ROOM 14B
897 Words
CHAPTER FOUR
POV: Anabel (Female Lead)
Julian's office building does not look like a headquarters for anything important and she thinks that is deliberate.
It sits between a dry cleaner and an accountancy firm on a street that most people walk through without stopping, and the signage outside says Meridian Health in letters that are easy to miss if you are not looking. Anabel is always looking, so she sees it, and she sees also the way the security camera above the entrance is angled to capture the entire block and not just the door, which is not standard building security. That is surveillance.She goes in at five minutes to nine.
The receptionist, a young woman named Delight who greets her with the specific warmth of someone genuinely pleased to see her, walks her directly to the fourteenth floor without stopping at any desk, which means Julian told his people she was coming and that she was to be moved quickly and without friction. She notes that too.
The elevator opens onto a floor that is quieter than the ones below. Four doors, all closed, and at the end of the corridor, an open door through which she can see the edge of a large desk and one wall of glass looking out over the city.
Julian is standing at that wall of glass when she enters. He does not turn around immediately, and she gets three full seconds to look at him without him knowing. She suspects it is not accidental at all."You worked through the night," he says, still not turning.
"Your records suggested I should," she says.
He turns then, and she sees that he looks like a man who also did not sleep, not from anxiety but from work, and there is something in that parallel that she does not examine too closely.
She opens her folder and lays the first assessment sheet on his desk and begins.
She speaks for forty minutes. He does not interrupt once. He listens the way people who are actually intelligent listen, not waiting for a pause to insert themselves but following the thread all the way to its end before he picks it up. When she finishes he looks at the maps for a long moment and then he looks at her."You found the dependency fault in the eastern supply chain," he says.
"Third page," she says.
"My last three consultants did not find it," he says.
"They were not looking at the right layer," she says.
He is quiet for a moment, and then he says: "Thaddeus called you last night."
Her whole body goes still.
She does not perform the stillness. It just happens, the way it does when something unexpected walks into a room she thought she had secured.
"How do you know that," she says.
Julian reaches into the top drawer of his desk and sets a single printed page in front of her. It is a call log. Her number is on it. Thaddeus's number is on it. The timestamp reads six forty-two.
"Because I have been monitoring his communications for seven months," Julian says, and his voice is even and direct and carries no apology and no theater. "He is not working against the faction, Anabel. He is still inside it. What he told you last night about being coerced, about his pack, I need you to know that the pack he named as leverage has been living freely in the northern territory for eleven years. The faction has no hold over him. He called you because they sent him to call you."
The room is very quiet.
"Why are they sending him to me now," she says.
Julian looks at her with something in his expression that is careful and deliberate. Underneath all of that, something that is not professional at all.
"Because you are not who they told you you were," he says. "And they have known that longer than you have. And if you figure out what you actually are, you become the most dangerous person in the world."
She stares at him.
He reaches into a second drawer and sets a sealed file on the desk between them.
"Your DNA results," he says. "I commissioned them six weeks ago. Before you ask how I had access to your genetic material, the answer is that I did not. Your physician of record in the paranormal governance system had samples on file from your initial intake assessment. I requested them through the council under investigative authority."
She does not open the file.
Not yet.
She is looking at Julian, who is looking back at her with the patience of someone who has been waiting a very long time for this exact moment and who is not rushing it.
"What does it say," she says.
"Open it," he says, quietly.
Her hand rests on the sealed edge of the file, and the city stretches out behind Julian's wall of glass, grey and enormous and indifferent. Somewhere below this building a faction is watching her, and somewhere in the paranormal territory Thaddeus is already reporting back. Julian is standing across a desk from her with the truth of who she is sealed in a folder under her fingers.
She has never been more afraid in her life.
She has never wanted to know something more badly.
She pulls the seal.
- Writer
