FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

12

Chapter 12

I was back inside the building in four minutes.

Not running. Walking fast with Kane at my shoulder and my mind doing the arithmetic that my body was already ahead of. The device had been pinging from this building every day for two years. Before I arrived. Before any of this started. Someone who lived or worked here had been receiving those messages the whole time.

Axel was in the corridor on my floor.

He took one look at our faces and straightened.

Kane said: Who else is housed in this building.

Axel said: Twelve staff units. Three currently occupied. A visiting lecturer on the ground floor, a senior administrator on the second, and the building supervisor who has been here eleven years.

Kane said: We need the floor plans and a list of every person with key access.

Axel already had his phone out.

I said: Which floor is the administrator on.

Second, Axel said. Why.

Because my room is on the second floor, I said. And if the device has been in this building for two years and someone chose to put me here last night, either they did not know about the signal or they knew exactly what they were doing.

The corridor went very quiet.

Axel said: I chose this building.

I know, I said. I am not saying it was you.

He looked at me steadily. You can say it if you need to.

I held his gaze. The idea had crossed my mind for exactly three seconds in the garden before I let it go. Not because I was naive. Because I had been in his arms and felt his heartbeat and there are things a person cannot fake at that level of proximity.

I said: I do not need to. But I need to know who told you this building was available.

Something shifted in his face.

He said: The senior administrator. She called me directly when I put out the request for a secure room. Said she had a guest suite she could clear immediately.

Kane said: Name.

Axel said it.

Kane went very still.

I looked at him. You know her.

She has been on the endowment advisory panel for four years, he said. She has access to everything I have access to and she has been here long enough to build a ghost account without anyone questioning her credentials.

The pieces fell into a shape I did not want to look at directly.

I said: She put me in this building on purpose. Either to watch me or to use the signal location to make it look like I was the one receiving those messages.

Or both, Draven said.

I turned. He was at the end of the corridor, jacket on, clearly having arrived while we were talking. River was two steps behind him.

Draven said: I have been thinking about the room. The evidence. The way it was all laid out. It was too clean. Too complete. Someone with that much access could have destroyed it years ago. They did not. Which means they wanted it found.

River said: They wanted us to find it and think we had won.

While the real play was happening somewhere else, I said.

Draven nodded.

I pressed my back against the wall and thought.

The room full of evidence. The photograph in my room pointing us there. The code on the back. The phone with the messages. Every step of this had been handed to us. Guided. Like a trail of breadcrumbs laid by someone who wanted us moving in a specific direction.

I said: We are being managed.

Kane said: Yes.

I said: The question is whether the person managing us is an enemy or the same person who has been building that case for three years.

River said: Draven's brother.

Or someone who got to him, Axel said.

The thought landed like a stone.

I pushed off the wall. I said: I need to talk to the administrator. Alone.

Kane said: Absolutely not.

I looked at him. If all five of us walk into her office she closes down. If I go alone she underestimates me. She has been doing it since I arrived because everyone in this building has been doing it. I am the scholarship girl. I am the one they thought they could use.

I let that work for us now.

Kane held my gaze for a long moment. Then he said: Axel is in the corridor outside her office.

I said: Fine.

He said: And you come out the moment anything feels wrong.

I said: Also fine.

He did not look happy. He looked like a man exercising considerable restraint and aware of exactly how much of it he was exercising.

I found her office on the second floor. The door was open. She was a woman in her late fifties, silver haired and composed, the kind of composed that has been practiced rather than felt. She looked up when I knocked on the frame and smiled with professional warmth.

She said: Miss Cross. Are you settling in alright.

I said: I have a question about the building.

Of course, she said. Come in.

I sat across from her desk and I looked at her the way I had looked at my father in the Dean's office and I said: How long have you known my father.

The warmth did not drop. That was what told me everything. A genuine reaction would have shifted. Hers stayed exactly in place like it had been applied.

She said: I am not sure I know what you mean.

I said: The photograph. The one from the sealed room. Him and the board member. You arranged that meeting. I think you have been arranging meetings between people for years. Moving pieces. Keeping records of some and destroying others. And I think you put me in this building last night because you wanted me close.

A long silence.

Her smile faded. Not into guilt. Into something more tired than that.

She said: You are smarter than they told me you would be.

I said: Who told you.

She looked at her hands on the desk. Then she said: I have been waiting for someone to find that room for three years. I built it. I built all of it. And then I could not get out and I could not finish it alone and I needed someone they would not see coming.

My breath held.

I said: You are not the enemy.

She said: I was. For a long time I was exactly that. And then a young man in my administration department found out what I had done and instead of going to the board he sat across from this desk and said he would help me fix it.

Draven's brother, I said.

Her eyes filled. She pressed her lips together.

She said: They found out he was talking to me. They did not make him disappear. I did. I hid him. He has been safe. He has been helping me from the outside for three years.

The air left my lungs.

He is alive, I said.

She said: He is. And he is here. He came back last night when he heard you had found the room.

She picked up her phone and sent a single text.

Thirty seconds later footsteps sounded in the corridor.

I turned in my chair.

The man who appeared in the doorway had Draven's eyes.