37. Mira
MIRA
I told Katya we were picking up a box of my mother's old files from storage, which was true enough to say out loud without flinching, and left out the part where the storage in question was Kozlov Motor Group's legal archive on a night I had no legitimate reason to be anywhere near a records floor after ten o'clock.
She didn't ask why I needed her there instead of a moving company.
She just grabbed her coat off the back of a chair and said she'd been meaning to see the inside of my father's building anyway, since apparently it was the one place in Detroit she hadn't managed to talk her way into yet.
The drive over took eighteen minutes, most of which I spent rehearsing an answer for a question nobody was likely to ask.
Security wouldn't stop a Kozlov badge from opening every door in that building, not at this hour, not at any other, and that was the entire reason this could work at all.
I'd been counting on that particular blindness for two weeks, ever since I first let myself imagine what a real search of Niko's old files might actually turn up, and the ease of it should have felt like relief.
Instead it sat behind my ribs the whole drive downtown, low and steady, less like relief and more like guilt wearing relief's clothes.
"You're being weird," she said in the elevator, watching the floor numbers climb. "This is weirder than usual, too, which is saying something, because you've had a face for weeks like a woman doing long division in her head at all times."
"I'm tired. It's late."
"It's ten o'clock. You used to stay up until two doing actual division for fun." She studied me sideways, and I felt her read landing closer to the truth than I wanted it to. "You don't have to tell me. I'm just saying I noticed."
The archive floor was quiet in the specific way empty office floors always were, not silent, never actually silent, just quiet enough that every small sound announced itself like it had something to prove.
The HVAC ticked somewhere in the ceiling.
A copier hummed on standby down a hallway I couldn't see.
My own heels sounded enormous on the tile, and I found myself walking on the balls of my feet without deciding to, the way you do in a house where someone else is sleeping.
"So what are we actually doing here?" Katya said, low, once the elevator doors had shut behind us and we stood alone in a corridor of frosted glass doors and motion-sensor lights that hadn't caught our motion yet.
"We're pulling old case files. It won't take long."
"Mira." She caught my sleeve. "I've known you since we were nine. You get a very specific voice when you're doing something you'd rather I not ask about directly, and you're using it right now."
I could have lied again. I'd gotten good at it over the last two months, better than I liked admitting to myself.
But Katya had shown up at ten o'clock without a single real answer, coat over pajama pants, because I'd asked her to, and she deserved better than another careful half truth in a hallway that smelled like toner and floor wax.
"I'm looking for something that ties Niko to a company called Northgate," I said. "I can't tell you everything yet. I need you to trust me that it matters, and I need you to keep your voice down while we're up here, because I don't actually know who else might still be on this floor."
Her face did something complicated, surprise folding fast into resolve. "Okay. Lead the way. I'm excellent at looking like I belong places I don't."
The case files lived in a records room three doors down, shelving that ran floor to ceiling in gray metal cabinets labeled by year, and I found the drawer I wanted faster than I expected to, muscle memory from three years of exactly this kind of work taking over before my nerves could slow me down.
Niko's name filled an entire cabinet on his own, fifteen years of expense reports and closed case summaries and the small administrative debris of a man who had made himself indispensable one signed form at a time.
"What am I even looking for?" Katya whispered, standing watch at the doorway with her arms crossed like a woman guarding a door in a movie she'd only half rehearsed.
"I need anything that mentions a vendor code starting with VX, anything with Northgate in the header, or anything that doesn't match the rest of the file around it."
I handed her the small flashlight I'd brought in my coat pocket, meant more to light the doorway than to read by, since I didn't want the overhead lights drawing attention from a floor below.
She took it like I'd handed her a prop in a play she was still learning the blocking for, turning it over once before clipping it to her waistband.
"You want me to read finance documents at night, in a records room. This is not the caper I signed up for when you said storage boxes."
"You don't have to read anything. Just watch the hall."
"I'm a phenomenal hall-watcher. I have extensive professional experience." She peered out into the corridor, then back at me. "This is very stressful, by the way. I want that on the record. I would like hazard pay in the form of brunch."
I worked through the drawer methodically, oldest files first, building a timeline instead of chasing whatever looked most interesting at a glance, the same patient discipline I'd trained into myself for anything that actually mattered.
Most of what I found was exactly what it should have been, routine paperwork from a busy fixer's fifteen years of quietly running interference for my father.
It was the kind of file that would put anyone else to sleep, and normally it would have put me to sleep too, except I was reading every line now like it might be the one that mattered.
I found it forty minutes in, a single sheet buried between two ordinary expense reports, a wire authorization form a decade old, the ink faded to a soft brown that told me exactly how long it had been sitting untouched in this drawer.
Niko's initials sat in the corner where a senior partner's approval was required, the same tight, economical hand I'd seen on a hundred documents growing up, birthday cards and permission slips and the margin notes on contracts he'd walked me through before I was old enough to understand them.
The vendor line read a name I didn't recognize, something generic and bland, the kind of shell name built specifically to be forgotten.
I cross-referenced it against the vendor list I'd memorized from Northgate's paperwork without thinking twice, and there it was, buried three characters into a routing number that matched exactly.
I checked it twice more to be certain, tracing the digits with my fingertip exactly as my father had taught me to check figures before I trusted them, because a single match could be coincidence and a decade-old memory could be wrong in ways a person didn't notice until it cost them something.
It wasn't coincidence. The routing number lined up down to the last digit, and the amount authorized, though small enough to slip past anyone not already looking for it, sat exactly inside the threshold I'd first learned to recognize back at the fire claim, the same careful, practiced restraint of a man who understood precisely how much a number could carry before it started asking questions of its own.
My hands went cold, and it had nothing to do with the room's temperature.
"Katya." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I need a minute of quiet. I found something."
"Is that it?" Her voice dropped to match mine. "Get the picture."
"Getting it." I pulled out my phone, angled it over the document, and my hands were shaking just enough that I had to take the picture twice to get it clean.
That was the exact moment Katya, God love her, chose to lean into the hallway and say, at a volume calibrated for a much emptier building, "Wait, is this the Northgate thing you mentioned in the car? The company from the break-in?"
I froze. A figure moved at the far end of the corridor, a man in gray coveralls pushing a cleaning cart, close enough that there was no version of the last ten seconds he hadn't heard at least part of.
He paused. His eyes found us first, then dropped, very specifically, to the cabinet drawer still standing open behind me, my hand still resting on the edge of it.
Three seconds passed that felt considerably longer, my pulse loud enough in my own ears that I half expected him to hear that too.
"Evening," he said, and kept pushing the cart, unhurried, not stopping, but not looking away either until he'd rounded the corner toward the elevator bank.
The cart's wheel squeaked once, faded, and then the hallway was ours again, except it didn't feel like ours anymore.
It felt borrowed, the way a room feels different the instant you learn someone else has a key to it.
Katya's face had gone the particular shade of pale that meant she understood exactly what she'd just done. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't think anyone was down here. I thought we were alone. I would never have said it that loud if I'd known someone could actually hear every word."
"It's fine." It wasn't fine. My heart was doing something violent and fast against my ribs. "We need to go now, not panicked, just quickly."
"Who was that? Is he going to tell someone?"
"I don't know him. I don't know whose floor he cleans.
" That was the part that scared me most, walking back toward the elevator with Katya's hand gripping my sleeve the way it used to when we were nine and convinced something was following us home from school.
If he worked the legal floors regularly, he'd have seen Niko's name on that cabinet a hundred times.
If he mentioned tonight to the wrong person in passing, an offhand comment about the boss's daughter poking through old files at ten at night, it could reach exactly the one man I most needed not to know I was looking.
We rode down in silence, Katya's hand still tight around my arm, both of us watching the floor numbers fall instead of climb.
I photographed the wire authorization one more time in the elevator, just to be certain the image had actually saved, and slid the phone back into my coat like it was something that could still be taken from me if I held it wrong.
The lobby was empty except for the night guard reading a paperback behind the desk, who nodded us out without looking up, and the cold hit both of us the second the revolving door spat us onto the sidewalk. Katya exhaled like she'd been holding her breath since the records room.
"I need you to tell me you're okay," she said. "I mean actually okay, not the kind of okay you say just to make other people stop asking."
"I will. Soon. I promise." I meant it, mostly, true in spirit if not entirely in substance, which was how most things I told her lately came out. "Go home. Text me when you're inside."
She hugged me hard, quick, the particular fierce hug she gave when words had run out, and headed toward her car parked at the far end of the lot.
I stood there a moment longer than I needed to, catching my breath in air that tasted like exhaust and cold concrete, and looked up out of habit at the tower behind me, forty stories of dark glass with a handful of lit windows scattered through it like the building was breathing on its own schedule.
One of them, two floors below the records floor I'd just left, flicked on while I watched.
I knew that window. I'd been in the office behind it a hundred times as a child, waiting for my father to finish a meeting, coloring on the good stationery while Niko let me sit in his chair and pretended I was running the company myself.
Eleven o'clock at night, on a floor that should have been as empty as the one I'd just fled, that light had no reason to be on unless someone had a reason to be standing under it.
I scanned the windows on either side of it, an old habit from childhood I'd never quite outgrown, matching lit floors to the people who occupied them.
Nothing above it, nothing on the floor I'd just left, nothing anywhere else in that entire glass face except his window, glowing alone against a building otherwise gone dark.
A man with nothing to hide would have been home in his own kitchen at this hour, not standing in an empty office two floors beneath a drawer he'd spent fifteen years building specifically to bury.
I didn't move for a long moment, the cold forgotten, my whole body gone very still in the middle of a parking lot where I understood, with a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, that he might already know exactly who'd been looking.
The photograph was still on my phone, safe, saved, real.
It didn't feel like enough anymore. It felt like the first thing I'd need to protect.