Chapter 2 No Sign of Entry
POV: WREN
I swung before I saw who had made the sound.
The brass candlestick cut through empty air. Momentum pulled me sideways, and my shoulder struck the wall hard enough to numb my fingers. The hallway remained vacant. Bedroom door open. Front door chained. Kitchen dark.
On the phone, the dispatcher repeated my name.
When I looked back at the balcony, the hand was gone.
So was the blood.
I reached the glass and stared down. Rain swept the narrow balcony in silver sheets. No body lay below. No rope moved against the stone. There was only a clean rail, a locked door and my reflection holding a weapon like a woman who had finally become the story everyone told about her.
The police arrived ninety seconds later.
They found rainwater.
No blood. No handprint. No man hanging from my nineteenth-floor balcony like a nightmare with excellent upper-body strength. Officer Bell rubbed a paper swab across the damp floor and gave me the look people reserved for cracked glass they were afraid to touch. His partner searched the apartment twice. They found no damaged lock, no open window and no person hiding beneath the bed.
They also found no book.
"It was there." I pointed at the clean pillow. "A first edition. Green leather. The card was beneath it."
"And the card?" Bell asked.
"Gone."
My stomach dropped as I said it. The card had fallen beside the bed when the television came on. I had not looked away long enough for someone to cross the room, take both objects and vanish. Yet the depression in my pillow was already lifting as though nothing had rested there.
I opened my camera roll. The hallway photographs were sharp. The balcony glittered with rain. The bedroom portion of the video showed rolling grey static, while my recorded voice calmly described an image that did not exist.
Bell exchanged a glance with his partner.
I knew that glance too.
At ten forty-three, Detective Nolan Pierce arrived in a charcoal coat and kind eyes. He had handled my mother's crash seven years ago. He remembered how I took my tea and always spoke softly when he mentioned Elara Hart. I had once mistaken that softness for safety.
"Anniversaries can be difficult," he said after the uniformed officers moved into the hallway.
"Her anniversary is in November."
"Grief doesn't use calendars."
He sat across from me at the dining table as though this were a visit rather than an investigation. Rain darkened the shoulders of his coat. Silver threaded his hair at the temples now, but his sympathetic expression had not changed since the hospital waiting room where he told twenty-year-old me that my mother had died on impact.
"Wren, you've reported gifts before."
"Because they happened before."
"Flowers without a card. A scarf you didn't remember buying. A taxi appearing when you needed one."
"My brake line was cut."
"The mechanic said corrosion."
"A taxi was waiting on an empty street at two in the morning with my name already on the booking."
"You may have scheduled it and forgotten. You were working very long hours."
I hated him then, not because he dismissed me, but because he did it with such patient concern that I heard my own voice becoming shrill.
"Eric Sloane followed me. Now he is missing."
Pierce folded his hands. "Did Mr. Sloane threaten you?"
"Not in words."
"Did you know his name before tonight?"
"No."
"Did you have any contact with him?"
"I just told you-"
"Direct contact, Wren. Calls. Messages. Physical confrontation."
"No. Someone else confronted him. The person who left the book."
His gaze sharpened for a fraction of a second. "What book?"
The question was too quick. He had already heard me explain it to Bell.
"A first edition of The Secret Garden."
"Your mother's favourite."
Cold moved over my skin. "I never told you that."
"You may have mentioned it after the accident."
"I didn't."
He smiled without showing teeth. "Trauma affects memory."
Behind him, Officer Bell lifted a framed photograph from the shelf. Mum stood in front of the Archive, one arm around my shoulders, wind blowing her copper hair across her smile. Pierce watched me watching it.
"Have you been taking your medication?" he asked.
"I don't take medication."
"Dr. Vale prescribed-"
"You spoke to my therapist?"
"Your reports raised welfare concerns. We had to establish whether you were at risk."
"From myself?"
"From anyone."
The answer was smooth, but the room had changed. Pierce knew about Mum's book. He knew about an unsigned prescription I had never filled. Perhaps it was ordinary police diligence. Perhaps seven years of fear had trained suspicion into me until kindness looked like camouflage.
I excused myself and carried two mugs into the kitchen. While the kettle boiled, I opened a backup application hidden beneath a calculator icon. My phone automatically uploaded every photograph I took to a private server Talia had helped me set up after the brake line incident.
The images were there.
The book gleamed on my pillow. The card lay beneath it. In the balcony photograph, a man clung to the exterior rail, his face turned from the camera.
Then, as I watched, the first image vanished.
The second followed.
Someone was deleting them remotely.
I switched the phone to aeroplane mode. The third image froze before it could disappear. I enlarged it until pixels broke across the screen. The man's dark jacket had ridden up at his wrist. Beneath it, a silver watch caught the light, its face black, its design severe.
I had seen that watch in business magazines.
Cassian Voss had worn it while testifying before a parliamentary security committee. He had worn it beside the prime minister after a hostage recovery. He had worn it in the only candid photograph ever taken of him, one hand around another man's throat outside a private club.
I returned to the living room with the tea and placed my phone facedown beneath my thigh.
Pierce had moved to the window.
"No one could climb onto this balcony," he said.
"Apparently someone could."
"Or you saw a reflection."
"Reflections don't bleed."
He turned. "Sometimes the brain adds details when it needs a threat to make sense."
"And sometimes a threat learns how to remove details."
His expression cooled before sympathy reclaimed it. "I can arrange somewhere safe for tonight."
"Where?"
"A monitored medical facility. Just until you've slept."
The words closed around my throat. I imagined surrendering my phone, my keys and my credibility. By morning, the final photograph would be gone and Pierce would have another record explaining why I should not be believed.
"I'm staying with a friend," I lied.
He studied me for a long moment, then reached into his coat. I gripped the mug, ready to throw boiling tea.
He placed a business card on the table. "Call me before you call anyone else."
After the officers left, I waited behind the locked door until the lift carried them away. Then I packed my laptop, Mum's photograph and the emergency cash beneath the flour tin.
My phone vibrated despite aeroplane mode.
The impossible message filled the screen.
Do not go to Talia's. Pierce is watching her building.
I typed with shaking thumbs.
Who are you?
The reply arrived immediately.
The man at the glass.
I crossed to the window and looked down. Pierce stood beneath the awning across the street. He was not looking at his car.
He was staring directly at the hidden camera above my balcony.
