FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

11

Chapter 11

I did not sleep.

I lay in the dark with my phone on my chest and that message burning behind my eyes and I thought about Kane's hand on my jaw and his mouth on mine and the way he had looked at me tonight like I was worth staying for.

Then I thought about the message.

Ask him why he already knew that floor existed.

I was up at six. I texted Kane one line: I need to see you. Now. Alone.

His reply came in under a minute: East garden. Ten minutes.

He was already there when I arrived. Standing with his back to me, hands in his pockets, watching the pale morning light move across the frost on the grass. He turned when he heard me and looked at my face and whatever he read there made him go very still.

He said: What happened.

I held up my phone. He took it and read the message and the stillness deepened into something with a different quality. Not surprise. Something closer to a man who has been waiting for a particular door to open and has just heard the handle turn.

I said: You are not going to tell me it is wrong.

He handed the phone back. He said: No.

I said: How did you know the floor existed.

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that is not hesitation. That is organisation.

He said: My father had me study the full campus infrastructure when I took over management of the family endowment account here. Every building, every level, every room designation including the decommissioned ones. I have had a map of this campus in my head for two years.

I said: And the access code.

He said: I generated it. The old administrative coding system runs on a master key structure that the endowment trustees still have access to. I used it to decode the number sequence in about four minutes when Axel sent me the photograph.

I stared at him.

I said: You are a trustee of this university.

One of six, he said.

The ground felt different under my feet.

I said: Kane. You have had access to the administrative infrastructure of this campus the whole time. The same infrastructure someone used to build that ghost account and monitor my file.

Yes, he said.

His eyes did not waver.

I said: Tell me you are not part of this.

He said: I am not part of this. I have been trying to dismantle it.

The words landed clean and direct and I searched his face for the thing that would make me not believe them.

I did not find it.

But I said: That is not enough. I need more than your word, Kane. I need to understand why someone who has trustee access, who can generate room codes and access administrative files, is only now finding out what has been happening on this campus. Why did you not see it before.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he said: Because until eight weeks ago I did not know what to look for. Someone sent me something anonymously. A single document. Partial financial records that pointed to misappropriation through the endowment fund. I started pulling threads. The more I pulled the more I found. The file in that room is three times what I have assembled myself.

Who sent you the document, I said.

He said: I do not know. It came through a dead drop. Physical copy. No prints.

I thought about a man who had been in this university for three years building a case in a sealed room.

I said: Draven's brother.

Kane said: That would be my guess.

I pressed my hand to my sternum and breathed.

So he did not disappear, I said. He went underground. He has been feeding both of you. Separately. Building redundancy in case one trail got cut.

Kane said: It is the only explanation that fits.

Which means he is still here, I said. Or close. And he is still watching.

And he trusts you, Kane said. Enough to point you at me when I had information you needed. That message last night was not an accusation. It was a test. He wanted to know if you would confront me.

The morning air was very cold and very clear.

I said: And if I had not.

Kane said: Then he would have known you were not the right person to carry this forward.

I am carrying this forward, I said.

I know, he said. So does he now.

We stood in the frost and the thin early light and I looked at Kane Hargrove, this man who had come into my life six days ago like a wall I had walked into, and I understood something I had been turning over since the library.

He was not cold. He had never been cold. He was contained, the way something runs hotter when it has no room to expand.

I stepped in and kissed him.

He made a low sound and pulled me against him and kissed me back with everything he usually kept behind that controlled surface. His hands were in my hair and at my waist and I was up on my toes and none of it was careful or measured or deliberate.

It was just real.

When we finally broke apart his breathing was unsteady and mine was worse and he pressed his forehead against mine and said nothing for a moment.

Then he said: There is something else.

I said: Of course there is.

His chest moved on something that was almost a laugh.

He said: The phone Axel recovered last night. My contact extracted the data this morning. There are messages on it going back two years. Exchanges between someone using an encrypted alias and a recipient whose identity we cannot yet confirm.

I said: What do the messages say.

He pulled out his own phone and read directly.

He said: The most recent one, dated four months ago, says: She will be back for the new academic year. When she arrives everything changes. Use her or lose everything.

I went cold from the inside out.

They knew I was coming back, I said.

Before you did, Kane said. Someone planned for your return months in advance. You were not caught in the middle of this, Sienna. You were always the center of it.

I took a step back from him.

I needed the distance to think.

I said: The person they were messaging. The unconfirmed recipient. Can your contact narrow it down.

Kane said: They already did. They cannot confirm a name. But they confirmed a location.

He looked at me.

The messages were received on a device that has been pinging from the same building every day for the last two years, he said.

I said: What building.

He said: This one.

He turned and I followed his gaze.

We were standing in the east garden.

The building directly behind us was the staff residence.

The building I had been moved into last night.