31. Avery
AVERY
The service elevator opens behind me while I shove Nadia through the fire door, but no one steps out.
The empty car waits beneath its humming light with a grey maintenance cart parked crooked across the threshold, and I know Sasha isn’t inside before the doors bounce against the cart and open again.
That cart belonged beside the conference room when I walked the receptionist toward the stairs.
One wheel has caught on a strip of beige carpet, leaving the shelves turned toward the rear hall as if someone rolled it there in a hurry, then abandoned it once the elevator could make enough noise for us to watch.
Nadia catches the fire door before it closes and plants one heel against the stairwell floor. “Avery, get in here!” She has used that voice on attorneys twice her size, but the fear beneath it belongs to the woman who gave me a job and expected to leave this building beside me.
“Go down and tell the police the elevator is empty.” Whoever rolled that cart onto the threshold is already on this floor and behind me, and two flights at my speed would put us both inside a concrete shaft with one door at the bottom and no way to watch who follows us into it.
I keep my body between her and the hall, one hand on the crash bar and the other beneath my open coat, where the grip of the gun presses against the retention holster at my waist. I took it from the safe in my office after Nadia ordered the evacuation, following the rule she wrote after Sasha’s first visit: the weapon stays locked during an ordinary workday and goes on my body only if a direct threat forces us out.
The weight was a nuisance in training. Now it rides above the place the baby keeps shifting, and the elevator stands open for a woman who isn’t inside it. “Don’t come back up.”
Nadia looks past me at the maintenance cart, then reaches for my sleeve. She misses when I step away, which saves us both from arguing about whether she can drag a pregnant employee down two flights by the coat. “The police told us to clear the floor together.”
“Then clear it.” I push the door until only the width of my hand remains. “Tell them she was already here.”
The conference-room door stands open beyond the cart.
Nadia closed it before she called the detective.
I watched her pull the handle twice, irritated by the swollen frame and unwilling to trust the first click.
Now a white bottle sits on the lowest shelf of the cart where no bottle belongs, its cap wet beneath the overhead light.
I don’t need to read the label. I smelled that jasmine shampoo on Sasha’s hair while she lay in my sheets, and five months haven’t stopped me from remembering the worst room of my life.
“She is,” a woman says behind me, close enough that the jasmine smell reaches the stairwell. “Close the door, Avery.” Sasha sounds pleased that I found her before Nadia did, which tells me she can see both of us.
Nadia’s face changes through the narrowing gap.
I press the fire door shut before she can answer, and the latch catches with her on the safe side.
The gun beneath my coat stays holstered.
Sasha is close enough to speak without raising her voice, which means drawing before I know her position would give her the first shot and put Nadia on the other side of a door she might open if she hears it.
I turn with both hands visible. Sasha stands near the reception desk in black work pants and a grey maintenance jacket, the firm logo stolen from the cleaning company stitched above one breast. Her hair is shorter than it was in October and dark enough that I would have passed her on the street if I hadn’t spent months waking with her face between me and sleep.
A plastic badge hangs from her collar. The pistol in her right hand is aimed at the part of my coat the baby has begun kicking whenever I sit through lunch too long.
My first urge is to cover the baby. I did it when I fell beside the toilet with the positive test in my hand, and I did it again when the safehouse door opened on Declan and Sasha.
Both times, my hand reached the child before I understood there was a child large enough to protect.
Today the baby is twenty-eight weeks, strong enough to punish my bladder during contract calls and turn my stomach lopsided beneath my sweater.
My hand would give Sasha a cleaner target.
I keep it lifted beside my shoulder and feel the movement where I can’t answer it.
The gun frightens me. Training didn’t cure that, and anyone who claims it should probably be kept away from guns.
The instructor made me name every reason not to draw before he let me fire, then sent me home the first afternoon when anger about the tracker made every paper target look too much like a person I wanted to punish.
I returned the next week less eager to prove anything.
The lesson matters now. Sasha has the first weapon out, Nadia is behind a door close enough to hear us, and the safest thing I can do for my child is let this woman believe I am unarmed.
“You sent up an empty elevator,” I say, moving one step away from the fire door so Sasha has to follow me with the barrel rather than glance toward Nadia.
My phone rests in my coat pocket with the local recorder active and the emergency message already gone.
The silent alarm icon turned green before the elevator reached our floor.
I don’t know how close they are, but the speaker in the conference room records even if the internet dies.
“That’s a lot of trouble for an entrance nobody saw. ”
“You saw it.” Sasha lifts the badge from her jacket, showing the photograph of a woman who has her general coloring and none of her face.
“People see a uniform, a cart, and a laminated card, then help you carry the thing you’re using to rob them.
Your building manager held the rear door for me this morning. ”
She says it with pride, but the stolen badge swings against a jacket that doesn’t fit her and the empty elevator keeps trying to close around the cart.
This isn’t the woman who sat in the safehouse wearing my husband’s hoodie as if she owned every room he brought her into.
The company accounts are exposed, the safehouse is empty, and the club door has closed.
She has a stolen badge, a bad jacket, and the gun in her hand.
“You’ve been here all morning?” I ask, letting disbelief hide the fact that I’m working backward through every open door, visitor, and delivery Nadia and I may have missed.
“Long enough to watch you bring a box out of the house Declan let me burn.” Her gaze drops to my stomach, and the gun follows. “Long enough to hear you accept a job as though a desk and a baby made you somebody new.”
My appointment with Dr. Evans is on the calendar for late afternoon.
The reminder lit my screen during the contract call Nadia let me lead, and I dismissed it while promising myself I would leave work on time for once.
Sasha watched enough to know when I arrived, what I carried, and which window belonged to me, yet she has mistaken the things I earned for costumes I put on after leaving Declan.
I want to tell her the job is mine, the baby is mine to protect, and the woman standing in this hall existed before either of them learned how useful my labor could be.
A speech would stop her from talking, and I need her to keep talking.
A correction will keep Sasha’s attention where I need it.
“I signed the permanent offer the day before the divorce. If you’re going to watch me through a window, at least take useful notes.”
The insult pulls her attention to my face.
Nadia taught me that people who believe they are the smartest person in the room can’t leave a correction alone, even when answering costs them.
I used the same vanity to walk a contractor through three versions of a lie until he admitted which invoice he changed.
Sasha isn’t a contractor, and the thing in her hand can kill both of us, but she wants me afraid of how much she knows.
Letting her prove one fact at a time keeps her talking.
“Where is Nadia?” she asks, looking toward the fire door as though my boss is another file she can retrieve once I answer correctly.
“She left with the staff.” I walk backward toward the conference room, keeping my coat open so I can reach the holster if the barrel leaves me. “You’re alone with a recorder you already knew about because I told you the first time you came here. Why come back?”
Sasha reaches behind the reception desk and presses the stolen badge to the security panel.
The front doors lock with a heavy click, and the service elevator doors close after she kicks the cart free.
The fire stairs remain behind me. The crash bar would open from this side, with the width of the hall and the barrel of her pistol lying between my hand and it.
Sasha’s whole system is her own body standing between me and the exit with a weapon aimed at my child.
“Open your office,” she says, using the gun to point toward the far door. She has stopped asking about Nadia. The lie bought what I needed from it.
“The police copied the burner in October. Burning the house didn’t change that.” I walk where she directs without turning my back, and the conference-room doorway reaches my shoulder.
“Copies don’t show what Declan hid after you ran.” She advances, forcing me through the conference-room doorway. “I want the original phone and the eastern parcel sheet. Open the office.”