Chapter 5 Seven A.M.

I got to the twelfth floor at six fifty-five, because showing up late to a meeting about a threat against my own safety felt like exactly the kind of detail that could be used against me later, and I had learned, the hard way, to never give anyone a detail to use.

Kian was already at the window when I walked in, same as the first time, except this time there were two mugs of coffee on the table by the seating area instead of one, and something about that small, deliberate act of preparation — he thought about what I'd want before I got here — undid me more than I wanted to admit.

"You didn't sleep," he said, without turning around.

"Neither did you, apparently, if you were pulling personnel files at one in the morning."

That got him to face me. He looked, if anything, worse than I did — tie already loosened at an hour when most executives hadn't put one on yet, a tightness around his eyes that read less like exhaustion and more like a man holding something together through sheer force of will. "Sit," he said. "Tell me what happened."

I gave him the message verbatim. I watched his jaw work as I read it aloud — careful what you go digging for, some files are buried for a reason — and when I finished, he was quiet long enough that I started counting the seconds.

"I want the number," he said finally. "I want it traced, and I want to know if it originated from inside this building."

"I already tried. It's a burner. Whoever sent it knew enough not to make it traceable."

"Then whoever sent it isn't some low-level employee panicking about getting caught. That's someone who thought ahead." He said it clinically, the same tone I used when I described a joint injury, and I understood, watching him, that this was how he processed threat — not with visible fear, but with the same meticulous cataloguing I brought to a bad knee. "Show me the clearance forms you flagged."

I pulled up the file on my tablet and slid it across the table. He went through it methodically, cross-referencing dates against something on his own laptop, and I watched his expression change in real time — controlled at first, then, slowly, genuinely troubled, the mask slipping in a way I suspected very few people in this building ever got to witness.

"These three signatures," he said, turning the screen toward me, "belong to a therapist who left the company eight months ago. Officially, for 'personal reasons.'" His voice had gone very flat, the particular flatness of a man deciding not to feel something yet because feeling it wasn't useful. "I signed off on her severance package myself. I was told it was voluntary."

"You don't think it was."

"I think," he said slowly, "that I've spent three years being extremely good at running a company and apparently not good enough at noticing what was happening four floors below my own office." He closed the laptop with more force than the action required. "That's going to change."

"Kian." It was the first time I'd used his first name to his face, and I watched him notice it, something shifting behind his eyes. "Whoever sent that message knows I'm looking. If this goes further than a warning—"

"It won't." He said it with a certainty that should have been comforting and instead felt like a promise from a man who'd just admitted he hadn't seen the last problem coming either. Then, more quietly: "I'm not going to let anything happen to you over a set of files I should have caught myself."

"This isn't your responsibility to fix alone."

"No," he agreed. "It's ours, apparently. Which is a conclusion I did not expect to reach four days into knowing you."

There was something in the way he said it — dry, almost self-mocking, a crack of humor in a man I hadn't yet seen use humor as anything but a weapon in a boardroom — that caught me off guard enough to laugh, short and surprised, and for a moment the tension in the room loosened into something that felt dangerously close to ease.

"I need you to do something for me," he said, once the moment passed. "I want you to keep reporting directly to me, but I want it to look, on paper, like a standard escalation protocol. Nothing that flags you as the person digging into this. If someone inside medical is watching your file access, I don't want your name attached to what we're building."

"You're trying to protect me."

"I'm trying to be useful," he corrected, though we both heard the distinction fail to land the way he wanted it to. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

He didn't answer that, and the not-answering told me more than a response would have.

I left the twelfth floor eleven minutes later with a revised reporting structure, a growing case file, and the distinct, uneasy awareness that whatever line existed between my CEO is protecting an investigation and this man is starting to care what happens to me specifically had gotten considerably blurrier in the span of one coffee-fueled conversation. I was still trying to talk myself out of the second interpretation when Priya intercepted me at the elevator, her expression tight in a way that told me the morning wasn't done handing me things to worry about.

"Torres is asking for you," she said. "He's in treatment room three. Says it's urgent."

"His four-week bench starts today. What could possibly be urgent?"

Priya's mouth pressed into a thin line. "He says someone came by his apartment last night. Says he wants to tell you about it before he tells anyone else."

The floor seemed to tilt slightly under my feet, the same lurch I'd felt reading the anonymous text at one in the morning, and I was already moving toward the elevator before I fully processed why — because if someone had gone to Jake's apartment the same night I'd received my own warning, then whatever this was, it wasn't isolated to me anymore, and I had a very bad feeling I already knew whose name belonged at the center of it.