I lasted twenty-two hours.
Which, honestly, was impressive. I'd fully convinced myself I wasn't going to do it. I'd had an entire internal monologue on the bus home from clinical about personal boundaries and rational decision-making and the very valid reasons why a normal person would not accept a key fob to an unregistered floor in their apartment building from a man who managed a secret safe house and gave away information like it was rationed.
Very compelling monologue. Really solid points throughout.
And then I was standing in front of unit 701 with my hand raised to knock and apparently that was just something that was happening.
I knocked before I could talk myself out of it.
Silence. Then footsteps — unhurried, even, like he'd been expecting this and had decided to take his time about it anyway. The door opened.
Luca was in a grey t-shirt.
Not a hoodie. A t-shirt. Like a normal person who existed in his own home with normal human arms and apparently a very unfair set of shoulders that the hoodie had been hiding this whole time and I was going to need a second.
I didn't get a second.
"Hour twenty-two," he said.
"I was busy."
"You were deciding."
"Same thing." I crossed my arms. "Are you going to let me in or are we doing this in the hallway?"
He stepped back.
✦
His apartment was clean in the way that felt deliberate — not sterile, but controlled. Like every object had been placed with intention and nothing existed in it that didn't serve a purpose. A dark couch. A low shelf of books that I desperately wanted to read the spines of. A kitchen that looked used, actually used, with a coffee maker that was significantly nicer than mine and a cutting board with knife marks that meant he actually cooked.
No art on the walls. But there were two monitors on the desk in the corner, one showing what looked like a building schematic, and beside them a whiteboard covered in names, dates, color-coded lines connecting them.
He turned it face-down before I'd taken three steps inside.
Smooth. Practiced. Like he'd done it a hundred times.
"Interesting whiteboard," I said.
"It's work."
"Mm." I looked around. "Nice place."
"It's functional."
"That's what people say when they don't want to admit they have taste." I nodded at the bookshelf. "You've got a first edition in there. Third from the left."
He looked at the shelf. Then at me. "You can tell from there?"
"The spine's a different shade. Slightly narrower. And you've got it separated from the others by about half an inch like you don't want it touching them." I shrugged. "Nursing school. We notice things."
Something moved through his expression — that thing again, the considering look, except this time it was warmer. Like I'd surprised him and he wasn't bothering to hide it.
"Sit down," he said.
"I'm okay standing."
"Aria."
"I'm okay standing, Luca."
The corner of his mouth moved. He pulled open a drawer in the kitchen and set something on the counter between us.
The fob.
Small, matte black, no markings. It looked like a car key without a car.
I looked at it. Didn't touch it yet.
"Rules first," he said.
"Obviously."
He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, and the t-shirt did things I was aggressively not thinking about. "Residents on the fourth floor are private. You don't ask their names, you don't ask why they're there, you don't engage beyond basic courtesy unless they come to you first."
"Understood."
"If you see something that concerns you — medically," he added, with a look that said he knew exactly what kind of concerned I was capable of being, "you come to me first. Not the building super, not emergency services, not anyone outside this building. Me."
"And if you're not available?"
"I'm always available."
I raised an eyebrow. "That sounds exhausting."
"It is." He said it simply, without self-pity, which somehow made it worse. "The elevator fob will get you access to the fourth floor and nothing else. The doors to the individual units are separately keyed. You don't have access to those."
"Okay."
"The hallway is shared space. You're welcome there."
"Except—" I looked at him carefully. "The door at the end."
His expression didn't change. "Except that one."
"What's behind it?"
"Storage."
"Luca."
"Old storage. From before the renovation. It's been sealed since then, structurally it's not—"
"Luca." I kept my voice even. "You just spent thirty seconds giving me very specific, very honest rules about a secret floor in our building. Don't start lying to me now."
The silence stretched between us. The monitors on his desk hummed quietly. Outside, the city did its indifferent city thing.
"It's complicated," he said finally.
"You say that a lot."
"Because a lot of things are."
I held his gaze. He held mine. Neither of us moved and the counter between us felt both very solid and somehow insufficient.
"Okay," I said. "I won't go near the door."
"Thank you."
"Yet," I added.
His jaw tightened — just barely. "Aria."
"I'm kidding." I wasn't entirely kidding. "Are those all the rules?"
He was quiet for a beat too long. "One more."
"Okay."
He looked at me directly, and there was something in it — something careful and deliberate and also something else underneath that, something he was keeping at a very specific distance. "This stays between us. What you know about this floor, about the residents, about any of it. It doesn't leave the building."
"I already told you I was good at keeping things quiet."
"I know you did."
"Then why is that a rule?"
"Because," he said, "the other rules are about the floor. That one's about you. About keeping you—" He stopped. Chose the next word with visible precision. "Safe."
The word landed softly and stayed there.
I didn't say anything for a moment. Neither did he. The kitchen counter between us felt like a very thin argument.
"Okay," I said quietly. "That one I'll actually follow."
He nodded once. Picked up the fob. And held it out.
I reached across and took it.
Our fingers didn't quite touch. Almost — the edge of his thumb against the side of my hand, a fraction of a second, the specific warmth of accidental contact. Neither of us mentioned it.
Neither of us moved immediately either.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me yet," he said. "You don't know what you're agreeing to."
"Do you?"
Something in his expression shifted — darker, quieter, the composure pulling slightly thin at the edges. For just a second he looked like someone carrying something very heavy who had gotten practiced enough at it that you only noticed if you were paying close attention.
I was paying close attention.
"Good night, Aria," he said.
✦
The fourth floor at night was different from the fourth floor at eleven PM on a Tuesday.
I don't know what made me use the fob on my way back instead of just taking the elevator up to seven. Curiosity, probably. The same professional instinct that made me count monitor beeps and notice first edition spines and register the half-second pause before no.
The doors opened. I stepped out.
The hallway was quiet. The lights did their flickering thing — slower tonight, almost rhythmic, like breathing. The navy carpet absorbed the sound of my footsteps. Three doors on the left, keypads dark. Somewhere behind one of them, someone was living a life that officially didn't exist.
I stood there for a moment and let the strangeness of it settle over me. This was real. This was a thing that existed and I was standing in the middle of it with a fob in my hand and a head full of rules and the ghost of accidental contact still registering on the side of my hand.
I started back toward the elevator.
And then I saw it.
The door at the end of the hallway.
Heavy wood, no keypad, just a deadbolt — the kind that locked from the outside, I could see that from here, the mechanism facing out. Like whatever was inside wasn't meant to open it from their side.
I stopped.
Under the door — a thin line of dark, the gap between wood and carpet.
And in that dark line.
Light.
Faint. Yellowish. The specific quality of a light that had been on for a very long time.
I stared at it.
It moved.
Not the light itself — the shadow within it. Something passing in front of a light source. Something on the other side shifting its weight. Moving slowly from one side of the door to the other, pausing, then moving back.
Like pacing.
Like something that had been pacing for a very long time and had gotten patient about it.
My fob hand had gone cold.
The shadow stopped.
Directly in front of the door.
I had the sudden, absolute, animal certainty that whatever was on the other side of that door knew I was standing here. Not heard me — there'd been no sound. Just knew. The way things know in the dark when you can't explain how.
The lights above me flickered once.
Went out.
Came back.
I was already at the elevator, fob pressed to the panel, not entirely sure when I'd started moving.
The doors opened. I stepped in. Hit 7. The doors closed.
I stood in the elevator and breathed.
In. Out. In. Clinical. Controlled. The way they taught you to breathe when a patient was crashing and you needed your hands to be steady.
It's storage, he'd said.
Old storage.
Structurally it's not—
He hadn't finished that sentence.
I looked down at the fob in my hand.
The elevator stopped at 7. Doors opened. My hallway. Normal carpet, normal lights, steady and unbothered and aggressively ordinary.
I walked to my apartment, unlocked the door, went inside.
Sat on the edge of my couch.
My heart was going at a rate my clinical instructor would have found concerning.
The thing was — and this was the part I couldn't separate out, couldn't place neatly on one side of a line or the other — I didn't know which part of the last hour was responsible for it.
The light under the door. The shadow moving. The cold certainty of being known by something that shouldn't know anything.
Or the fraction of a second of warmth at the edge of his thumb.
Or the way he'd said safe like it cost him something.
I lay back on the couch and stared at the ceiling.
My heart kept going.
Both reasons. Neither reason. Something tangled in the middle that I didn't have the clinical language for.
I closed my fingers around the fob.
Fell asleep holding it.