CHAPTER NINE: THE SOURCE
877 Words
The voicemail lasted forty-three seconds.
Connor's voice, careful, warm, the specific register he used when he wanted to sound concerned rather than strategic. Just worried about you, Mia. Storm has a history with the women around him. Call me back.
She listened once. Deleted it.
Then she sat at her drafting table and thought about the evidence folder growing quietly on her phone, and the documents in the Harlow basement, and the third photograph that had been moved two centimeters, and the fact that Connor Walsh had been strategically uninvolved in her life for two years and had now contacted her three times in eleven days.
She opened her laptop and searched Connor Walsh and Marcus Hale.
Nothing obvious. Different industries, different circles, no visible overlap.
She searched deeper.
At 1 AM she found it, a single industry event, fourteen months ago. Both names on the attendee list. One photograph from the evening, posted by the event organizer, showing a group of people at a cocktail table.
Connor on the left. Marcus Hale on the right.
Between them, laughing at something off-camera: a woman in ivory.
Mia stared at the photograph for a long time.
Then she saved it to the evidence folder and went to bed.
She told Ethan Friday morning.
Not in his office, she found him in the forty-fourth floor corridor at 7 AM, arriving as she was arriving, both of them carrying coffee with the mutual awareness of people who'd been thinking about the same thing from separate locations.
"Connor called," she said, without preamble.
His expression didn't change. His pace slowed by half a step.
"What did he say?"
"That he was worried about me. That you have a history with women." She pulled out her phone, showed him the photograph from the event. "Fourteen months ago."
Ethan looked at it. Something moved behind his eyes, recognition, she thought. Not surprise.
"You already knew," she said.
"I knew about the connection." He handed the phone back. "I didn't know the timeline extended to fourteen months."
"How long have you known?"
A pause. "Ten days."
She absorbed this. Ten days. He'd had this for ten days and hadn't told her.
"Why?"
"Because I was verifying the full scope before I brought you incomplete information." His voice was even. "I don't give people half-pictures."
"It's my half-picture."
"Which is why I'm telling you now." He held her gaze. "Connor Walsh was introduced to Marcus Hale through a creative industry contact who has a documented relationship with Victoria's personal assistant. The chain is three people long. It was deliberately obscured."
Mia processed this. The careful construction of it, three removes, documented but non-obvious, the kind of connection that looked like coincidence until you pulled the thread.
"She recruited him," Mia said.
"She created the conditions. Whether Connor required significant recruiting is a separate question."
The specific flatness of that sentence told her everything about what Ethan thought the answer was.
"What does she want from him?"
"Information about you. Your confidence levels, your emotional state, whether you're," He stopped.
"Whether I'm what?"
His jaw shifted. "Whether you're a vulnerability worth sustaining pressure on."
The words landed with the particular coldness of something true.
She was a vulnerability. To Ethan. And Victoria knew it, or suspected it, and was using Connor to take the measure of exactly how significant that vulnerability was.
"And am I?" Mia asked. "Worth sustaining pressure on?"
He looked at her directly. The gray eyes at a temperature she couldn't read.
"I'm having the building's security protocols reviewed," he said. "Your access card was already upgraded. I am also."
"That's not what I asked."
Silence.
The corridor was empty. The city was beginning outside the windows. Somewhere above them, the building was waking up.
Ethan looked at her for a long moment.
"Yes," he said quietly. "You are."
It wasn't a romantic declaration. It was an honest answer from a man for whom honesty was the most costly currency he had.
Mia held it carefully.
"Okay," she said. "Then we deal with it."
We. The word landed between them, small and enormous.
He looked at it, she could see him looking at it, the specific quality of a man processing a pronoun.
"The Greenwich meeting is still Saturday," he said finally.
"I know."
"Davis will send the revised security briefing to your personal email."
"Okay."
He moved toward the elevator. She moved toward her office.
"Mia."
She turned.
He was looking at her from the elevator doors. Something in his expression was different, not open, not unguarded, but decided. Like a man who had been standing at the edge of something and had quietly, privately, stopped pretending he wasn't.
"The photograph on the archive wall," he said. "The initial. It isn't for Natalie."
The elevator opened.
He stepped in.
The doors closed before she could respond.
She stood in the empty corridor for a full minute.
Not for Natalie.
She thought about the photograph. The handwriting. The warmth in the laughing face.
N.
Not Natalie.
Someone else entirely.
Her phone buzzed. Connor again.
This time she didn't even look at the screen.
She opened the evidence folder instead.
And added a new document.
Titled: Floor 53.
— End of Chapter Nine —
- Writer
