Chapter 3 Too Close, Too Soon

Welcome to the building, Natalie.

I stare at the message until the letters stop looking like words. My hands go cold first, then my whole chest, like someone opened a window inside me and let winter in.

I delete it. Not because deleting helps. But because looking at it any longer feels like standing in the open with a target painted on my back.

“You good?”

Aaron’s back in the doorway, jacket half on, ready to leave for the day. I didn’t hear him come over.

“Fine.” I close my phone screen and smile the way I’ve practiced for exactly this, too fast to look natural if he really looked, but he doesn’t. Nobody really looks at the new girl on day one. “Just a lot to take in.”

“Meridian’ll do that.” He shrugs into his jacket. “Get some rest. Eight a.m. sharp, and trust me, he notices if you’re late.”

“I bet he does.”

Aaron laughs and heads out, and I sit there another ten minutes, running through everything that just happened. Someone in this city knows my real name. Not the file name, not Kate Brady. Natalie. Which means whoever sent that text isn’t guessing. They know exactly who I used to be, and that means they know exactly what I’m here to find.

I can’t think about that right now. I have one thing I actually control today, and I’m not wasting the daylight.

I grab my badge and head for the east stairwell instead of the elevator, the long way, past departments that have nothing to do with compliance. I need the map of this building in my head, every hallway, every door that needs a badge swipe versus the ones that just need a shove.

The forty-first floor is all glass and open desks, easy to read, nothing hiding here. I take the stairs down to thirty-nine, and the air changes. Fewer people. Narrower halls. A different kind of quiet, the kind that means somebody decided this floor didn’t need windows facing the street.

I walk slow, like I belong here, like I’m looking for a bathroom or a supply closet, anything boring enough that nobody stops to ask.

Most of the doors are unmarked. One says LEGAL. One says RECORDS in gold lettering gone dull with age, the type of sign that hasn’t been updated since somebody important decided this hallway didn’t matter anymore.

I try the records door out of habit. Locked, obviously, but a normal lock, badge access like everything else on this floor.

Further down, past a bend in the hallway where the carpet changes color, like it’s a different building grafted onto this one, there’s a door with no sign at all.

That’s the one that stops me.

No plaque. No department name. Just a black keypad instead of a badge reader, and a small brass plate beside it that’s been polished so many times the engraving is barely legible. I lean in close.

B.R. — PRIVATE

Bernard Ruspoli.

My pulse kicks so hard I feel it in my throat. Ten years, and here it is, a door with his initials on it, sitting in a hallway nobody bothers to walk down anymore.

I press my palm flat against it, stupid, like I could feel the truth through the wood if I just wanted it badly enough.

Footsteps echo somewhere behind me, distant, coming closer.

I step back fast, heart slamming, and pretend to study my phone like I’m lost, like I wandered down here by accident looking for a meeting room. The footsteps turn a different direction and fade.

I let out a breath and look at the keypad again. No badge reader means no easy workaround, no borrowed access card, no charming a junior staffer into swiping me through. This needs an actual code, something I’d have to steal or guess or force out of someone who already knows it.

Someone like Jackson.

Or someone like whoever runs security clearance for doors that don’t officially exist on the building directory.

I think about Harry, the name Aaron mentioned in passing during the tour, head of internal security, the kind of man who’d notice a new hire loitering outside a sealed office on day one faster than anyone.

This is exactly the type of mistake that gets people caught. Standing outside a locked door with no cover story ready, no reason to be on a floor I have no business being on.

I need to leave. I know I need to leave.

But I don’t move yet.

Instead I check the keypad one more time, memorizing the model, the number of digits, anything I can use later when I have more time and less risk of being seen. Whatever’s behind this door, Bernard cared enough to keep it locked down long after anyone else stopped paying attention to this floor.

That kind of secrecy doesn’t survive ten years by accident.

A voice cuts through the quiet behind me, low, amused, entirely too close.

“Lost, Ms. Brady?”

I turn, and Jackson is standing at the end of the hallway, hands in his pockets, watching me with an expression I can’t fully read, not angry, not yet, something closer to curiosity sharpened into a blade.

“This floor isn’t on your access list,” he says, stepping closer, unhurried, like he already knows I have no good answer. “So I have to ask myself why a new compliance hire, three hours into her first day, ends up standing outside my father’s old office.”