27. Neri
Chapter 27
Neri
I step out of the bathroom and into a world that doesn’t quite exist.
The hallway stretches dim and uneven, like it’s been lit from the wrong angle. Shadows slide where they shouldn’t. Corners bleed into each other. The walls are soft cream or pale pink—but I can’t quite focus on the color. Like my eyes refuse to register it.
It’s always like this when I’m here. Like I’m walking through someone else’s dream. Like the apartment itself is holding its breath, hoping I don’t notice the cracks.
I walk past a row of frames on the wall—blurry shapes in silver edges. Certificates. Photos. Childhood garbage, probably.
And in the middle?
That one’s crystal clear.
ETHAN CROSS DEAD: Suicide or Something More?
His body splayed open like a crime scene in motion, red smeared wide across stone. Front page. Full bleed—pun intended. Framed like a goddamn masterpiece.
I stop. Stare. Smile.
“Cute,” I mutter. “Bit dramatic.”
It showed up a little while ago. Out of nowhere. That happens here sometimes.
Things just… appear.
I don’t question it anymore.
I keep moving.
The tapestry at the end of the hall doesn’t look like some artsy thing from a home decor blog.
Not to me anyway.
To me, it looks like a blanket of shadows. Something the house draped over itself like it’s trying to hide a scar. The kind of thing you only notice if you’ve been through worse.
I reach for the edge?—
And hear it.
Click. Click. Click.
Little claws on the hard floor.
Then—
“Mrrrow.”
Oley appears like a cursed spirit summoned by my disdain. And by disdain I mean absolute obsession.
He blinks up at me, pure snow-fur and elegant contempt, eyes narrowed like he just caught me forgetting to wear pink on Wednesdays.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Judge Judy in a fur coat,” I mutter, dropping to a crouch.
He doesn’t flinch. Just lifts his tail, turns sideways, and gives me the full sass silhouette and a, “I dare you to rub my belly. ”
“You know I could kill you, right?”
He yawns. He knows I would never. Fuck this little bastard is everything to me.
Stretching like a smug asshole who knows exactly how cute he is when he’s inconveniencing me—and knows I love every minute of it.
“God, you’re insufferable.”
I reach to scratch behind his ear.
“Don’t get comfortable,” I warn. “Last time you passed judgment on me mid-murder-doc binge when I was criticizing the murderer, and then had the audacity to sleep on my chest like a weighted guilt blanket.”
He purrs.
The fucker purrs.
I sigh.
“You’re lucky you’re hot.”
He flicks his tail and sniffs at the tapestry like he owns the place. Probably does.
“You coming or not?” I ask.
He turns in a circle and flops down like a diva, stretching across the floor in a way that says I’ll allow you to open the door. But only because I’m in the mood to watch you fail.
I shake my head, grinning as I pull the tapestry aside.
It slithers off the wall, darker than the rest of the apartment.
Behind it?
My door.
Plain. Unlabeled. Not even a fancy doorknob—I should do something about that.
I glance down.
Oley’s still stretched out like a furry warning sign.
“Fine,” I whisper. “But if you shed on my suit again, I swear to god, I’m lint-rolling you in your sleep.”
He blinks once.
Purrs louder.
I slip inside and pull the door shut behind me—not because I’m hiding. I don’t hide. I haunt. I hunt. But still—this place feels better with the world locked out.
It’s barely a closet, really—one of those narrow storage setups meant for broken vacuums or sad winter coats that nobody wears anymore. And that one shelf filled with the kind of crap people swear they’re gonna fix someday. Here? It’s filled with me.
I mean, not me-me. Not like a clone in a jar or anything. Though, honestly? That would be kind of badass.
But this?
This tiny, suffocating, perfect excuse of a closet?
This is mine.
But it works. I’ve carved enough space to breathe, and that’s more than I get anywhere else.
Linda’s perched in her little box on the shelf, cracked along the grip from when I dropped her mid-fall trying to vault a fire escape. She still sings when I tap the trigger, bless her spark-happy heart.
My suit hangs neat on the hook—black, reinforced, re-stitched across the left thigh where that one security fence didn’t like me much. It’s starting to smell like sweat and adrenaline and maybe a little gasoline, which feels honest. The black-and-gray skirt’s folded next to it. I kept it out of spite. It had one job and it did it well, so now it gets to stay.
I smirk.
“Earned your spot after all. ”
The beanbag’s in the corner. Aggressively lumpy. Makes a noise like a haunted whoopee cushion every time I drop into it. So naturally, I love it. Feels like it’s always on the verge of collapsing. Same, buddy. Same.
And the wall? Oh, baby. The wall is art.
Voss’s face, dead center. Cropped out of some press release where he’s shaking hands with evil in a lab coat. I blacked out his eyes and gave him devil horns. For professionalism.
Below him—layers. Papers. Blueprints. A photo I definitely didn’t steal from a secure server. Might’ve kissed it once. Might’ve stabbed it with a thumbtack. Who’s to say?
And then—her.
Mom.
There’s a photo, she’s laughing in it. Holding some test tube like she’s on the cover of Science Today and not two steps from a chemical execution. Her badge says senior researcher. Her eyes say she thinks she’s saving the world.
I stare at it like it might blink.
“She had the audacity,” I mutter, “to work for the wrong man.”
That’s all it took.
Not treason. Not betrayal. Not even a mistake.
Just… a Tuesday.
A routine lab day with the wrong clearance level, under the wrong name, signed onto the wrong project.
And now? She’s ash.
Courtesy of the man taped six inches above her with devil horns drawn in Sharpie.
Lucky her. She got to take her daughter to work that day. Front-row seat to the apocalypse .
“Great job, Mom,” I say to the photo, flicking it once so it swings. “Ten outta ten. Really nailed the career trajectory.”
Whatever.
I taped it below Voss’s smug Frankenstein mug like a middle finger made of sentimentality.
I lean back, arms crossed.
“You’d be proud of me,” I mutter to her photo. “Maybe. Or horrified. Depends on how you felt about tasers and tax fraud.”
I sink into the beanbag. It squawks.
“I told you to die quieter.”
The bulb above me buzzes like it’s judging my life choices. Join the club.
My eyes drift to the corner where I taped up the poster of The Crow—black and white, all broody and dramatic. Saw it once at like, thirteen, and said yep, that’s the vibe. Smudged face paint. Vengeance. Dead girlfriend. Real uplifting shit. That’s where the mask came from. Sort of. I liked the aesthetic.
I crack my knuckles, lean back, stare at Voss’s face like I’m waiting for it to apologize. It won’t. I know that—but maybe if I stare long enough, something will crack.
“Anyway,” I mutter, voice flat. “I hope you’re having a nice day. I hope your coffee spilled. I hope your test subjects bit you.”
Then quieter, almost to myself?—
“I hope she haunts you.”
I close my eyes for a second. Just a second.
But the blood’s already buzzing under my skin again, the plans rewinding, replaying. I don’t sit still well.
“You can rest when he’s dead,” I whisper .
Then I pop back up, already reaching for Linda.
“Alright, bitch,” I say to the wall like it’s Voss himself. “Let’s go ruin your year.”
The fridge groans when I open it.
Not like please don’t rob me—more like you again. Like if Wraith were to somehow turn into an appliance.
I peer inside, humming a little victory tune under my breath.
Leftover noodles. Expired yogurt. Mystery tupperware labeled DO NOT OPEN. Which, by the way, I opened last week—he should’ve specified why.
And there it is.
The prize.
Cold. Glorious. Untouched.
His last soda. Again.
“Well, well, well,” I murmur to myself. “Look who forgot about the gremlin in his walls.” I crack open the can with the flair of someone who knows damn well she didn’t pay for it.
The hiss of carbonation slices through the air like a war cry.
“Don’t even think about it,” he says without turning around.
I take a long, obnoxiously slow sip.
“Too late.”
He exhales like he’s trying to summon patience from the ninth circle of hell. Still doesn’t look at me.
I grin wider.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“That’s always terrifying.”
“Har-har, very funny.” I roll my eyes at the stupidly attractive asshole. He turns, giving me his full attention. No one else does that, gives me their undivided attention while I speak. Not that I really talk to anyone else, but still the guy might as well be written by a woman with how attentive he is.
“Well?”
“I have this strange feeling that I know where Voss’s secret lab is.” He stares at me intently for a few moments—what a creeper. I take back the written by a woman comment.
“Where?”
“The suspiciously well-funded compound outside Princeton that he calls home.” I don’t know how I know, but I know this is right. It’s like the ghost of Voss’s Christmas past came to visit and spilled all his secrets to me.
“Alright, that shouldn’t be impossible to find.” He believes me. Just like that. I take back the take back—he’s definitely written by a woman.
Wraith leans back in his chair, finally giving me something close to a smirk. “You’re not the only one that’s been thinking.”
I raise a brow and tip the soda can toward him in mock toast. “Oh? Color me impressed. Multitasking and brooding at the same time. What’s got your terminally haunted attention?”
“The code.”
I freeze. Mid-sip. “The one on the back of the card?”
He nods.
“Did you crack it?”
“Not quite,” he admits, “but I think I might be onto something. ”
I sidle up behind him, peering over his shoulder like an extremely nosy parrot. “Lay it on me, sexy Wikipedia.”
He taps some keys. Numbers flash, too uniform to be random. “It’s structured. Repeating patterns. Same sets of digits, same spacing. Too clean to be noise.”
“So, not just his grocery list.”
“No. And not just coordinates, either—though that was my first guess. But they don’t point anywhere real. Not unless you want to visit the middle of the fucking Atlantic.”
“Hard pass.” I sip again. “So, what are we thinking? Caesar cipher? Substitution?”
“Caesar doesn’t fit,” he mutters. “I tried shifting the values—+3, -5, all the basics. Nothing meaningful came up.”
“Okay, so maybe we go weirder,” I say, tapping the can against my thigh. “Vigenère?”
“Too long a string for that to work cleanly unless we’re missing the keyword.”
“Could it be a book cipher? Like page-line-word?”
“Possible. If we knew what book. Could be anything from Frankenstein to Mein Kampf with Leviathan.”
“Or The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” I shrug. “Man’s a wild card.”
Wraith’s mouth twitches. “I’ve also been looking at Fibonacci sequences. Binary clusters. Hell, even keyboard-based mapping—like laying the numbers out on a QWERTY and seeing what shapes they form.”
“Oh my god,” I whisper. “You nerded it.”
He shoots me a glare. “I researched it.”
“Sure, sure. With your massive, throbbing IQ.”
He ignores that. “There’s one pattern that stood out. Every third number is a perfect square. ”
I blink. “Wait… seriously?”
“Yeah. Which could mean it’s a masking technique. Squares as markers. Or it could be a split code—two messages running parallel, one in the squares, one in the rest.”
I whistle low. “Okay, okay. That’s sexy-level encryption. Leviathan doesn’t play.”
“No,” Wraith says quietly. “He doesn’t.”
I nudge his shoulder. “You’ll crack it.”
He doesn’t look away from the screen. “I have to.”
“So it could be two messages?” Something far too simple occurs to me. “What if it’s a date and time, plus a location?”
He looks at me and then types a few things in and then I hear him huff a “fuck,” under his breath.
“Guess we gave him far too much credit in the brain’s department.”
“No fucking shit.”
He taps again, the numbers flashing in clean rows across the screen.
“Alright,” he mutters. “If we split them down the middle—every third digit as its own stream… And assume the rest maps to standard ASCII…”
The cursor blinks. Then freezes.
A time. A date. A location.
One week from now. Midnight. An abandoned steel plant outside Yonkers.
I stare. “Holy shit. That’s a meeting.”
Wraith exhales, low and sharp. “It’s a fucking drop.”
“For what?”
“No idea. But if Leviathan encoded it like this, it’s either high-level trade or an execution.”
“Oh good,” I chirp. “Maybe both. ”
He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a burner. Dials without looking.
The voice on the other end picks up immediately. “What.”
Wraith doesn’t flinch. “I don’t have a name.”
A beat of silence. Then, “Disappointing.”
“But I’ve got a time, date, and location.”
“Talk.”
Wraith rattles it off. Cold. Exact.
S grunts. “I know the site. Was decommissioned ten years ago. I’ll have eyes in place.”
“This is Leviathan’s. So no cowboys.”
“I’m insulted,” S says flatly. “You think I’d ride in without my spurs?”
“I think you like fire too much to leave your matches at home.”
S doesn’t argue. “You’ll be there?”
“Oh,” Wraith says, voice dipping dark. “I’m not missing this one.”
The call ends without a goodbye.
Wraith tosses the phone onto the couch like it burned him.
I take another sip. “So… date night?”
His smirk is thin. “You bring the chaos. I’ll bring the cleanup crew.”
I raise the can between us. “To mutual destruction.”
He clinks his fist to it. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Somewhere between Princeton and Philly,” I mutter, cracking open a folder and tossing it onto the war table like it just insulted my shoes. “That’s what all his shell companies trace back to.”
Wraith’s already ahead of me—figures—digging through digital purchase records and zoning loopholes like a nerd on a warpath.
I perch on the edge of the desk, swinging one boot idly.
“He’s not gonna register a lab under his own name,” I add. “Too obvious. But the land? That’s how rich psychos do it. They build their evil lairs under their wine cellars.”
Wraith snorts. “Underground Bond villain chic. Love that for him.”
His fingers fly over the keys. “I’m cross-referencing permit anomalies with electricity usage spikes and private road maintenance records.”
“You’re such a dork,” I say, but I’m grinning. “Tell me you color-coded it.”
He deadpans, “There’s a spreadsheet.”
God, I want to kiss him and also maybe throw him off a roof.
Then—click.
“Found it.”
I lean over his shoulder. A pin appears on the screen. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.
A private estate. Gated. Wooded. Middle of nowhere.
It doesn’t have an address—just a parcel number.
No photos. No records past 2019. And even those are scrubbed.
“That’s it,” I whisper. “That’s the place.”
Wraith’s quiet. His eyes don’t leave the screen.
“You’re sure? ”
“I don’t know how I know,” I admit. “But I do. There’s something there. Buried. Breathing.”
He studies me for a moment too long.
“I trust your gut,” he says finally. “If you say it’s there—it’s there.”
I nod. Then—frown. Something about the mansion’s structure feels… off.
“It looks too normal,” I say. “Too polished. No signs of hidden entry points. No industrial support. No noise.”
“Which means whatever he’s hiding is below the baseline. He’s not just underground—he’s under the underground.”
I blink at him. “Did you just go full hacker Inception on me?”
He grins. “Shut up.”
We pull every record we can find. Land surveys. Demolition permits. Fake wine cellar extensions. Then, behind a paid firewall?
A request for reinforced foundation materials delivered under a false contractor name.
No ventilation blueprints. No plumbing schematics. Just a line item tagged “Phase 3 — Cold Storage.”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “This is it.”