Someone was inside the room with me. I couldn't see who — the shelves were too tall, and the lights flickered every few seconds, My heart pounded against my ribs. "Who's there?" No answer. The footsteps had already stopped, like whoever it was had heard the question and decided it didn't deserve one.I glanced back at the door and pulled the handle again — still locked. I hit it with my fist. "Open the door!" Nothing came back but silence, and somehow that silence was worse than any answer could have been. I forced myself to take a slow breath, Whoever was hiding in here wanted me to panic, wanted me scrambling loud and easy to find. I wasn't going to make that easy for them.I reached for the wooden mop handle leaning against the wall. It wasn't much — a length of splintered wood against whatever had been sent in here for me — but it beat standing there with empty hands. The room went quiet again, too quiet, the kind of stillness that felt deliberate rather than empty. Then a metal

I stared at the photograph until the shapes stopped making sense and started again, sharper the second time. My grandfather sat at his desk, half-turned toward the window, the same warm study I sat in a hundred times growing up, sunlight cutting across the same shelves I could still picture with my eyes closed. The timestamp printed in the corner placed it minutes — only minutes — before he collapsed in that ballroom in front of everyone who'd ever claimed to love him. And behind him, caught in the glass like an accident of light rather than a choice, stood Benjamin Brooks. I must have made a sound, because Daniel was beside me before I even realized . "What is it?" I couldn't answer right away. I turned the photograph toward him instead, tapping the reflection with a finger that wasn't quite steady. "That's Benjamin Brooks." Daniel leaned in and studied it for a long moment. "Your lawyer's lawyer. The one who gave you the letter and the key." "He never told me he was in the hou

Three days passed before I heard anything, and every one of them felt longer than the last. Daniel noticed the waiting was wearing on me more than the note or the beating had. "You keep checking the door like she's going to walk through it herself." "I keep thinking about what happens if she asks him the wrong question the wrong way." "She's a lawyer who's spent her career asking dangerous people dangerous questions. I trust her to know how to do it." He was probably right, but knowing that didn't stop the feeling sitting in my chest, low and constant, that I had handed her something that could get her hurt and hadn't warned her how much. When the officer finally called my name for a visit, I was on my feet before he even finished saying it. Isabella looked different this time — not tired exactly, but careful, the way someone looks when they're choosing every word before they let it out. She waited until the door closed behind the officer before she spoke. "I met with Benjamin Br

I brought the name back to the cell without meaning to say it out loud, but Daniel had a way of reading things off me before I decided to share them."You look like you saw a ghost in there.""Maybe I did." I sat down on the lower bunk across from him, turning Isabella's words over one more time before I let them out. "There's a beneficiary in my grandfather's will nobody's ever heard of. A name that doesn't show up anywhere — no records, no address, nothing. Isabella thinks it might connect to something my grandfather was protecting.""What's the name?""Marcus Whitfield."Daniel went still in a way I recognized now, the same stillness he had shown the first night I told him my last name — a half-second longer than the moment called for, held just past the edge of natural."You know that name," I said.He didn't answer right away, which was its own kind of answer. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped into something quieter than I had heard from him before, careful in a way t

Captain Morrison found me two days later, not in the infirmary this time but pulled straight out of the laundry line without explanation, the same way the guards had once pulled me toward Storage Room B. For a few steps I genuinely didn't know which version of this place I was walking into."Relax, Mr. Hayes," he said, reading the tension in my shoulders before I'd said a word. "This isn't that kind of walk."He led me to a small office near the administrative wing, empty except for a desk, two chairs, and a window that looked out over the yard instead of another corridor. He closed the door behind us and didn't sit right away, just stood there for a moment like he was deciding how much of whatever he'd come to say was actually safe to say out loud."I've been asking around," he said finally. "Quietly. About your transfer paperwork from a few weeks back — the one that got approved and then mysteriously never processed."I hadn't told him about that. "How do you know about that?""Beca