The question caught me off guard.“What?”
“You’ve spent the last month being angry.Being certain.Being absolutely sure that he was the enemy.”Sophie tilted her head, studying me with the same careful attention she gave difficult guests.“Maybe you don’t have to know what it means yet.Maybe you just have to stay long enough to figure it out.”
It sounded reasonable.It sounded like good advice from a woman who had seen me through worse crises than this one.
So why did it feel like standing at the edge of a cliff, trying to decide whether the water below was deep enough to catch me?
Sophie left eventually, summoned away by a crisis at the spa that I should have been handling myself.I made the usual promises to finish the calendar and get some rest, knowing I would keep none of them.My mind was stuck on the man I had left this morning, his mother’s unfinished wolf still watching over him from the nightstand.
To distract myself, I pulled up the security access logs.The system was one of the first things I had modernized after taking over operations, back when proving myself felt like the only thing that mattered.
The logs scrolled across my screen in neat columns.Employee badge swipes, keycard access times, entry and exit stamps for every door in the building.I was looking for patterns.Anything that might connect to the stalker who had killed Stephanie, who had left dead animals in our storage rooms, who had somehow known my schedule well enough to escalate every time I started to feel safe.
An hour in, my eyes burning from the screen glare, I found something.
The loading dock access records showed a keycard entry at 2:47 AM three nights before Stephanie died.A maintenance staff credential.Normal enough, except that when I cross-referenced the employee schedule, no maintenance shifts were logged for that night.The building had been empty except for security.
I pulled up the camera footage for that timestamp.The loading dock feed showed nothing.Just empty concrete and the yellow glow of the security lights.No movement.No delivery trucks.No maintenance worker.
But the keycard had registered an entry.Someone had swiped in and done nothing that the cameras could see.
I scrolled back through earlier weeks.Found two more anomalies.Same pattern.Keycard swipes during empty hours, camera feeds showing nothing unusual.All maintenance credentials.All logged to a single employee ID.
Gerald Finch.Maintenance supervisor.
My stomach dropped.Gerald was in his sixties now, gray peppering his sable beard, but I remembered him as the guy who fixed the sound system at my tenth birthday party and let me hand him tools like I was helping.He had been here longer than I had been alive.
I saved screenshots of the log entries and checked the staff schedule.Gerald was on shift on Friday morning.
This was my hotel.My staff.Before I pointed anyone’s suspicions at a man who had known me since childhood, I needed to hear his side of the story.
The afternoon bled into evening.The hotel quieted around me as the day shift gave way to night.I should have gone upstairs to my old room, or back to the manor, or anywhere that wasn’t this office with its stale coffee and half-finished paperwork.
I stayed anyway.Avoiding both homes because I wasn’t sure which one felt more dangerous.
Around nine, I finally gave up on the spreadsheet.I meant to go upstairs to my room, get some sleep, face the confusion with fresh eyes tomorrow.
Instead, I texted Parsons.
He pulled up to the hotel entrance fifteen minutes later, the black SUV as familiar as my own reflection by now.Raphael’s driver, Raphael’s security, Raphael’s way of keeping me safe without being asked.I had stopped arguing about it weeks ago.
I slid into the back seat without a word, and Parsons drove toward the manor on the hill.The route had become automatic.
The gates opened as we approached.Lights glowed warm in the ground-floor windows.He was still awake.
Parsons pulled up to the front entrance and I sat for a moment, hand on the door, trying to understand what I was doing here.The contract said my evenings belonged to him, but that wasn’t why I had texted Parsons.That wasn’t why my hand was already reaching for the door.
I got out anyway.Because I couldn’t seem to stop myself.Because his scent was starting to feel like home, and that scared me more than anything else.
The front door was unlocked.I let myself in, following the soft glow of lamplight toward his study.
He was on the leather couch, papers spread across the coffee table, a cup of coffee gone cold at his elbow.Investigation notes, probably.He had been chasing leads all week, trying to find who had killed Stephanie, who had been terrorizing the hotel.Looking in all the wrong places, if the lack of results was any indication.
He looked up when I appeared in the doorway.His expression shifted through surprise into warmth, into quiet hope he didn’t try to hide.
He didn’t ask why I was here.Just moved the papers aside to make room, creating space for me without demanding explanations.
I crossed the room and sat on the opposite end of the couch.Close enough to feel his presence, far enough to maintain the illusion of distance.As if distance meant anything anymore.