WHAT HE DID NOT SAY
854 Words
CHAPTER THREE
POV: Anabel (Female Lead)
Julian's records arrive at four fifty-seven in the afternoon. Three minutes before the end of business day, which tells her he is a man who keeps his word to the minute and not a single second more. She files that detail away with the rest of them.
She works through the night.
Not because she has to, but because this is the thing nobody ever talks about when they speak about people who are built for work. The fact that it is not discipline that drives them. It is an appetite. She was hungry for this, the clean satisfaction of a real problem laid out in numbers and structures and gaps that need closing. She has been eating small meals for two years and she did not fully know it until she opened Julian's files and the hunger hit her like light through a window she forgot was there.
By two in the morning she has mapped his entire current structure across six sheets of paper, color-coded by load, risk, and dependency. By four she has identified nine points of critical vulnerability in his expansion plan, three of which would not have shown up until the second year when the damage would have been expensive and public. By six she is on her third cup of actual coffee and she has begun drafting the first section of her assessment report with the kind of quiet momentum that used to carry her through hundred-hour weeks without complaint.
At six forty-two, her phone rings.She picks it up without checking the screen because she is still writing, and the voice that comes through is not Julian.
It is Thaddeus.
Her pen stops.
The silence on the line is thick and waiting, and Thaddeus fills it the way he always did, with careful, measured words that are designed to feel like honesty.
"I know you do not want to hear from me," he says. "I am asking you to listen anyway. Fifteen minutes. That is all."
Anabel sets down her pen with a steadiness that costs her more than she will ever admit to anyone.
"How did you get this number," she says."It is not important," he says.
"It is the only thing that is important right now," she says.
He exhales, and in the sound of that exhale she can hear something that might be real exhaustion, or might be practiced enough to sound like it, and she has never been able to tell the difference with Thaddeus and that is the thing that haunts her most about him.
"I was not free," he says. "What I did to you, to your company, I was not operating of my own will. The faction had my pack. They had seventeen people I was responsible for, and they told me if I did not complete the infiltration, those people would not exist by the time I got back."
"You told me you loved me," she says, and her voice is flat and even and she is proud of that."I know," he says.
"While you were stealing from me," she says.
"I know," he says again, and this time the word carries something that sounds like grief, and she hates that it sounds real, and she hates more that she is still listening.
"What do you want, Thaddeus," she says.
"I want you to be careful," he says. "The faction is moving again. They have been watching you since you started the paranormal consulting work. They know about Julian. And Anabel, whatever Julian has told you about who he is, there is more. I am not saying he is dangerous. I am saying he is not what he appears."
The line goes dead.
She sits for a long time without moving, her hand still holding the phone. Julian's color-coded maps spread across the table in front of her, the apartment so quiet she can hear the red cart woman setting up outside three floors below.
She does not know if Thaddeus is telling the truth.
She does not know if he is still the faction's instrument, sent to make her distrust the one thing that has made her feel like herself again in two years.
What she knows is that she has a meeting with Julian at nine, and she has a report that is already better than anything she has produced in months. She has seventeen open questions about a man whose files are cleaner than any files she has ever seen, which could mean he is honest, or it could mean he is very, very good at what he does.
She picks up her pen and goes back to writing. But her hand is not quite steady, and for the first time since she accepted this job, she is afraid that she does not know which thing to trust more: her head, which is telling her to be careful, or her wolf, which has not flinched once since Julian's name appeared on her screen.
She needs the answer to that question before nine o'clock.
She is not sure she will have it.
- Writer
