Grace's light was on when he did his final round, the thin gold line under 6B's door the only sign anyone still lived a real life in this building instead of just surviving it. He didn't knock. He never knocked unless something was wrong. That had been the agreement, unspoken but absolute, since the day he'd shown up eight months ago with a folder of forged references and a story about needing steady work after "some trouble down south."She'd hired him because he was cheap, and because David vouched for him, and because — she'd told him once, half-joking, the only time in eight months she'd said anything close to kind — he had 'sad eyes and a quiet mouth, which is honestly all I need from a security guard.'She had no idea her father had died with Jack's hand wrapped around his, no idea that the last coherent sentence William ever spoke had been 'she doesn't know how to be careful, watch her for me,' no idea that the man mopping up the lobby floor twice a week had once held a rank th

What actually happened was quieter and took longer to explain to anyone, which was why he'd never tried. Eighteen months after the ridge, in a debrief room with no windows, he'd been handed a file on Grace West — orphaned at twenty-two, family company teetering, exactly as reckless with her own safety as her father had promised — and he'd understood, reading it, that keeping his word meant becoming a man who didn't officially exist. He forged the discharge himself, with help from people who owed him enough favors to ask no questions. He built a fake employment history thin enough to survive a background check from someone who wasn't looking very hard, which described the entire hiring committee at Ashford Residences perfectly. He took a job that paid barely enough to survive on, because a security guard's salary raised no flags and required no scrutiny, and because it put him inside the same building as the one person left in the world he'd sworn, with a dying man's blood soaking thro

"Was that Tiger I just passed on the corner?""Yes.""Every month." She said it like a fact she was still, after two years, refusing to fully accept. "Every single month, and the committee just lets it happen, and you just — " she gestured vaguely at him, at the mop still propped against the wall, at the whole small shape of him " — hand over the money like it's rent.""It keeps things from getting worse.""Does it?" There was something sharper in her voice than usual, an edge that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a company circling a drain and a Deputy Director who smiled too much in emails. "Or does it just mean the worst thing hasn't happened 'yet'?"Jack had no good answer for that, mostly because it was the exact same question he'd been asking himself about his own years of standing still."I'll walk you to your car," he said instead."I have a driver.""Then I'll walk you to the driver."She almost smiled — almost, the ghost of something that might once, in a

Mr. Rhodes studied him for a long moment — an ordinary man, greying at the temples, no reason to look twice at anything Jack did — and something in his expression suggested he wasn't quite as unobservant as all those years of careful invisibility had assumed everyone in this building to be."You move like someone who's done that before," Mr. Rhodes said. "Not like a security guard breaking up a fight. Like — " he searched for the word, didn't quite find it, settled for something smaller than what he meant " — like someone who used to be somebody.""You're imagining things," Jack said. "Get some rest."He walked back down the stairwell alone, three floors, mop and bucket waiting exactly where he'd left them, and told himself the same thing he'd told himself a hundred times over years of small, careful days: that this was an exception, that it changed nothing, that a man could bend the rules once without breaking the promise entirely.He didn't yet know that forty-one calculated ways to

She didn't know, walking toward the elevator, that the man behind the desk had spent eighteen months learning to dismantle organizations considerably more dangerous than Samson's, or that the reason he could do nothing visible about her father's company was the exact same promise that had put him behind that desk in the first place. She only knew that talking to him made the headache behind her eyes ease, slightly, for the length of a lobby conversation, which was more than her actual therapist had managed in six months.Jack watched her go, then went back to David's computer, and did not, for once, let himself think about all forty-one ways he could have made Samson's afternoon considerably more difficult.Some promises were about what you did. This one, more and more, was turning into a promise about everything he had to stop himself from doing.He didn’t know it yet, but by the time he locked the front doors that night, Samson had already made a phone call of his own — one that had