I almost let that line do something to me.
I keep my voice flat instead.
"Mr. Shaw. You surveil your employees?"
He arches one eyebrow. "HR file flags you as audio-sensitive."
"Sensitive enough to read minds?"
The air thins.
I expect a flinch. Or a question. Or for him to call the lab boys and have me carted off.
Instead, he reaches into the cabinet, pulls out a folded white dress shirt — his, monogrammed cuff visible: A.S. — and sets it on the couch beside me.
"You don't have to admit anything."
He turns his back to me.
"Change."
I hold the shirt and don't move.
His thoughts are level, almost careful.
Don't turn around.
She'll be scared.
But she'll look good in it.
I clench my jaw and change.
The shirt is enormous. The hem hits halfway down my thighs. Yes — that beat. The one in every paperback. I'm in it now.
I clear my throat. "Done."
Adrian turns. His eyes find me, hold for exactly one second, and slide off.
His thoughts don't slide off.
Done.
Worse than I thought.
My face heats up.
There's noise outside the door — heels clicking fast, men's voices murmuring, then Vivienne's, raised.
"I just heard a strange sound from in there. Adrian, are you all right? I'm getting concerned."
She has Sentier security with her. Two of them.
In the bigger guy's head:
If she actually walks in on something I will lose my pension. I have a kid in college.
Vivienne's head:
Open the door, get the photo, watch her get marched out as the slut who seduced him.
I'm already mouthing "back exit" when Adrian reaches behind himself and locks the door.
I grab his sleeve.
"Are you out of your mind?"
He looks down at my hand on his cuff.
His thought goes there first.
She touched me first.
Stay focused. Finish the job.
He unlocks the door.
He opens it himself.
Vivienne and her security walk straight in.
She opens her mouth.
She sees the gown in the trash. She sees the pinhole bead on the credenza.
Adrian holds out his phone to the bigger guard.
"Call NYPD."
Vivienne's voice cracks. "Adrian, what is this."
He looks at her like she's a comma in a contract.
"Ms. Locke-Caron entered an executive lounge with concealed surveillance equipment. That's a felony in New York."
"You're calling the police on me. Over her."
"Should I have called them over you?"
Tears jump into her eyes — the kind that are pure rage routed through tear ducts.
In her head, low and viperous:
Then we burn together.
NYPD is fast — a Hudson Yards address gets fast.
Just before they cuff her and walk her out, Vivienne lunges at me.
She doesn't touch me. She presses her mouth close to my ear and stage-whispers between mascara-smeared sobs — pitched only for me.
"Don't get smug, Megan."
"You think he's protecting you because he likes you?"
And underneath, the second sentence, which she doesn't say with her mouth:
She doesn't know that crash on the Saw Mill — that was Sentier too.
The blood in my arms goes cold.
Adrian sees my face go and reaches for my elbow.
I move out of reach.
His hand stops in midair.
For the first time, his thought stutters.
What did she just hear?
What did Vivienne say to her?
I look up at him.
"Mr. Shaw. I'd like to take some PTO."
He frowns. "It isn't safe right now."
"I'd like to take some PTO."
A second look. Then a small nod.
"I'll drive you home."
"I've got it."
I walk out.
The 47th-floor corridor is wall-to-wall guests and Sentier staff drinking out of plastic flutes.
Their mouths ask each other what just happened. Their heads have already published the gossip.
The little EA tried to climb in his bed and bombed.
Did Vivienne finally get cut loose?
That's his shirt under the jacket, right?
HR's going to NDA this by Monday.
If Locke pulls Shaw down, my year-end bonus is dead.
Twenty interior monologues stab into the same patch of skull at once. My fingers shake by the time I hit the elevator bank.
The doors open.
There's already a man inside.
Charcoal suit, gold-framed glasses, polite smile.
He sees me. Inclines his head.
"Ms. Locke. Wesley Pryce-Locke. Chief of Staff to Mr. Locke-Caron."
His mouth is courteous.
His head is sub-zero.
Finally, alone.
I take a step back.
Wesley puts one finger on the door-hold button.
"Charles would love five minutes upstairs. A cup of tea."
Two men in dark coats step in behind him from the corridor.
I'm pulling air in to scream when a voice cuts across the lobby behind me.
"She isn't drinking tea."
Adrian.
Wesley's smile holds. "Mr. Shaw. The chairman has expressed an interest."
Adrian crosses the marble in five strides and slots himself between me and the elevator.
"Tell Charles. People who want to see me make appointments."
Wesley's head sneers, openly.
Shaw still doesn't know the board's already drafting the no-confidence vote.
Adrian, mild as if discussing weather: "And tell him the supporting Form 8-K, I filed it with the SEC at 4 p.m. Anonymous tip line followed at five."
The smile finally breaks on Wesley's face.
Adrian takes me up to the executive floor.
Not because I want him to.
Because there's a Locke-Caron-plated SUV idling in the loading dock.
I sit on the edge of his desk chair. He sets a glass of water in front of me, room temperature.
"What did Vivienne say."
I stare at the rim of the glass. "She said the crash on the Saw Mill had something to do with Sentier."
He's quiet.
My stomach drops three floors.
"You already knew."
He doesn't deny it.
I'm on my feet. The water glass goes off the edge of the desk and shatters on the floor.
"So you hired me to keep an eye on me."
He looks at the broken glass. His voice is low.
"No."
His thoughts come up underneath, fast.
I wanted to keep you safe.
She isn't going to believe that.
Because I did lie. By omission. Every day for a year.
I laugh. It isn't a nice laugh.
"Mr. Shaw. Don't perform devotion at me from inside your skull."
His pupils contract.
It's the first time I've torn my own secret open in front of someone.
"You knew I could hear you. So you knew lying to me was pointless."
The door swings.
Sebastian Reyes — COO, fixer, Adrian's father's old man — walks in without knocking.
"Adrian. Emergency board session. Now. Charles is waiting."
He registers me. His face flickers a fraction.
His mouth: "Megan. Hello."
His head:
This little headache is in here. Where's the file her parents left? Where the hell is it.
I latch on.
"What file."
Sebastian's expression locks. "Excuse me?"
Adrian looks at me.
I don't break Sebastian's gaze. "What did my parents leave."
Sebastian's thoughts go suddenly, deliberately, loud-blank.
It isn't an absence of thought. It's a man choking off thought in real time.
I get it for the first time. A mind can be trained into silence the way a dog can be trained not to bark.
Adrian steps in front of me.
"Get out, Sebastian."
Sebastian smiles thinly. "You can't even protect yourself right now and you're protecting her?"
He drops a folder on the desk.
"Board resolution. You're suspended pending the investor inquiry."
Adrian's phone buzzes on the desk. The screen lights with a blocked-number text.
If you want her alive, hand over her parents' chip.
Chip.
A picture I haven't looked at in a decade lifts up clean in my head.
I'm sixteen. I'm on a hospital gurney. A surgeon is showing me a sliver of dark metal in a kidney dish, telling me, smiling, that this is just a fragment from the seatbelt mechanism — they had to fish it out of my collarbone, it must have been shoved in by the impact.
My aunt nodded along. Said car parts come apart in crashes like that.
I believed her for a decade.
Adrian is reading the text. His face goes a shade I haven't seen on him.
Sebastian sees it too.
A flicker, in his head:
The chip really is in her, then. We were right.
I put my hand to my collarbone.
Adrian's hand closes around my wrist before I get there.
"Don't touch it."
His palm is cold.
His thoughts are stretched bowstring-tight.
She'll hurt herself.
They embedded that thing in her so she'd survive the crash. Touching it now without shielding —
I look up at him.
"You know where it is."
He doesn't speak.
I yank my arm free.
"Adrian, how much have you been hiding from me."
Sebastian, behind us, finally laughs — a short, satisfied laugh.
"Megan. Why don't you ask him why your little party trick has never worked on him?"
My spine locks.
Sebastian, smug:
Tell her, Shaw. Tell her your father was the lead PI on the original program.
Adrian's eyes go arctic.
I hear my own voice, far away: "What program."
Sebastian holds up his palms. "Empath-Link. Cortical array, designed for inter-subject neural coupling. Your parents were the principal scientists. Sentier was the funder. Then the program slipped its leash. Then there was a crash. The data went up in flames, and you" — he gestures at me — "you walked out of it the only living test subject."
I take half a step back.
The world goes silent for one beat.
Then it floods.
The lobby barista is fuming about a no-show pickup.
The boardroom across the hallway is doing share-dilution math on a whiteboard.
The cabbie at 33rd is cursing the light.
A nurse three blocks away is crying in a stairwell.
Too loud.
I drop to my heels and clamp both hands over my ears.
Adrian crouches in front of me.
"Megan. Eyes on me."
I won't look.
His thought slides through the static, weighted, steady.
Listen to me.
Only me.
I won't let them touch you again.
I stare at him. Tears land on the hardwood between us.
"Why should I trust you."
His throat works.
"Because that crash on the Saw Mill — I was in the car too."