Page 2

I stand there holding a lamp I have never met, hands shaking, breathing like I just sprinted up four flights of stairs. It takes a solid ten seconds of staring at the cabinet, waiting for my pulse to drop out of my ears, before my brain finally reconnects to my mouth.

“Denise’s contract does not cover this,” I tell the lamp, my voice coming out thinner than I mean it to, setting it back down with hands that are still trembling slightly, adjusting it an inch to the left so it looks untouched. “I checked back when the scariest thing I found in a client’s house was a stuffed fox wearing sunglasses.”

I reach the fourth door and stop, one hand still on the frame, not stepping inside.

Rope hangs coiled on a hook by the entrance, thick, dark, wound in a tight loop as someone coils it the same way every single time. A bench sits low and wide in the center of the room, padded in black leather worn pale at the edges from use, definitely not built for sitting and having tea. Straps hang off both sides, buckled, waiting.

My eyes go up before I can stop them. Another hook, this one bolted straight into the ceiling beam, and my stomach drops the second I see it, a full-body flinch that has me gripping the doorframe tighter than I mean to.

I decide right then, permanently, not to look at it again.

My heart’s still going too fast when I lift the duster, more out of muscle memory than any real intention to clean anything in there. I run it along the doorframe without stepping past the threshold, quick, sloppy, nothing like my actual work, and pull my hand back into the hallway like the air in that room might follow it out.

The last door in the hall won’t open. I try the handle twice, gently, and it doesn’t give either time. I press my ear to the wood for one embarrassing second and hear nothing on the other side. Locked from somewhere I can’t reach.

The bathroom has a shower with four showerheads angled in different directions. I turn the wrong knob while trying to find the light switch, and one of them blasts on and soaks my sleeve to the elbow before I get it shut off.

“Four shower heads,” I say, wringing out my sleeve. “Because apparently one stream of water at a time is for peasants.”

By the time I pack up my caddy in the entryway, I’ve built myself a whole story. Consultant. Security consultant. The kind of guy who needs cameras and a gun cabinet for work reasons, nothing more. I like this story. I’m sticking with it.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket. A story notification. I pull it up out of habit more than interest, some girl I went to high school with posting a smoothie bowl arranged like a flower, and I tap the little heart because that’s the whole extent of what we owe each other these days.

I almost post my own story right there, a picture of the ceiling hook with some caption I haven’t figured out yet, and then I think better of it and lock my phone instead.

Nobody needs to see that. Nobody’s going to ask, either.

I zip my phone back into my pocket and start loading the caddy by the door, snapping the lid shut on my spray bottles, coiling the cord on the vacuum. My knees ache from the bathroom floor.

Four showerheads. Unhinged. I glance at the time on my phone, do the math on whether I can still catch the earlier bus, and I’m reaching for my jacket off the back of a chair when I hear it.

A key card beeps against the lock.

I freeze with one arm halfway into my sleeve, staring at the front door like it’s about to explain itself to me.

2

ARTEM

The elevator doors open on twelve, and the air is wrong before I’ve even stepped off.

Cleaning product. Citrus, something sharper underneath it. My building runs a cleaning contract on Tuesdays, not today, and even on Tuesdays nobody has a reason to be inside 12A. I stop in the hallway and listen.

Nothing. No footsteps, no voice, no hum of a vacuum that would explain the smell hanging this fresh in the air.

I draw before I open the door. Not because I expect a fight. Because I don’t know what I’m walking into.

My key card beeps against the reader, green light blinking once, and the door gives before the lock even fully disengages. It was already unlocked. That alone tells me something’s off, because nothing about my security lets a door sit unlocked by accident.

I push it open with two fingers and step inside low, gun up, and there she is. A woman by the front closet, one arm half into a jacket sleeve, staring at me like I’m the one who doesn’t belong here.

She’s not armed. She’s not hiding. There’s a cleaning caddy by her feet, spray bottles capped, a vacuum cord coiled neat around itself. None of it explains why she’s standing in my apartment.

“Don’t move,” I tell her, and my voice comes out flatter than I mean it to.

“I’m not…” Her hands come up slow, jacket sliding off her shoulder. “I was cleaning. My supervisor sent me to two units on this floor, said they were both part of the same contract. I don’t know if she mixed something up or if I misread the assignment, but I swear I didn’t touch anything, I just…”

“Who sent you?”