Chapter 3 Through the Lens

The warehouse sat on the edge of the arts district, its brick face soot‑stained and unmarked except for a buzzer with no name. Kiera pressed it twice before a voice cracked through the intercom, distracted and too fast. “Yeah, come up, it’s open—watch the third step, it’s rotted through.” The door released with a metal groan.

Inside, a freight elevator rattled her up three floors in a cage of chicken wire and rust.

Emre Kade’s studio took up the entire top level, one enormous room bleeding light from a wall of industrial windows. Cameras hung from hooks like trophies. Backdrops in a dozen colors lay rolled against the far wall, and a clothesline strung corner to corner held photographs clipped by their edges, drying or discarded. The air smelled of chemical fixer and old coffee.

He came out of a curtained doorway with his sleeves pushed up, ink crawling from wrist to elbow, dark curls damp at the temples like he’d been running his hands through them for hours. His eyes found her and did a quick, involuntary sweep, the kind men gave when they were nervous and trying not to look nervous.

“Detective.” He said it like a question he already knew the answer to. “I figured someone would show up eventually. Didn’t think it’d take three days.”

“I had other people to see first.” Kiera let her gaze travel the room, cataloging. Three cameras with lenses removed and set aside like surgical instruments. A contact sheet taped to the wall, half the frames slashed through with a red marker. “You were the last person to photograph Vivienne Corbeau alive.”

“I was the last person to photograph a lot of people alive. Comes with the job.” He turned back toward the curtained doorway. “I’m in the middle of something. You can talk while I work.”

She followed him into the darkroom.

Red light bathed everything, turning his skin the color of a wound. Trays of chemical sat in a row, and he moved between them with the fluency of muscle memory, tongs lifting a print from the developer bath and dropping it into the stop before she’d even adjusted to the dark. His hands were steady doing this. Everywhere else, they weren’t.

“Vivienne hired you for a shoot the night she died,” Kiera said. “Your calendar says fashion editorial. Your studio doesn’t have a single fashion prop that isn’t dusty.”

“People change plans.”

“People don’t hire a photographer at eleven at night for a fashion shoot in a penthouse with no set, no stylist, no assistant.” She watched the print surface in the tray, an abstract shape she couldn’t identify. “What did she actually have you photograph, Emre?”

His jaw worked. “Documents. Some kind of files on her desk. She wanted them shot clean, high resolution, page by page. Said it was insurance.”

“Insurance against what?”

“She didn’t say. I didn’t ask. You don’t ask Vivienne Corbeau follow‑up questions when she’s paying triple your rate to keep your mouth shut.” He hung the print, dripping, on the line. “I did the job. I left. That’s it.”

“That’s not it.” Kiera stepped closer, close enough that the red light caught the sheen of sweat at his collarbone. “Where are the files now?”

“Deleted.” Too fast, too clean.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not—”

“You’re lying with your body even if your mouth is behaving.” Her voice dropped, the way it did in interrogation rooms when she wanted the truth to feel like the only exit. “You keep touching your left wrist. People touch what they’re afraid of losing.”

He went still.

She used the stillness, closing the last of the distance until he had to tilt his head to hold her eyes, near enough that her height became a wall he had to reckon with. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t need to. His breathing changed anyway, shallow and quick, shoulders curving in like he wanted to make himself smaller under her attention.

“There was someone else in the penthouse that night,” she said.

“I don’t—”

“Emre.” Just his name, low, patient.

His breath left him in a rush. “I saw a shape. In the hallway, past the kitchen, when I was packing up. Tall. Moved wrong, like every step was measured. Clinical. Not a limp, not a hurry, just precise. I told myself it was staff. I told myself a lot of things.”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t stay to find out.” His voice cracked, and he pressed the heel of his hand against one eye. “I ran. I grabbed my gear and ran and I’ve been running for three days waiting for someone to come put a bullet in me or a badge in my face, and I genuinely don’t know which scares me more.”

Kiera’s gaze dropped to the camera resting on the counter, a battered medium‑format body with a lens cap askew. Something about the weight distribution had registered wrong. She picked it up, twisted the lens free, and found the hollow chamber behind the glass elements—a compartment that had never come from any factory, holding a slim drive no bigger than her thumb.

“Don’t.” Emre’s hand shot out, closing over hers, warm and shaking. “Please. Not yet. Whatever’s on there, it’s fragments, not even the whole thing. I couldn’t save it all before I panicked. If whoever’s looking for that drive knows I still have it—”

“Then they’re already looking.” She held his eyes, and for a moment the red light made him look younger than thirty‑two, made the fear in his face something she recognized from her own reflection more times than she wanted to admit. “I can protect what’s on this drive better than you can. Hiding it in a lens isn’t a system. It’s a prayer.”

“And if it gets you killed instead of me?”

The question landed somewhere she didn’t have a ready answer for, and for one unguarded second she let the silence hold both of them, let herself feel the small, unfamiliar ache of someone worrying about her safety instead of his own. She closed her fingers around the drive.

“It’s evidence now,” she said, gentler than she meant to. “That means it’s mine to lose, not yours.”

He didn’t let go of her hand right away. When he finally did, his fingers dragged, reluctant, and something in his expression looked like grief for a decision he hadn’t made yet but already knew was coming.