Chapter 4 #4
I plant my feet and drive backward.
He hits the wall in a rough, stumbling collision—no clean movie crash, just enough impact to steal his air and buy me seconds. I take them. I back up fast, hands up, spine to something solid, eyes straining for shape in the dark.
The darkness is no longer neutral—it’s a weapon. He can’t read my hands.
He hesitates. I can hear him deciding, recalculating the cost of finishing this. It has changed.
He bolts—not at me, past me—toward the emergency exit at the far end of the corridor. The push-bar snaps. The door bangs open. Cold night air rushes in, and his footsteps slap across the back lot, fast and fading, until there’s only the hum of the building and my own breathing.
I don’t move for a long moment.
My hands shake so hard my fingers look blurred. I let them. Mack taught me that too: let the body do what it needs to do afterward—just not during.
I flip on the corridor light.
Blood beads along my chin where it struck the wall, warm and slow, as if my body is still catching up to what just happened.
My shoulder throbs with a deep, deliberate ache—the kind that warns something was twisted the wrong way and won’t forgive me later.
I take inventory by instinct: head clear, ribs intact, no dizziness.
I’ve carried worse injuries home and taught myself how not to feel them.
I go straight to my office.
The desk drawer is open.
It shouldn’t be. I always close it. Always.
That rule lives deeper than habit. Inside, the files have been handled—but not carelessly.
Not torn through. This was methodical. Deliberate.
Folders lifted and returned with a mimicry of caution, like someone studying my routines without ever quite understanding them.
I stare at the drawer the way you stare at a familiar room after something has shifted—nothing overtly changed, yet everything is suddenly wrong.
Nothing is missing. Program files. Vendor contracts. Grant documentation. Paper that means nothing to someone guessing—and everything to someone who knows exactly what to look for.
This wasn’t a robbery.
It was reconnaissance.
A search.
The vendor check is exactly where I left it, untouched on top of the inbox—easy money for anyone who wanted money.
Not money. Information.
I photograph the drawer, then call the police. The back door is still open. Night air snakes down the corridor, cold and alive. I don’t close it yet. Evidence has a purpose.
Mack would approve.
An officer arrives, takes the report, and photographs the scene. He’s professional, careful. And we both understand the reality of this: no forced entry, no theft, no camera pointed at that corridor. A file will be created. A box will be checked. This won’t rise to the top of anyone’s stack.
They clear the building before they go, checking closets and corners like the dark could still hide him. I walk them out, thanking them until my voice sounds steadier than I feel. When the side door locks behind them, the quiet floods back in.
I call Luke.
He answers before the second ring—meaning he found my note, and the waiting already started. “I’m okay,” I say before he can speak. “But someone was here. I need you to come.”
The silence on the line lasts exactly as long as it takes him to get to his feet.
“On my way,” he says.
I slide down to the floor with my back against the desk—not because I can’t stand, not because anything is broken, but because my body has finished during and moved on to after. I don’t stop it. I let it.
The office settles into a silence that feels wrong, as if the walls themselves are holding still to see what I’ll do now that there’s no one left to perform for.
No voices. No movement. No decisions pressing in from every direction.
Just the aftermath, finally catching up in a space that isn’t asking anything from me.
I stay there on the cold floor and let the stillness take over the job of holding me up. It isn’t fear—fear would be sharp, immediate, easy to name. This is slower. Heavier. The accumulated weight of staying ahead of the impact for so long that your body forgets what it feels like to stop bracing.
This is the cost of control when the situation keeps trying to peel it away, inch by inch, rather than in blows.
I draw in a measured breath and hold it just past comfort, steadying the rhythm before it can tip into something sloppy. Reactive. Something that would take more from me than I’m willing to give.
My eyes close—not to escape it, but to compress it. To let the surge rise and crest and fall without giving it enough room to turn into something louder. My heartbeat stumbles at first, my breathing shallow and uneven, but I don’t intervene. I wait until both settle into something usable again.
When I open my eyes, the moment has narrowed.
Not gone.
Contained.
I push myself up from the floor and straighten, already recalibrating, already orienting forward—because whatever comes next isn’t going to wait for readiness.
And I’m done waiting for it.