He was gone when I woke up.
Not vanished — he'd left evidence. Two mugs rinsed and upside down on the drying rack, which told me he'd been awake long enough after I fell asleep to clean up, which meant he'd sat in my kitchen alone for a while, which meant something I wasn't going to examine before coffee.
My phone said 7:43 AM.
There was a text from him. Sent at 5:18.
Luca: *they're coming today. Stay on seven.*
I stared at it.
Me: *who's they*
No response. Which meant he was either asleep — unlikely — or already dealing with something that had both his hands.
I made coffee. Stood at my kitchen window and watched the city do its morning thing and thought about a woman named Mara who had grabbed my arm in a stairwell and told me things she shouldn't have known and was now gone behind a door that locked from the outside.
I thought about Luca's face when he said *I know* about the three people eight years ago. The specific weight of someone who had been carrying a thing so long they'd stopped noticing the shape of it.
I thought about him sitting at my kitchen table at two AM, typing, not talking, just — there. In the room. The particular quiet of it.
My print was still straight.
I drank my coffee.
Waited.
✦
They arrived at eleven.
I know because I heard the elevator. I wasn't in the hallway — I was at my desk, nursing notes open, attempting to be a student with a normal life — but the building had a sound when the main elevator ran, a low mechanical hum that traveled through the walls, and I'd gotten good at reading it.
This time it ran twice in quick succession. Then a third time. The pattern of multiple people arriving.
I stayed at my desk for four minutes.
Then I went to get more coffee. From the lobby machine. Obviously.
I took the stairs.
✦
There were three of them.
Standing in the lobby with Luca, who was in a dark jacket I hadn't seen before — not the hoodie, something more structured, like he'd dressed for this specifically. He was standing the way he stood when he was managing something: still, measured, the composure dialed up to its most polished setting.
The three of them were — not what I expected, which I realized meant I'd been building an expectation without knowing it.
Two men, one woman. The men were both somewhere in their fifties, the kind of unremarkable that felt deliberate — forgettable faces, neutral clothes, the practiced anonymity of people who moved through spaces without leaving impressions. The woman was younger, maybe early forties, sharp-featured, dark coat. She had the posture of someone who was always the most prepared person in any room and knew it.
They were looking at a tablet. Luca was talking, low and even.
He saw me the second I came through the stairwell door.
Something moved through his expression — quick, controlled, there and gone. Not alarm. More like recalculation. The split-second adjustment of someone who had not been expecting this variable right now but was already figuring out what to do with it.
I almost turned around.
The woman looked up from the tablet.
She looked at me the way people looked at things that needed to be assessed before they could be categorized — direct, unhurried, taking her time. It was not a comfortable look. It was the kind of look that made you aware of every decision you'd made in the last three weeks.
I went to the coffee machine.
Because I had come down for coffee and I was getting coffee and everything was normal.
I pressed the button. Waited.
Behind me, footsteps. Even, deliberate.
"You're on seven," the woman said.
Not a question. I was beginning to understand that people on the fourth floor — or connected to it — didn't ask questions they already knew the answers to.
I turned around. "704, yeah."
She was closer than I expected. Dark eyes, the kind of face that had been pretty once and was now something better — interesting, lived-in, the softness replaced by something more durable.
"How long have you been in the building?" she asked.
"Three weeks."
"And you're aware of the fourth floor."
I looked at her. Then at Luca, who was watching this exchange with the specific stillness of someone who had decided not to intervene yet and was waiting to see if he needed to.
"I'm aware of an elevator that occasionally stops on an unlisted floor," I said evenly. "And I'm aware that the building has some non-standard management arrangements."
The woman's expression didn't change. "That's a careful answer."
"I'm a careful person."
"Luca says you're a nursing student."
"Luca's correct."
"First year?"
"Second."
She looked at me for another moment. Then she looked at Luca. Something passed between them — the compressed communication of people who had worked together long enough to have a language that didn't need words.
Luca said, quietly: "She knows what she needs to know."
"That's not an answer to what I'm asking," the woman said. Still looking at him.
"I know." His voice was even. "She knows what she needs to know and she's handled it appropriately and she's been useful." A pause. The word that came next came out flat and final, the tone of someone closing a door on a conversation. "She's an asset."
The lobby was quiet.
I picked up my coffee.
The woman looked at me one more time. Then back at Luca. Then something in her posture shifted — not softening exactly, more like a decision being filed.
"Fine," she said. And walked back toward the two men.
I stood at the coffee machine.
Luca crossed the lobby. Stopped beside me. Not quite facing me — both of us angled toward the machine, toward the wall, toward anything except each other, the way people stood when they needed to say something they didn't want lip-read.
"I told you to stay on seven," he said. Low. Not angry. Something more complicated than angry.
"I needed coffee."
"You have a machine in your unit."
"It's temperamental."
A beat. "Aria."
"You said I was an asset," I said quietly.
He said nothing.
"You didn't hesitate," I said.
Still nothing. But he was very still beside me, and the stillness had a quality to it — the quality of a person choosing not to move because moving would mean something.
"Who are they?" I asked.
"The people I report to."
"Does the woman have a name?"
"Several, probably." The corner of his mouth moved. Barely. "She goes by Reyes here."
"And she was — what, assessing me?"
"Yes."
"And you called me an asset."
"Yes."
I looked at my coffee. "That could mean a lot of things."
"It means you're trusted," he said. "In this context. With these people. It means you're inside the circle instead of outside it." A pause. "It means if something happens they won't look at you as a liability."
"Something like what happened to Mara."
His jaw tightened. "Yes."
I thought about that. The circle. Inside instead of outside. Three weeks ago I'd been a nursing student with boxes and a mold-refugee history and zero idea that the building I'd picked off a desperate online search had a floor that didn't exist.
Now I was an asset. With a fob. In a lobby being assessed by a woman named Reyes while something behind a deadbolted door on the fourth floor stayed quiet in a way that felt louder every day.
"Did you sleep?" I asked.
A pause. "Some."
"Luca."
"I'm fine."
"That's my line."
The almost-smile made it slightly further than usual before the circumstances got it. "A few hours. On your couch."
I looked at him. "You slept on my couch."
"You fell asleep at the table. I wasn't going to wake you." He met my eyes briefly, then away. "I left before six."
I thought about that. Him in my apartment, on my couch, while I slept at the kitchen table over cold tea and nursing notes. The domesticity of it so quiet and accidental that neither of us had planned it.
"You could have used the bed," I said. "I would have taken the couch."
"I know." He didn't elaborate.
I didn't push it.
Across the lobby, Reyes and the two men were looking at the tablet again, talking in low voices. One of them glanced toward the elevator with an expression I recognized — the same expression I'd had the first night. The expression of someone who had just been told something about this building that they were still deciding whether to believe.
"What are they here for?" I asked.
"Mara." He exhaled slowly. "When a resident goes — unaccounted for — there's a protocol. They come, they assess, they decide next steps."
"What are the next steps usually?"
"Depends on the assessment."
"And if the assessment is that she went through the door."
He was quiet for a moment. "Then they decide whether the floor stays operational."
I looked at him. "They could shut it down."
"Yes."
"And the other residents—"
"Would be relocated. Quickly." His voice was controlled but underneath it something tight. "Whatever progress they've made toward being safe, toward rebuilding — it gets interrupted. Upended. Some of them can handle that. Some of them—" He stopped.
"Can't," I said.
"Can't."
I thought about the young woman with the chain on her door and the enormous careful eyes. About the man who'd been awake anyway and said Mara had been standing at the end of the hallway for a week.
"Then we have to make sure the assessment doesn't go that way," I said.
Luca looked at me. "We."
"Yes, we." I looked back at him steadily. "You said I was an asset. Use me. What does Reyes need to see?"
He studied me for a long moment. The considering look, except warmer now — not just evaluating, but something else underneath it. Something that had been building since the first night in the elevator and had been picking up weight ever since, quiet and incremental, and was now sitting right there on the surface where I could see it if I looked directly at it.
I looked directly at it.
He looked away first.
"She needs to see that the floor is stable," he said. "That this was an isolated incident and not a pattern. That the current residents are secure and the operation is intact."
"Can you make that case?"
"I can make part of it."
"Which part can't you make?"
A pause. "The door. She's going to want an update on the door. On what's behind it." He looked toward the elevator. "She always does. And I always tell her it's contained and manageable and she always decides to believe me because the alternative is—"
"Complicated."
"Expensive," he said. "Logistically, politically. Shutting down what's behind that door isn't simple. It would require things that people in Reyes's position don't want to require." He paused. "So everyone agrees it's contained. Even when it's less contained than it was."
"Is it less contained?"
He looked at me.
"The print," I said. "The text from the unknown number. The cold in my apartment." I held his gaze. "Me, Luca. Whatever it is, it's been paying attention to me since I moved in. That's not contained."
The lobby hummed.
Luca said nothing for a long moment.
"No," he said finally. "It's not."
"So what do we tell Reyes?"
"I tell Reyes what I always tell her." His voice was even. Decided. "That it's manageable. That I have it under control." A beat. "And then I figure out how to make that true."
"You've been doing that for six years."
"Yes."
"And it keeps getting less true."
He looked at me then — really looked, the full weight of it, no deflection, no management. Just Luca, tired and certain and carrying something that had been getting heavier for six years, looking at me like I was the first person in a long time who had seen the exact shape of it and hadn't looked away.
"Yes," he said.
The word landed quietly between us.
I opened my mouth.
"Luca." Reyes's voice, from across the lobby. Crisp. Carrying. "We need to go up."
He held my gaze for one more second.
Then he straightened. The jacket settled. The composure clicked back into place like a door closing — not all the way, not the way it used to, but enough.
"Stay on seven this time," he said. Low, just for me.
"I make no promises."
"Aria."
"I'll stay on seven," I said. "For now."
He looked at me. Something in his expression — right at the edge of the composure, right where it was thinnest — did something I didn't have a word for yet.
Then he turned and crossed the lobby toward Reyes and the two men and they all got into the elevator together and the doors closed and he was gone.
I stood at the coffee machine.
Holding my coffee.
Heart doing the thing it did. The complicated thing. Both reasons, same as always, except the ratio kept shifting and I was increasingly unable to tell which one was louder.
Asset.
Without hesitation. Flat and final. The tone of someone closing a door on a conversation.
I drank my coffee.
Went back to the stairs.
Got to the third floor landing — the same one where Mara had grabbed my arm, the same fluorescent buzz, the same door to the fourth floor stairwell access — and stopped.
The door was open.
Not much. An inch, maybe. Just enough to not be fully closed.
I stared at it.
It had a self-closing mechanism. I'd watched it swing shut behind Mara. It always closed.
I looked at the gap.
From somewhere on the other side — from the fourth floor, from the hallway, from the direction of a door that locked from the outside — something.
Not a sound, exactly.
More like the absence of sound in a specific shape. The silence that had a source.
Like something standing very still on the other side of a gap, waiting to see what I'd do.
I thought about Mara. About a woman who had stood at the end of the hallway for a week, knowing something she hadn't been told, and then walked toward it anyway.
I thought about curiosity is what it wants.
I thought about Luca in the elevator right now, above me, making the case to Reyes that everything was contained and manageable.
I reached out.
And pulled the stairwell door firmly, fully closed.
Listened to the latch catch.
Stood there for a second.
Then I went upstairs.
To seven. To my apartment. To my nursing notes and my temperamental coffee machine and my print that kept moving on its own and the cold corner that had become as familiar as furniture.
I sat at my desk.
Opened my notes.
Stared at them.
My phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
One message.
good girl
I stared at it.
Screenshotted it.
Sent it to Luca with no caption.
His response came forty seconds later, which meant he'd looked at his phone in the middle of whatever Reyes was saying, which meant—
Luca: don't respond to it
Me: I wasn't going to
Luca: I know. I just—
The three dots appeared and disappeared twice.
Then:
Luca: I'll explain tonight
Me: you say that a lot
Luca: I know
Me: do you actually explain things tonight or is 'tonight' a concept
A pause. Longer than usual.
Luca: tonight. I promise.
I looked at that for a long time.
Luca didn't promise things. In nine chapters of careful measured words and near-answers and almost-everything, I had never once heard him promise anything.
I put my phone down.
Picked it up.
Put it down.
Stared at my nursing notes.
Thought about the way he'd said asset— flat, final, not a discussion.
Thought about I'll explain tonight. I promise.*l
Thought about a door on the third floor landing that should have been closed and wasn't.
Thought about good girl from a number that shouldn't have mine.
My coffee went cold.
I didn't notice.