Chapter 6 The Bet Pool Gets Louder

POV: Wren

Three hundred and seventeen replies by seven in the morning.

My roommate Priya was still asleep behind her closed door and the apartment was quiet and I was sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold beside me, scrolling.

Theory one was easy to dismiss. Callum Kane finally settling down, people writing it like they'd won something. Those replies I moved through fast.

Theory two was slower going.

What's a girl like that doing with him.

She's not even in his circle. Like at all.

Someone's getting something out of this and it's not him lol.

Look up her byline. She writes for the paper. Draw your own conclusions.

I put my phone face down on the table.

Drew their own conclusions. Right. Because the only reason a girl from nowhere with a partial scholarship and a press badge would get close to Callum Voss was obviously not something clean. I picked the phone back up and kept reading because stopping felt like losing.

By noon I had a corrections piece half finished, two sources confirmed for a separate story, and forty-one browser tabs open that I was pretending were all research. Callum texted at two fifteen.

Forum's loud today. You good?

I typed: Fine.

Sent it before I thought about the word.

His reply came in under a minute.

You have a very specific way of saying fine.

I stared at that. Then I put the phone in my desk drawer and closed it and worked for another hour without checking it.

He called at four.

I let it ring twice before I picked up. "I said I was fine."

"You closed the drawer," he said.

"How do you know I closed the drawer."

"Because you stopped responding mid-afternoon and you don't just put your phone down. You put it somewhere with a barrier."

The kitchen. That's where I was now. I had moved from the desk to the kitchen.

"The thread is loud," I said. "It'll die down."

"Which theory bothers you more."

"Neither."

"Wren."

"Theory two," I said. "Obviously theory two."

He was quiet for a second. 

"They don't know you," he said.

"I know that."

"So their version of you is just something they made up."

"I know that too." I pulled the phone slightly away from my ear and then back. "Knowing it doesn't make it quieter."

"The M.V. account posted again," I said.

"I saw."

"Same account. New screenshot. This one's from an angle that wasn't in the dining hall. Someone else was there with a camera."

"I know," he said. "I'm working on it."

"Working on it how."

"Let me handle that part."

"That's not how this works," I said. "We agreed on access. That includes whatever you're doing about the people watching us."

A beat. "Fair. I'll tell you tomorrow. In person."

I said fine again, caught myself, and said: "Okay."

We hung up.

I stood in the kitchen for a minute. Then I grabbed my bag and my jacket and went back to the paper building.

The office was empty when I got there. Good. I liked it empty. I sat at my desk and opened the corrections piece and worked through two paragraphs before I heard it.

A sound at the door.

Not a knock. Not footsteps. I was out of my chair before I thought about it. Three steps to the door, pulled it open.

The hallway was empty in both directions.

I looked down.

White envelope. No name on the front. 

I picked it up with two fingers at the corner.

Inside was a single folded piece of paper. Plain white. No letterhead.

Six words in the centre of the page, printed, not handwritten.

You do not know what you just walked into.

I read it twice.

Then I took out my phone and photographed both sides of the envelope, the note itself, the floor where it had been, and the empty hallway in both directions. 

Then I sat back at my desk and looked at the note on the surface in front of me and thought about the M.V. account and the second camera angle and Callum saying let me handle that part and the forum thread with three hundred and seventeen replies and theory two.

Someone had come to this building and that was a warning. 

My phone lit up on the desk. A forum notification. New reply on the bet pool thread, fresh account, no history.

I opened it.

The reply was a photo.

Me. Taken through the paper office window. Tonight. At my desk. Reading the note.