Chapter Six: Smoke Behind The Glass
1410 Words
Arielle waited until Kairo left.
He didn’t say where he was going—he rarely did—but his absence was marked by the silence he left behind. No movement. No footfalls in the hall. No sharp sound of fingers typing. His presence always carried weight, even when he didn’t speak. So when it disappeared, it left behind an odd kind of gravity, something off-balance.
She waited five minutes after the elevator sealed shut.
Then she moved.
She didn’t make a plan. That would have made it too rigid, too easy to fall apart if one detail slipped. Instead, she followed instinct. Small steps. Controlled curiosity.
She started with the library.
Most people would begin with his office, but Kairo wasn’t careless. If there were answers, they wouldn’t be left in plain sight behind a desk. He kept that space locked anyway, unless he was inside. But the library—lined with perfectly aligned spines, books arranged with military precision—that was accessible. And people often hid themselves in the things they read.
She ran her fingers across the shelves slowly. The books were not for show. They were worn in places, dog-eared at random intervals, annotated lightly in pencil. She recognized several titles—Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, political memoirs, rare editions on corporate strategy, historical biographies. Nothing scandalous. Nothing personal.
But something stood out: a thin, black leather notebook on the top shelf of the far-right case.
She pulled it down.
It wasn’t hidden, just placed slightly out of reach for a casual observer. Inside were pages filled with short notes—single lines, sometimes only a phrase or a name. Dates without context. No full sentences. No explanations. A cipher of thought.
“Concordia—Oct 17. Red ledger. Ask Roman?”
“Debt buried in 2014, untraceable? Check with T.”
“ALVARIA—Too clean. Dig deeper.”
She flipped further.
“Devereux—still too loud. Keep Arielle in.”
Her fingers stopped moving.
The date beside the entry was from two weeks before he’d proposed the engagement.
She read it again.
Keep Arielle in.
Not bring. Not convince. Keep.
As if she’d already been placed, and the rest was just containment.
Arielle snapped the book shut.
She returned it to the exact spot on the shelf and stepped back. Her pulse had quickened, but her breathing was steady. It was a thread. Not enough to tug free a whole answer, but enough to prove she was part of something long before she thought she had a choice.
Next, she went to the guest room two doors down from hers.
It was always pristine. Never used.
She opened the door.
Nothing but a perfectly made bed, untouched towels, and a small writing desk. But as she stepped inside, the silence felt different here—denser. Like air that hadn’t moved in too long. Her eyes scanned the corners, the desk drawers, the light switches. All normal.
Until she noticed the ventilation panel near the floor had faint smudges along the edge.
She crouched down, gently pulled at the cover.
It popped off cleanly.
Inside, tucked just behind the grill, was a flash drive. Black. Unlabeled.
Arielle stared at it for a long second, then stood. She didn't have a laptop of her own—Kairo hadn't allowed it—but the public guest lounge near the gym had one for general use, locked in a docking station.
She pocketed the drive and made her way down the hall.
The lounge was empty.
The laptop booted with a fingerprint scanner, but the guest profile opened automatically once she tapped the screen. She inserted the flash drive and waited.
One folder. Dozens of files.
Each labeled only with numbers.
She opened the first.
Audio.
Voices—recordings. Most low quality, some garbled.
Then she recognized one.
Her sister.
“...well, she’s not like us, is she? Arielle just—she follows. She always has.”
The voice was from a dinner party a year ago. A Devereux event. Private.
Another clip.
Her mother, speaking sharply: “As long as she doesn’t get in the way, I don’t care what happens to her.”
Clip after clip, all about Arielle.
Her stomach turned.
But the most jarring one came next—her father.
“If the Vescari boy wants her, let him have her. He’ll chew her up, realize she’s empty, and we’ll still have the merger.”
Arielle closed the file.
She leaned back in the chair and pressed her fingers to her temples. It wasn’t just that Kairo had collected these. It was that he’d kept them close. Stored, not discarded.
She searched the drive for anything more—any indication of who gathered these, how he’d obtained them, why he’d kept them in a vent instead of one of his high-security systems.
There was nothing.
No sender. No metadata. No encryption.
Whoever compiled this didn’t want it traced.
She copied one file—just one—onto the desktop. Her father’s voice. Then she wiped her fingerprints from the mouse and returned the flash drive to where she’d found it.
Back in her room, she stared at the tablet blinking on her nightstand. Another outfit prepared for tomorrow. Another set of tasks. Another silent command.
Kairo returned hours later.
She heard the elevator. The door unlocking. His quiet footsteps heading toward his room. He didn’t stop by her door. Didn’t ask where she’d been.
The next day, she searched again.
This time, she managed to enter his office.
The door wasn’t locked.
That was her first red flag.
Inside, it was as expected—organized, cold, precise. Two monitors. A fingerprint scanner for the deeper systems. Locked drawers. Paper files were rare, but she found one—a thick envelope marked with an emblem she didn’t recognize. Inside were glossy photographs, all of buildings. Corporate ones. No faces. No writing.
One of them, she realized after a moment, was an abandoned shell company in Zurich.
She’d seen it on the news once—bankruptcy tied to political bribery.
She replaced everything and left without disturbing a paper.
The rest of the week, she kept going.
Small steps.
She asked one of the stylists if Kairo had family.
The woman hesitated, then said, “Only a sister. But she passed. Long ago.”
No details.
She asked one of the drivers if Kairo ever traveled for pleasure.
“No,” he replied. “Only business.”
She searched the penthouse again two days later and found a locked drawer in the library desk that didn’t belong to the others.
When she tried a letter opener to pry it, it didn’t budge. No sound. No give.
She stopped before forcing it.
Another dead end.
One night, after a benefit gala, she tried a more direct approach.
They rode the elevator in silence. She watched him through the mirror’s reflection—straight posture, eyes fixed ahead. Impeccable.
“Kairo,” she said quietly. “Why me?”
He didn’t blink. “We’ve already covered this.”
“No. You told me why it was useful. Not why it had to be me.”
He turned to her then. Something unreadable behind his expression.
“Would you believe me if I said convenience?”
“No.”
“Then don’t ask questions you’ve already decided how to answer.”
The doors opened. He stepped out.
She followed.
They didn’t speak again that night.
She gave up searching the next morning.
It wasn’t defeat. It was a quiet admission.
She had found pieces. Strange, personal things. A notebook of ciphers. A vent with recordings. An unlocked office that felt like bait. But none of it added up. And the more she looked, the more deliberate it all began to feel.
Like he wanted her to look.
Like he’d left a trail just long enough to keep her chasing her own tail.
Arielle sat by the window that evening, her tea untouched, the skyline stretching out like a map of locked doors. She’d thought she could find a weakness. A secret. Something to explain why he’d chosen her, why he’d stitched her into this life with threads she couldn’t pull apart.
But there was nothing.
Not really.
Just shadows.
Just glass.
Just Kairo, a man too calculated to leave answers laying around.
She was a strategist.
But he was a fortress.
And for now, the walls weren’t letting her in.
- Writer
