Chapter 41: Alone in the Dark

Catherine answered on the second ring.

“I know,” she said, before Damien could speak. “I got the same message twenty minutes ago. I’ve been trying to reach you since.”

“Who sent it,” Damien said.

“Angela Marsh.”

I stared at the phone. Angela Marsh, who I had told to go home from the midtown office. Who had sat behind Gregory’s desk with the look of someone who had been living inside the cost of a decision for longer than the decision had been worth. Who had said I’m sorry with the particular quality of someone who meant it completely and wasn’t certain it was enough. Who had apparently gone home, watched, waited, and picked up her phone.

“She’s been inside Gregory’s operation for two years,” Catherine said. “Not by choice initially. He found her through the diner connection, offered money, and she needed it. Then the money became a leash. By the time she understood the full shape of what she was inside, she was too deep to simply walk out.”

“Until today,” I said.

“Until you told her to go home with no conditions attached. She spent four hours understanding that someone had offered her a door with no strings and she hadn’t taken it. Now she was choosing to.”

“What does she know,” Damien said.

“Everything. She knows the shell companies, the board members, the timeline, and the specific mechanism Gregory intends to use tonight instead of December fifteenth.” A pause. “And she knows something we didn’t. Something that changes the shape of all of it.”

“Tell me,” Damien said.

“Gregory doesn’t have enough shares. Not yet. He’s short by a margin that is small but significant. December fifteenth was chosen because by then the final acquisition would have completed and he’d have sufficient shareholding to call the vote and win it.”

“He moved the date forward,” Damien said. “Which means he knows he doesn’t have enough.”

“He moved the date because someone tipped him about the folder. About my documents. About this afternoon at Eleanor’s brownstone.” She paused. “He knows we know. And he knows that if he waits three weeks, we’ll have dismantled everything he’s built.”

“So he’s moving tonight,” Damien said. “With incomplete shareholding. Which means his plan isn’t the vote.”

“If he can’t win the vote,” I said slowly, “then triggering it tonight is suicide. So what is the plan.”

I watched Damien assemble the pieces.

“Catherine’s documents,” he said. “If they reach regulatory authorities before Gregory completes the final acquisition, the shell companies become a liability. The board members get exposed. The entire structure collapses before it’s finished.” He looked at me. “He needs to destroy the originals. Tonight.”

“But Catherine has copies,” I said.

“Does he know that,” Damien said. “Catherine, does Gregory know about the copies.”

A pause.

“Angela says he believes the folder you have is the only complete set,” Catherine said quietly. “He doesn’t know I’ve been keeping digital copies in three separate locations for eight years.”

“He’s coming for the folder,” Damien said.

“Tonight. He has someone inside your building, Damien. On the security team. They’ll give him access.”

Damien and I looked at each other. The folder was on the kitchen counter downstairs, where we had left it when we came up to the studio.

I was already moving.

Damien caught my arm. “No.”

“You need to be on the phone,” I said. “Call your lawyers, the regulatory authority, start the filing process tonight with what we already have.

Originals filed tonight are better than digital copies filed tomorrow.” I held his gaze. “I’ll get the folder. You make the calls.”

He looked at me for one long second with those dark eyes that were doing several things simultaneously and had chosen to trust me over all of them.

“Four minutes,” he said.

“Four minutes,” I confirmed.

The apartment was dark. I moved through it by memory, navigating the pale rectangles of city light across the living room floor and into the kitchen. I reached for the counter.

My hand found nothing.

I turned on the kitchen light.

The counter was empty.

The folder was gone.

I understood with cold clarity that the someone inside this building had not been waiting for Gregory to arrive. They had already moved.

“It’s gone,” I said when Damien answered.

A silence that contained a very large number of things.

“Get out of the apartment,” he said, his voice entirely level in the way it went level when something significant was happening beneath it.“Come back to the studio. Now.”

I turned toward the door.

And the apartment went dark. Not gradually. Instantly. The kind of power cut that takes everything simultaneously, the kitchen light, the city glow through the windows, the small green standby lights on the appliances, all of it gone at once, leaving a darkness so complete my eyes had nothing to adjust to.

“He’s cut the building power,” Damien said. “The stairs, Mia. Not the elevator. Find the stairs.”

I knew the apartment. The door was left. The corridor was straight. The stairwell was thirty feet ahead on the right.

I moved with one hand on the wall, phone at my ear, counting doors by feel. One. Two. Three.

Then I heard it. Not from ahead. From behind me.

The soft controlled sound of someone moving through darkness with practiced ease. Someone who had expected the dark and was not inconvenienced by it. Someone who had been in the apartment, who had the folder, who was now between me and the elevator. They didn’t know I was in the corridor.

I pressed myself against the wall and held my breath.

The sound moved closer.

“Now,” Damien said.

I moved fast and quiet, my outstretched hand finding the stairwell door, pushing through it, letting it close behind me as gently as I could manage.

Silence.

Then from the other side of the door came the sound of someone stopping.

A pause.

I pressed against the wall and counted. One. Two. Three. Four.

The sound moved away, continuing down the corridor.

I breathed.

I climbed to the studio by faint emergency light, each landing a small relief. Damien was at the door before I reached it. His hands on my face, reading me the way he always did, finding what he was looking for.

“You’re alright,” he said.

“I’m alright.”

He held me for a moment, brief and tight, then stepped back.

“Catherine is filing the digital copies now with the regulatory authority. My lawyers are on with three separate agencies simultaneously.” He looked at me. “Whoever has the folder has the originals. But originals without the digital copies already filed are a liability, not an asset. By the time Gregory understands that, it’ll be too late.”

“And Gregory himself,” I said.

“Is in the building. Angela messaged Catherine six minutes ago. He came through the service entrance.”

I looked around the studio. The dark windows. The paintings. The two of us standing in emergency light with the folder in unknown hands and Gregory somewhere below.

“Damien,” I said slowly. “The person in the corridor, moving with the practiced ease of someone who knew the building layout, who knew the apartment should have been empty. They knew we were in the studio. Which means they’ve been inside this building long enough to know our patterns.”

“The security team contact,” he said.

“Or someone who didn’t need access through the security team,” I said. “Someone who already had it. Someone with a key.”

I watched the understanding arrive in his expression.

And then from the corridor came the sound of the elevator. Emergency power, enough apparently for it to function on a limited basis. Stopping at the fourth floor.

Damien moved me behind him in one smooth instinctive motion. I let him. This was not the moment for a conversation about that.

The studio door opened.

The person who walked in was not Gregory Rearden. Not his security contact. Not anyone whose name had appeared in Catherine’s folder.

Victoria Haines stood in the doorway with the folder in her hands, and her expression was not guilt or defiance or the composed mask of someone running an operation. It was the expression of a woman who had made a decision and arrived at the moment of delivering it and was less certain about the delivery than she had been about the decision.

Nobody spoke.

Then Victoria looked at me. Not at Damien. At me.

“I want out, Mia,” she said.

The studio was very quiet.

Somewhere below us, Gregory Rearden moved through the darkness with the patient certainty of a man who believed he had already won. He did not know yet that the person he had sent for the folder was standing on the fourth floor, looking at the woman he had never accounted for.

And choosing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​