She did not sleep that night. Not properly. She lay in the dark of her room in the western wing and stared at the ceiling while the city outside moved through its quiet hours, its pulse visible through the gap in the curtains as a slow flicker of amber and white. She had grown accustomed to the nighttime sounds of the penthouse — the faint vibrations that she felt rather than heard, the particular quality of stillness in a building this tall, as if the air itself were held at a different pressure.
Tonight the stillness felt like pressure of a different kind.
She turned over what she knew. The photograph. The name in her notebook. The way Lucien had taken a fraction too long to answer a question that should have been simple. She was careful not to let those fragments harden into conclusio
