The knocking stopped at 11:58.
I know because I was staring at my phone clock, tracking it, the way you tracked vitals when something was wrong and you needed data because data was the only thing that kept your hands from shaking. Eleven fifty-four when it started. Eleven fifty-eight when it stopped.
Four minutes.
It had stood outside my door for four minutes.
Then — nothing. The cold at the base of the door didn't retreat all at once. It thinned, gradually, the way cold did when the source moved away rather than disappeared. Like it had turned and walked back down the hallway.
Patient. Unhurried.
Like it had made its point.
I stayed against the wall for another ninety seconds before my legs decided that was enough of that and walked me to the kitchen counter, which I held onto with both hands and breathed against.
In. Out. Clinical. The way they taught you when a patient was crashing.
My phone said 11:59.
Me: *it left. I think. The cold is—*
The door burst open.
I made a sound that was not my most dignified moment.
Luca came through it — key out, both locks open, moving fast and scanning the apartment in one continuous motion before his eyes landed on me at the kitchen counter and something in him visibly, physically released.
He crossed the apartment in four steps.
Stopped in front of me.
Close. Very close. His hands came up — not touching, hovering at my arms, the gesture of someone who had reached for something and caught themselves at the last second.
"Are you okay," he said. Not a question. An assessment. His eyes moving over my face the way I'd seen doctors move over patients, looking for the thing that wasn't being said.
"I'm fine," I said.
"Aria—"
"I'm fine, Luca. I didn't open the door. I stayed against the wall. I tracked the time." I held his gaze. My voice was steady. My hands on the counter were steady. "I'm fine."
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then his hands dropped to my arms.
Actually dropped. Made contact. His palms against my forearms, warm and solid and real, and the specific warmth of it after four minutes of cold seeping under my door was enough that I had to work not to close my eyes.
"You're shaking," he said.
"Adrenaline," I said. "Normal physiological response to perceived threat. It'll pass."
"That's a very clinical way to say you're scared."
"I know. I prefer it."
His thumbs moved. Just slightly. The smallest possible motion against the inside of my forearms, there and gone, barely there at all. I don't think he knew he did it.
I absolutely noticed.
"What was on the fourth floor?" I asked.
He let go. Stepped back. One step, two — putting the distance back, putting the composure back, the sequence of a man who had just done something unguarded and was quietly walking it back.
"Nothing," he said. "Exactly like you said. The access trigger was a false read — something manipulated the sensor remotely." He moved to the door, checked both locks. Then stood looking at the base of it, at the floor where the cold had come through. "It cleared the floor to get me away from here."
"It planned that."
"Yes."
"Luca." I pushed off the counter. Stood straight. "It knocked like a person."
He turned.
"Three knocks. Even spacing. The exact pattern of someone politely knocking on a door." I looked at him. "It knows how we do things. It knows the signals we use. It knew your knock would make me feel safe and it — it tried a different one. It didn't use yours."
Something moved through his expression. "Why does that matter."
"Because it means it knows the difference. It knows yours specifically." I paused. "It's been watching us. Not just me. Both of us. It knows how we interact."
The apartment was quiet.
Luca looked at the door.
Then at the cold corner, which was fully empty now — whatever had been here had taken the cold with it when it left. The corner was room temperature for the first time since I'd moved in and somehow that was worse. Like a person whose fever broke not because they got better but because something changed.
"Come sit down," I said.
He sat. Not on the couch this time — at the kitchen table. The operational position, the one he'd taken at two AM. I understood it. He was putting himself back on professional footing. Doing the thing he knew how to do when everything else was uncertain.
I made tea.
He didn't argue.
✦
"Tell me about the first one," I said.
He looked up from his mug.
"The first incident. Eight years ago. Not the article version — what you actually know." I sat across from him. "You said you'd explain tonight. Explain."
He looked at me for a moment. Then he wrapped both hands around his mug and started talking.
"The building was purchased in 2013 by a holding company. Shell of a shell — took me two years to trace it back to anything real and what I found when I did wasn't much cleaner." He paused. "The fourth floor had already been in use by then. Quietly. The previous management had been running it for about eighteen months before the purchase. Safe house operation, same basic structure as now, but less careful. Less — vetted."
"Less vetted meaning they let in people they shouldn't have."
"One person specifically." His jaw tightened. "A man. Late thirties. Came through the network with a story that checked out on paper — witness situation, credible threat, legitimate need for disappearance. He was placed on the fourth floor." A pause. "He'd been there six weeks when the incidents started."
"What kind of incidents?"
"Cold patches first. Residents on the floor reporting temperature drops in specific areas — not drafts, not ventilation issues, localized cold that moved." He looked at his mug. "Then objects. Small things at first. Items not where residents had left them. Doors they'd closed found open. Then the sounds — the knocking, always three beats, always patient."
"And the people running it at the time — what did they think?"
"Old building. Psychological stress. The residents were already people in difficult situations — fear, hypervigilance, trauma responses. The management wrote it off as that." Something in his voice. "Until the first person went through the door."
"Who was it?"
"A woman. One of the residents. She'd been there two months. By the end she'd stopped sleeping, stopped eating, spent most of her time in the hallway." He paused. "The staff found her door open one morning. She was gone. No signs of struggle. The door at the end of the hallway was closed and deadbolted same as always."
"But she'd gone through it."
"They assumed. There was nowhere else she could have gone." He exhaled. "The second was a staff member — one of the people running the operation. He went in deliberately. Said he was going to get her back." He looked at the table. "He didn't come back either."
"And the third."
"The third was smarter. Figured out what was happening and ran — not through the door, out of the building entirely. Checked herself into a hotel across the city and called the police." He paused. "The police call is what generated the article. The investigation that followed was shut down inside three weeks by people with enough reach to shut it down."
"The same people Reyes works for."
"Adjacent to them. This has been managed at that level for eight years." He looked at me. "After the third incident they sealed the floor completely. New management. Eventually — me."
"Why you specifically?"
A pause. Longer than his usual pauses. "Because I asked to."
I looked at him. "You volunteered for this."
"I had reasons."
"What reasons?"
He held my gaze. "The woman who went through the door in year one. The first resident." He stopped. "I knew her."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"How," I said carefully.
"She was—" He stopped again. Something moving through his expression that I recognized now — the shape that old grief left when it had been living in someone long enough to become structural. "She was someone I was supposed to get out. Before she ended up on the fourth floor. I was already working adjacent to the network — not managing anything, just — peripheral. And she needed to disappear and I found her a place and the place was here and—"
He stopped.
I didn't fill the silence. Let him hold it.
"She's been behind that door for eight years," he said. "Because I put her here."
The sentence landed in the room and stayed there.
I looked at him. At the scar above his brow. At the hands around the mug. At the six years of careful alone that made sense now in a completely different way — not just the weight of managing the floor but the specific, personal, unrelenting weight of why.
"You took over the floor to be close to her," I said. "In case there was a way to get her back."
"Yes."
"And in six years—"
"Nothing." His voice was even. Controlled. The control of someone who had said this to himself so many times that the saying of it had worn smooth. "No way to open the door safely. No way to know if there's anything left to get back. No way to know if what's in there is still — her."
I thought about the shadow pacing behind the door. Patient. Unhurried. Six years of pacing.
I thought about *good girl* from an unknown number.
"Luca," I said carefully. "The texts. The way it communicates." I held his gaze. "Has it ever communicated with you?"
He was very still.
"Yes," he said.
"What does it say."
A long pause.
"It uses her voice," he said quietly. "Her patterns. The way she typed. The abbreviations she used, the cadence of her sentences." He looked at his hands. "I don't know if it's her or if it learned her and is using what it learned. I don't know if there's a difference anymore."
The kitchen hummed.
I thought about what Mara had said. *It's already taken things from him that he doesn't know are gone.*
What if the thing it had taken was his certainty. His ability to know whether the person behind that door was still a person.
What if that uncertainty was the thing keeping him here.
"She might still be in there," I said.
"She might be."
"You don't know."
"No."
"And you can't find out without opening the door."
"And opening the door—"
"Gets people killed." I looked at him. "Or taken. Or whatever it does." I paused. "Luca. How long are you going to do this?"
He looked at me.
"Six more years?" I said. "Twelve? Managing this floor, keeping it running, keeping the door closed, sending people through the network and making sure none of them stay long enough to—" I stopped. "How long?"
"As long as it takes."
"To what? To find a way in that doesn't—"
"To find a way to get her out." He said it flat. Final. The tone of something that had been decided so long ago it wasn't a decision anymore. "That's why I'm here. That's why I've been here. That's the whole thing."
I sat with that.
The whole thing.
Six years. A safe house operation built around a sealed door. Residents moved through, protected, given their lives back, while the one person he'd put here in the first place stayed behind a door he couldn't open.
"What was her name?" I asked.
He looked at me.
"Her real name," I said. "Not a floor name."
A pause.
"Elena," he said.
I nodded. Held it.
"Okay," I said.
He blinked. "Okay?"
"Okay, I understand. Okay, that's the whole picture." I looked at him steadily. "And okay — we're going to figure out how to get her back."
He stared at me. "Aria—"
"You've been doing this alone for six years. You just told me I'm an asset. You just spent ten minutes telling me things you've probably never said out loud to anyone." I held his gaze. "Use me. Actually use me. Not just another set of eyes on the hallway — actually. What do you know about how it operates, what it responds to, what it's afraid of? Because everything has something it's afraid of. Even things that shouldn't exist."
He looked at me for a long time.
The kitchen lamp hummed. The city outside. The building breathing around us.
"You're doing it again," he said finally.
"What?"
"The thing where you walk toward it instead of away."
"Yes," I said. "That's who I am. You knew that when you gave me the fob." I paused. "Did you give it to me because you needed someone to help you figure this out?"
A long pause.
"Partially," he said.
"What's the other part?"
He looked at me.
And this time he didn't look away first.
The kitchen was warm and the lamp was soft and he was sitting across from me with six years of careful alone visible on his face and the composure completely absent and I was looking at him and he was looking at me and the space between us was doing the thing it had been doing for weeks — pulling, quiet and insistent, the tension of two things that wanted to close a distance and kept finding reasons not to.
"Luca," I said quietly.
"Don't," he said. Just as quietly.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were going to."
"Maybe."
"Aria." His voice was low. Careful. The word carrying more weight than one name should reasonably carry. "If I—" He stopped. "There are reasons this is complicated."
"I know."
"The floor. Elena. The operation." He looked at me. "You being drawn to it specifically. I don't know if what you feel is—"
"Real?" I said.
He held my gaze. "Influenced," he said carefully. "I don't know how much of what's happened to you in the last three weeks has been you and how much has been — it. Working on you. Drawing you in."
The sentence landed.
I sat with it.
It was a real concern. A legitimate one. The thing that got into people who stayed too long, the thing that made them stop wanting to leave, the thing that had taken Mara and was apparently patient enough to rearrange my furniture and text my phone and stand outside my door for four minutes.
Was I here because of him or because of it.
Did I know the difference.
"That's a fair thing to wonder," I said.
"Yes."
"It doesn't have a clean answer right now."
"No."
"But," I said, "I've been wondering the same thing about you."
He blinked.
"How much of why you're still here is Elena," I said, "and how much is it. Keeping you close. Using her as the reason." I held his gaze. "You said it communicates in her patterns. Her voice. It knows exactly which frequency keeps you here."
Something in his expression cracked open.
Just for a second. Just enough.
The thing underneath the composure, the thing I'd been seeing pieces of for weeks — it was right there. Raw and tired and real and looking at me like I'd said the truest and most terrible thing anyone had said to him in six years.
"I know," he said. Barely above a whisper.
"And you stay anyway."
"Because what if she's still in there."
"I know," I said.
We looked at each other across the kitchen table.
Two people sitting in the specific complicated wreckage of a situation that had no clean lines. His reasons tangled up with the thing behind the door. My reasons potentially tangled up with the same thing. Neither of us able to fully trust the ground we were standing on.
And still.
And still.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said quietly. "Whatever the reason is. Whatever it's doing or not doing. I'm three doors down and I have your fob and I've already decided." I paused. "That's mine. That decision is mine."
He looked at me for a long time.
Then he reached across the table.
And put his hand over mine.
Not the accidental contact of a fob handoff. Not the hovering gesture at my arms. Deliberate. His hand over my hand, warm and still.
Neither of us said anything.
Neither of us moved.
The lamp hummed. The city hummed. The cold corner stayed empty for the first time since I'd moved in.
His thumb moved. Slow. Tracing the line of my knuckle once, barely there, barely anything.
My heart did something I was done pretending not to notice.
We sat like that for a long moment.
Then his phone buzzed on the table.
We both looked at it.
Reyes.
He closed his eyes for exactly one second. The breath of someone who had been somewhere they wanted to be and was being pulled out of it.
He picked up the phone.
Looked at the message.
"I have to go," he said. His voice was rougher than usual. Like he'd had to find it.
"I know."
He stood. So did I. And we were close again — the kitchen table between us but barely, both of us on our feet, the same foot of space as the night he'd said *safe* and meant something by it.
He looked at me.
His hand was still warm from mine.
"Lock both locks," he said.
"Always."
"I'll check the floor. Make sure it's—"
"I know." I looked at him steadily. "Go."
He went.
The door clicked shut.
I stood in my kitchen and pressed my hand flat on the table where his had been and breathed.
Slow. In. Out.
I thought about Elena. About a door that locked from the outside and a shadow that paced and a voice that had been learned well enough to use. I thought about six years and *as long as it takes* and the way his face had looked when I'd said the truest and most terrible thing.
I thought about his thumb on my knuckle. Barely anything.
I thought about *influenced* and whether I cared.
I thought: I don't care.
Then I thought: that might be the problem.
Then I thought: I still don't care.
I went to bed.
Left the lamp on.
And at 1:33 in the morning, half asleep, my phone buzzed.
Not unknown number.
Luca.
One message.
floor is clear. both residents secure. you should sleep.
I smiled at my phone in the dark.
Me: working on it. you should sleep too.
A pause.
Luca: working on it
Me: Luca
Luca: yeah
I looked at the ceiling. At the lamp. At the print on the wall, still straight, the cold corner still empty, the apartment quieter than it had been since I moved in.
Me: the hand thing
A long pause.
Luca: I know
Me: okay
Luca: okay
Me: goodnight
Luca: goodnight Aria
I put my phone down.
Closed my eyes.
Fell asleep faster than I had in weeks.
And somewhere below us, behind a door that locked from the outside, patient as ever and twice as quiet—
Nothing.
Waiting.
Learning.