Buried Vows

Chapter Three: What Was Left on My Desk

Wren’s Pov

I know who you are.

Four words, small neat handwriting, on the back of a photograph tucked under my keyboard where I wouldn't see it until I sat down and it was already too late to un-see it.

I didn't sleep the night before. I'd made three wrong turns getting home, taken a bus I didn't need, cut through a parking garage with no cameras on the lower level, because knowing a city's blind spots is the kind of thing you learn when your life depends on it and never quite unlearn once you're safe. By the time I locked my door I was reasonably certain Viktor hadn't followed me the rest of the way.

Reasonably certain wasn't certain. I stood at the window with the lights off for twenty minutes, watching the street for a grey jacket, and thought instead about the engine. The bike. The two words stitched across a stranger's back in white thread before he vanished around the corner and took Viktor's nerve with him.

Ashen Kings.

I didn't know what it meant. I only knew someone had put themselves between me and a man from my old life, on purpose, at exactly the right second, and that kind of precision doesn't happen by accident. Somebody had been watching me long enough to know when to move.

I went to work anyway. Staying home looks exactly like panic, and panic gets you found. Ordinary clothes, ordinary coffee, four hundred and twelve ordinary steps, a folding knife I have no legal right to carry tucked in my jacket. I told myself I could survive one more day of pretending nothing was wrong.

I made it forty minutes.

My desk looked wrong before I understood why nothing disturbed, nothing out of place, and still some old animal part of my brain went still and alert the second I sat down. It took a second to find it. The photograph, half beneath my keyboard, small enough I'd have started typing right over it if I hadn't looked first.

Me. Not Wren. The other one. Nineteen, on the steps of a house I don't let myself picture, wearing a blue dress my mother picked, smiling the practiced smile of a girl who'd already learned smiling correctly was one more skill required of her, like posture, like knowing which fork to use.

I know who you are.

I sat very still for a long time. Long enough that Priya's voice, when it came, made me flinch hard enough to nearly knock coffee into my keyboard.

"Whoa. Sorry." Two mugs, the way she does most mornings except I hadn't heard her walk over, hadn't heard anything, had been so far down inside my own five-year-old terror the whole floor could have caught fire and I might not have noticed the smoke. "You look like you saw a ghost. You okay?"

Ghost. I almost laughed. Almost.

"Fine. Didn't sleep." I slid the photograph face-down under a folder before she could see it, a motion so practiced it wasn't even a decision, the same reflex that used to hide bruises under long sleeves and hide fear under good posture.

"You've had a face on since yesterday. Talk-about-it or leave-it-alone?"

"Leave it alone. But thank you."

She studied me a second longer than I liked, then shrugged, because that's the deal we've always had, she asks once, believes me when I say no, and I have spent eight months grateful for exactly that boundary without ever telling her what it costs me to keep it.

I sat with my hand flat on the folder, the photograph beneath it burning against my palm, and made myself think instead of feel. Someone had gotten close enough to my desk, in a building with badge access and cameras in every hallway, without a single alarm going off. Which meant either the building's security was worse than I'd assumed, or whoever left it didn't need to sneak past security at all.

Because they already belonged here.

I thought of Viktor under the streetlight. I thought of the bike, the patch, the sound of an engine that had known exactly when to arrive. And then, because my mind is apparently determined to torture me methodically, I thought of Damian Kade watching me through his office glass yesterday for one second too long. The particular stillness of his attention. The way he'd asked my name like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth.

Ms. Hale. How long have you worked here?

I told myself it was nothing. I have gotten so good at telling myself that it barely feels like lying anymore.

I was still telling myself that when my desk phone rang, the internal line, the one that almost never rings, connected directly to the fourteenth floor's most powerful and least accessible office.

"Ms. Hale." Damian's voice, flat, unhurried. "My office. Now."

"Is this about the Meridian file?"

A pause. Just long enough to mean something. Just long enough for my stomach to drop somewhere around my shoes.

"No," he said. "It isn't."

The line went dead. I sat there holding the receiver, the photograph still hidden under my hand, and understood with the cold clarity of a woman who's spent five years running from exactly this moment that whatever waited in that office, my ordinary life was already over.

I stood up. My legs didn't feel entirely like mine.

I hadn't made it three steps toward his door when Priya's phone buzzed loud enough to hear across the room, and she went pale reading whatever was on the screen, and said, without looking up, in a voice that had gone very small:

"Wren, there's a man downstairs asking for you by name. Security's holding him at the desk. He says he's family."