the door of the most important building on this campus.

Hargrove.

Kane walked past me and stood in front of the board and went completely still in the way that meant he was processing something at speed underneath a surface that showed nothing.

River was beside me. His arm pressed against mine.

Draven moved to the desk and bent over the documents without touching them. His eyes moved fast. He said: These go back four years. Someone has been building a case. Financial records, correspondence, internal communications. This is not surveillance. This is evidence collection.

Against who, I said.

Against my father, Kane said. His voice was flat.

He reached out and unpinned one photograph from the board and held it where I could see it. A man I did not recognise, caught mid-conversation in what looked like a private dining room. The timestamp on the photograph was three years ago.

The man my father met with two days before the incident, Kane said. The one that killed a junior member of his legal team. Ruled accidental. Never fully investigated.

The word incident sat in the room like a stone in still water.

Someone built this room to prove it was not accidental, Draven said.

And then disappeared, River said. Or got scared. Or got stopped.

Axel had moved to the far corner. He crouched down and came up with a phone in an evidence bag, old model, screen cracked. He said: This was taped under the desk. It has been here a while.

The number sequence, I said. The one on the back of the photograph in my room. Someone left it so we would find this room. Find all of this.

Find the phone, Axel said.

Kane looked at me across the room. His expression was doing something complicated.

He said: The person who built this room and the person who put that code in your room are the same person.

I said: And they chose me to lead you here.

You are the only one of us they trusted to actually come, River said quietly.

That landed somewhere tender.

Axel bagged the phone and the most critical documents. Kane photographed the board in full. Draven noted the dates and cross-references on the paperwork with the systematic attention of someone who had spent years analysing source material and knew exactly what mattered.

River stayed beside me the whole time and did not try to make it better with words.

We were back above ground in forty minutes.

Outside in the cold River pulled me aside while the other three talked in low voices near Kane's car. He turned to face me with his hands in his pockets and his hazel eyes carrying something serious.

You handled that, he said.

Did I have a choice.

You always have a choice, he said. You just keep choosing the harder thing. He paused. I need to tell you something and I need you to hear it without immediately arguing with me.

That is not a promising start.

His mouth curved briefly. I called my brother.

I stared at him. Dean. You called Dean.

He has contacts we do not, River said. The kind that move in the same world as Kane's father. If someone covered up what happened three years ago Dean can find the thread faster than any of us.

You told him about me.

I told him we needed help, River said. He is on his way.

The irritation that moved through me was real. So was the understanding underneath it. I breathed through both.

If he is rude to me, I said, I am leaving the room.

River said: If he is rude to you I will handle it personally.

I believed him. That was the thing about River. Underneath all the charm was a man who had decided what mattered and was not moving.

I walked back to the others. Kane was on a call. Axel had the bagged phone in his hand and was looking at it with the focused expression of someone doing calculations.

I stood beside Draven. He glanced down at me.

You are thinking, he said.

The person who built that room, I said. Four years of evidence. They were not an outsider. They had access to correspondence and internal communications. They were inside the university.

Yes, he said.

And they disappeared or were stopped three years ago. Around the same time as the incident Kane mentioned.

Yes.

I looked up at him. Draven. When you started at this university. When did you actually start.

He went very still.

Three years ago, he said.

I kept my voice level. Did you know about this room.

The silence lasted four full seconds.

No, he said. But I knew the person who built it.

The ground shifted.

Who, I said.

He looked at me with those dark eyes and the new open quality in them that I had come to recognise as the version of Draven that told the truth even when it cost him.

My brother, he said. He worked in administration here. Three years ago he disappeared. No body. No explanation. The university told my family he had resigned and relocated. I came here to find out what actually happened to him.

The cold air had nothing to do with why I could not breathe.

You have been here for three years, I said. And you never found him.

I found something tonight, he said. His eyes moved to the building behind me.

He found something in that room.

Draven, I said. What did you see.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a single photograph he had taken from the desk when the rest of us were occupied with the board.

He held it out.

My father's face looked back at me from the image.

Standing beside a man I now recognised as the board member Kane had named two days ago.

Dated eighteen months ago.

My father had not been watching me to protect me.

He had been watching me because he was one of them.