I don’t.”
Then he walked to the office door and turned the lock open again, deliberately, where I could see him do it.
“And I shouldn’t have locked that either.”
The apology hit me strangely.
It did not erase what he had done.
But it reminded me that the man I had spent three years observing was capable of recognizing a boundary after crossing it.
“If you want to leave this room, you can,” he said.
“If you want to leave this company, you can.
I’m not keeping you here.”
My gaze went to the file.
“But if I walk out without understanding this, I’m walking out blind.”
“Yes.”
I hated that he was right.
“Show me everything.”
Dante sat across from me.
He opened the folder fully.
The photographs were organized by date.
My commute.
My sister’s school.
The coffee shop she liked.
The corner where she waited for a bus.
My apartment building.
Mixed between them were photographs taken by Dante’s security people after they had identified the black sedan.
One showed the man from the forbidden file speaking on a phone outside my building.
Another showed him watching the entrance to Moretti Holdings.
A third showed him parked near my sister’s school.
Dante turned to a page containing a short printed summary.
“Yesterday, he made contact with someone connected to the deal I’ve been protecting.
This morning, I received a message.”
My mouth went dry.
“About me?”
“About my assistant.”
He opened his laptop, clicked once, then turned the screen away before anything readable could face me.
“I won’t show you the original because it includes material you don’t need to carry in your head.
But the message was simple.
They wanted access to information only a handful of people could reach quickly.
You were one of them.”
“And my sister was leverage.”
The muscles in his jaw tightened.
“They never said they would hurt her.”
“They followed a seventeen-year-old girl for two weeks.
They didn’t need to say it.”
“No.
They didn’t.”
I stood and walked to the window.
Chicago stretched beneath us, all glass and steel and traffic, indifferent to the fact that my life had changed in the time it took to open a folder.
I thought about my sister.
She wanted college.
She complained about homework, borrowed my clothes without asking, and believed most adult problems could be solved by ordering food and refusing to discuss them until dessert.
She had no idea that strangers had been studying her route home because of where I worked.
“Is she safe right now?”
“Yes.”
I turned sharply.
“How can you know that?”
“Because the moment we confirmed she was being watched, I put people close enough to intervene if anyone approached her.
They were instructed not to contact her unless necessary.”
