By midnight the city is just reflections.
Headlights smear across the rain-streaked windows, skyscrapers glitter in the glass, and every surface in this law firm is polished enough that I can’t move without seeing myself distorted—too pale, too thin, a rumor in an oversized janitor’s polo.
I drag the mop down the hallway anyway, eyes on the floor. Cameras blink red above every door, but I’ve mapped their blind spots the way normal people memorize bus routes. Step, pivot, hug the wall. Don’t look up. Don’t exist.
It’s a good night: quiet, empty, the kind that lets me pretend I’m just another invisible person doing an invisible job. The partners have gone home hours ago. The junior associates finally gave up and fled with their laptops and dark-circled eyes. Even the paralegals stopped gossiping at eleven.
I’m alone. Safely, blessedly alone.
My keyring clinks softly against my leg. I like the weight of it. Keys are rules rendered in metal—this door but not that one; this floor but not the executive suite. Limits. Boundaries. A universe I can understand.
I’m humming under my breath, some meaningless melody, when the overhead lights stutter.
Just a flicker.
I freeze anyway, a deer in fluorescent beams. The hum of the HVAC falters, then steadies again. Down the hall, the EXIT sign glows a flat, watchful red.
“Don’t do this,” I whisper to the building. “Not tonight.”
Blackout protocols and faulty wiring are things I understand. Those don’t terrify me. What terrifies me is the other kind of change—the kind with hands and eyes and questions.
The lights hold.
I exhale and push the cart onward. Conference rooms, glass-walled and empty, yawn open to my left like pristine aquariums. Someone’s left a whiteboard smeared with half-erased strategy notes: CLIENT PERCEPTION, RISK, EXPOSURE. I swipe my rag over the fingerprints on the glass instead of reading more.
Exposure. The word itself makes my ribs feel too tight.
On the forty-second floor, the law firm’s senior partners have their offices. I’m not technically supposed to be up there alone. There’s a policy about dual staff for high-value spaces—liability, theft, the usual—but the supervisor trusts me, and the cameras never see me, and I keep my mouth shut.
The elevator doors slide open with a soft chime. The carpet on this floor is thicker, swallowing my footsteps. Oil paintings of dead men glare down from the paneled walls. The air smells like leather chairs, expensive cologne ground into fibers, and the faint metallic tang of printer toner.
I should do the central bullpen first. That’s the safest. But there’s a checklist and routines keep me upright, and the top of the list says: Executive offices. Start at the end of the hall, work backward.
The last door on the right belongs to Adrian Kade, one of the firm’s major partners. Criminal defense, high-end corporate. His name is gold on frosted glass, his world a vague memory from the life I burned.
Kade sometimes works late. Tonight his door is dark.
I slide the master key in.
It doesn’t turn.
My hand pauses on the cool metal. I check the tag on my key—EXEC MASTER, 40–45. The key that opens everything except the server room and the managing partner’s vault.
It should open this.
I try again. No give.
