Chapter Twenty-Three
Brady
Lunch at Elise’s apartment should have felt like a victory lap.
She’d made a simple pasta tossed with fresh herbs and roasted vegetables that filled the tiny kitchen with something warm and savory and unfairly perfect.
We sat at her small table with that massive butcher-paper chart still taped to the wall like a silent third wheel, trading jokes about the “Krafty” nickname and how tragically committed those early-nineties yearbook photos had been to bad hair.
For about ten glorious minutes, everything stayed light.
I was having serious trouble concentrating.
Every time she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear or absently traced the rim of her water glass, my brain short-circuited.
Seeing her relaxed enough to leave a cookbook open on the counter, sleeves pushed up, moving around her own space like she belonged in my future felt dangerously domestic.
I liked it more than I probably should have.
But the easy rhythm didn’t last. Elise kept pushing food around her plate. Her answers arrived a beat too late. Her gaze kept drifting toward the window like she was waiting for bad news to knock.
I set my fork down. “What’s wrong?”
She offered a smile that almost reached her eyes. “I may have found another clue this morning. It could be nothing . . . but I think we should check it out.”
I studied the rigid line of her shoulders, the way she was clearly fighting some internal storm. “We don’t have to chase it today. We could just sit here and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist for a couple hours.”
For one heartbeat I saw real yearning flicker across her face. Then the shutters came down and she shook her head. “No. It’s not far. Let’s go.”
If movement would quiet whatever was rattling around in her head, I wasn’t about to argue.
The drive took us to the ragged edge of town along a gravel service road that dead-ended at a low, windowless building behind a chain-link fence.
It tried to look like any other industrial storage unit, but the reinforced doors, discreet camera housings, and high-tech keypad gave it away.
The faded sign out front simply read: Steele Facility.
Elise parked at a respectful distance. “I found references online to this place being used for prototype testing,” she said, voice tight. “Old stuff. Might be worth a look.”
We watched from the car. A single middle-aged guard lounged near the side entrance, uniform slightly rumpled, repeatedly checking his phone and stepping away from his post for short stretches.
“I wonder what he’s waiting to hear,” I murmured, “and from whom?”
Elise shot me a quick glance. “What?”
“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”
The guard wandered off again this time toward a plain service door that looked too boring to be heavily guarded. It was propped open.
I turned to Elise, already grinning. “It’s not breaking and entering if the door is open. It’s just . . . entering.”
She stared at the gap like it had personally betrayed her. The pure, genuine shock on her face was so perfect I had to swallow a laugh. “Why have security if they’re just going to leave doors wide open?”
“I’m sure he has reasons. But does it matter right now? We’re in.”
She sighed. “It matters. But . . . not in this moment, I suppose.”
We bolted to the opened door. Inside, the place was a surreal mix of abandoned archive and dormant lab. Dust-covered prototypes sat on metal racks like sleeping robots. Dark control panels lined one wall. Filing cabinets and storage units filled the rest. The air smelled of old electronics.
“This is kind of exciting,” I whispered, sticking close to her. “I hope the guard doesn’t come back soon.”
She stayed glued to my elbow, close enough that her warmth kept pulling my focus away from the mission.
We moved deeper until we reached a reinforced storage closet that screamed “serious business.” Handprint pad, retinal scanner, and a numeric keypad with what looked like biometric layering.
The kind of setup that made regular locks look like toys.
The sound of the guard approaching sent us scrambling around the corner. He let out a fart that echoed like a tuba in a cathedral. I gagged behind my hand.
“He’s sick,” I whispered to Elise, fighting laughter. “That’s why the door’s open. He doesn’t want to crap his way out of a job.”
She made a face.
I snapped my fingers. “I have Imodium in the car. Don’t ask.”
She shook her head, but I could see the tiny crack of amusement breaking through her tension.
The human part of the plan was ridiculous.
But ridiculous had been working weirdly well lately.
We slipped back out, grabbed the bottle, and approached the guard.
The rest played out almost too smoothly: the sympathetic conversation, the “I work for Mr. Steele” line, the shared bathroom horror stories, and the guard’s desperate relief when I “remembered” the stocked first-aid kit.
A few minutes later he was keying us through the storage room door, retinal scan and all, then hurrying off with the pills that I pretended to locate inside.
That got us into the room. But the inner cabinet was a different beast. No guard to charm this time. Just cold, layered tech that felt like it was staring back at us.
I crouched in front of it, studying the panel. High-end stuff. I’m no hacker, but there was a keypad and we’d discovered a lot about Thomas Steele, the guy who ate Kraft Mac & Cheese at three a.m. during robotics all-nighters. The guy who loved Don’t Stop Believin’ enough to make it a team caption.
People like that didn’t build systems without leaving a little personality in the cracks.
“Worth a shot,” I muttered. I punched in the old tennis trio’s jersey numbers from the yearbook photo then added the year the song came out. Nothing. I tried again, reversing the order and slipping in “KRAFT” on the old phone keypad letters. The panel blinked amber. Close.
Elise hovered behind me, breath caught. I could feel the tension rolling off her in waves.
One more try. I pictured that robotics club photo: Tom ‘Krafty’ Steele fueling another all-nighter.
I entered the sequence like a melody: 5-7-2-3 for KRAFT, followed by the last four digits of the song’s release year, then 1981 backward for good measure.
A soft chime sounded. The heavy panel popped open with a hydraulic whisper.
“No, way.”
I glanced at Elise. Her mouth was hanging open in surprise.
With a grin, I added, “I know, I’m just as shocked.” My gaze lingered on her mouth for half a second more before I turned toward the cabinet again. “So . . . what do you think we’ll find?”
With a soft pop, the panel opened. Tucked behind a bundle of old wiring diagrams was another manila folder.
We carried it to a workbench and spread the yellowed pages under the low lights. Bank statements. Mortgage papers. Eviction notices. All in Thomas Steele’s name. The numbers told a brutal, quiet story.
“He bet it all,” I said softly, flipping another page.
“It looks like my father bankrolled a project that Thomas and Cody were partners in.” The next few pages told the rest of the story.
“Cody designed whatever it was they thought would change the world. Thomas jumped onboard and bet everything he had that they’d succeed.
Then it looks like my father and Cody pulled out of the deal.
No explanation of why. The project never got off the ground and Thomas Steele lost everything. ”
Elise made a pained, guttural sound.
I glanced at her. “You okay?”
She gave a quick, tight nod. “Just thinking how tough that must have been for him.”
“It would have been devastating for anyone.” Shame nipped at my heels.
“My father can be a real bastard, but I can’t believe he did this.
It doesn’t fit with what I know about him.
” Except when it came to the Burkes. He wasn’t above anything with them.
“And it wasn’t just my father. Cody pulled out as well.
What happened back then that destroyed their friendship and made them capable of this? ”
I carefully slid the papers back into the folder and returned it exactly where we’d found it. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell my family this. Or if I even should. I’m not as sure as I was this morning that we should force contact. Especially if my dad played a role in what happened.”
Elise’s voice was barely a whisper. “We don’t have the full picture yet.”
I ran a hand over my face. “We have enough. They should’ve helped him.”
The quiet stretched. I cast one last look around the storage space before turning to her. “Ready to head out?”
“No.” The word slipped out so quietly I almost missed it. Her eyes widened in brief panic before she locked it down. “I mean . . . of course. Let’s go.”
When we stepped out of the storage room, the guard was looking markedly less green. He insisted on walking us back out through the full security gauntlet. “Protocol,” he muttered, clearly relieved and eager to cover his tracks.
What followed was a masterclass in over-engineering.
Retinal re-scan. Secondary handprint with pulse verification.
A pressure-sensitive floor panel that mapped weight distribution.
A silent AI-driven anomaly camera that scanned for unusual heat signatures.
Voice-stress analysis. The guard said most of it was new installs, but he seemed impressed by it all, and frankly, so was I.
I bent my head beside Elise’s. “Holy shit. Can you imagine if we’d tried to get in this way? ”
She nodded. “It would have been impossible.”
I smiled at that. “But we just proved that nothing is impossible.”
The guard thanked us again as he let us out the front entrance. “Appreciate the help today. Seriously.”
Elise was quieter than normal, so I stepped closer and gently tucked a stubborn strand of hair behind her ear. “Hey.”
Her gaze lifted to mine. For a long moment the warehouse, the mystery, everything else dissolved. “You don’t have to tell me what’s tearing you up inside,” I said softly. “But you don’t have to carry it by yourself either.”
Her fingers locked around mine. I squeezed back, trusting there was a damn good reason for whatever she was protecting so fiercely.
Maybe that made me na?ve. But trust didn’t mean much if you only offered it when things were easy.
For now, all I knew was that the man I’d spent weeks chasing had once lost everything because of two people he thought were his friends: one being my father and the other Cody Burke.
They’d left him high and dry.
No wonder he’d pulled back from the world and that mess.
And I wasn’t sure I had the right to drag him back into it.