Seven days.

I woke up to pounding on my apartment door at six AM. Through the peephole I saw two uniformed officers and a woman in a blazer holding a badge. I opened the door.

'Clare Moreno?'

'Yes.'

'We need you to come with us for questioning regarding an incident involving Paige Carroll.'

I didn't ask what incident. I already knew.

I got dressed. Black pants. White shirt. I pulled my hair back. I took my phone and my keys and I followed them downstairs to the patrol car. One of the officers put his hand on my head when I got in, the way they do in movies. The gesture was almost gentle.

The precinct smelled like burnt coffee and industrial cleaner. They put me in an interview room with a metal table and two chairs. The woman in the blazer sat across from me. She had a folder.

'Ms. Carroll was found unconscious in her apartment last night,' she said. 'Pills. Her assistant called 911. She's stable now, but she's made some serious allegations.'

She opened the folder. She slid printouts across the table. Screenshots. Social media posts. Anonymous accounts with names like @ManhattanTruthTeller and @SocietyInsider. All of them saying the same thing in slightly different words: Clare Moreno had spent months systematically tormenting Paige Carroll. Isolating her. Spreading rumors. Psychological abuse. Cruelty.

I looked at the pages. I didn't touch them.

'Do you have a response?' the detective asked.

'No.'

'You're not denying it?'

'I'm not responding to it.'

She studied me. 'Ms. Moreno, if you have evidence that contradicts these claims—texts, emails, anything—now would be the time.'

I thought about the three years I had spent designing jewelry for Paige. Attending galas where she wore my work on Adrian's arm. Sitting through dinners where she touched his hand across the table. I thought about the emerald necklace I would never finish. I thought about Rome Stephens holding a cardboard box.

'I don't have anything to say,' I told her.

She closed the folder. 'We're going to hold you overnight while we investigate.'

'All right.'

They processed me. Took my phone. Took my keys. Took my belt. Put me in a cell with five other women.

I sat on the bench and I waited.

---

The first woman who recognized me did it around midnight.

She was young. Maybe twenty-five. She had been scrolling on a phone someone had smuggled in, and she looked up and she looked at me and I watched her face change.

'You're her,' she said.

I didn't answer.

'You're the one who tried to kill that girl. I saw it online.'

Two other women looked over.

'That's messed up,' one of them said. 'Rich bitch thinks she can do whatever she wants.'

I kept my eyes on the wall across from me. I made myself very still.

'She's not even saying anything,' the first woman said. 'Look at her. Thinks she's better than us.'

I felt the shift in the air before anyone moved. It's a thing you learn when you've spent years reading rooms for danger. The temperature drops. The space tightens.

The first blow came from my left. A fist to my ribs. I doubled over. Someone grabbed my hair and yanked my head back. I tried to cover my face with my arms. Another hit—my eye, sharp and precise. My lip split. I tasted copper.

I didn't fight back. Fighting back would make it worse. I curled inward and I protected my face and I let them land what they needed to land until a guard finally heard the noise and came running.

They pulled the women off me. Someone was yelling. I stayed on the floor. My ribs screamed when I breathed. My left eye was already swelling shut.

A guard crouched next to me. 'Can you stand?'

I nodded. I got to my feet. Everything hurt.

They moved me to a different cell. This one was empty. I sat on the bench and I leaned my head back against the concrete wall and I closed my good eye.

Seven days.

---

Adrian was waiting when they released me the next morning.

I saw him through the glass doors as I signed for my belongings. He was standing next to a black town car, hands in his pockets, looking at his phone. He glanced up when I came through the doors.

He went very still.

I walked toward him. My ribs hurt with every step. My eye was swollen half-shut. My lip was crusted with dried blood I hadn't been able to wash off completely.

He stared at me.

'Jesus Christ,' he said quietly.

I stopped in front of him. I waited.

'Get in the car,' he said.

I got in.

He slid in beside me. The driver pulled away from the curb. Adrian turned toward me. He looked at my face for a long time. I looked back at him with my one good eye.

'You should have been more careful,' he said finally, 'about how you treated her.'

I felt something inside me go completely quiet.

Not angry. Not hurt. Just... empty.

I turned my head and looked out the window. I didn't say a word for the entire drive home.

When we reached my apartment, I got out without waiting for him to speak. I went upstairs. I locked the door behind me.

I sat on my bed. I pulled out my phone. I logged into the account Adrian didn't know about—the one I had been building in secret for three years, a hundred dollars here, two hundred there, every payment I could hide.

I transferred everything to a new account. Different bank. Different name on the paperwork. Somewhere he would never find it.

Then I pulled out my sketchbook.

I wrote a number in the corner.

Seven.

I went to sleep.

I woke up to a hand over my mouth.

Not Adrian's hand. Wrong size. Wrong smell—something chemical, sharp. I tried to move. My arms wouldn't respond. Zip ties. My wrists were bound behind my back.

A van. I was in a van. The floor was ribbed metal. It was still dark outside. Through the rear windows I could see streetlights sliding past.

Across from me, Paige Carroll was crying.

She was zip-tied too. Her mascara was running. She kept saying 'please' over and over to the two men in the front seats. They didn't answer her. One of them was wearing a ski mask. The other had a baseball cap pulled low.

I didn't say anything. I tested the zip ties. Tight. Professional. I tested my legs. Not bound. That was something.

The van turned. Slowed. Stopped.

The rear doors opened.

We were at a construction site. Unfinished high-rise. Steel skeleton against the dawn sky. Maybe thirty stories. Maybe more. The scaffolding on the exterior looked temporary. Swaying slightly in the wind.

They pulled us out. Paige was sobbing now. I stayed silent. They walked us to a service elevator—the industrial kind, all cage wire and exposed mechanisms. We went up. The city dropped away below us.

Thirtieth floor. The elevator stopped. The doors opened onto raw concrete and open air. No walls yet. Just steel beams and scaffolding and a long drop to the street.

They fitted us with harnesses. The kind window washers use. They clipped us to separate cable lines suspended from overhead rigging. Twenty feet apart. Then they stepped back into the elevator.

'Someone will come,' one of them said.

The elevator descended.

Paige screamed.

I hung in my harness and I looked down. Thirty stories. The street was a gray line. Cars like toys. People like dots.

I looked at my harness. Standard industrial safety equipment. The cable was anchored to a beam above me. The scaffolding beneath us was temporary—metal pipes and wooden planks, the kind they remove as construction progresses. It was groaning. I could hear it. Metal stress. Weight distribution.

We were too heavy. The structure was shifting.

I looked over at Paige. She was thrashing in her harness, making it worse. Her cable was pulling at a different angle than mine. The beam they were both anchored to was bending.

'Stop moving,' I said.

She didn't hear me. Or she didn't care.

I went still. I made myself breathe slowly. I counted the structural points. I calculated load distribution. I gave us maybe twenty minutes before something gave.

Then I heard the helicopter.

---

It came from the east. Black. Unmarked. It hovered above the building, then landed on the roof one level up. I heard boots on concrete. Voices. Adrian's voice, sharp and controlled, giving orders.

A security team appeared at the edge of the floor. Four men in tactical gear. Adrian behind them.

He saw us.

He went very still.

One of the security team was talking into a radio. Another was examining the scaffolding, the cables, the anchor points. I watched him shake his head. He said something to Adrian I couldn't hear.

Adrian moved toward me.

He was twenty feet away. Then fifteen. He was looking at me. Just me. His face was unreadable.

I looked back at him.

For three years I had given him nothing. No reaction. No emotion. No proof that anything he did could touch me.

I gave him something now.

I held his gaze. I let him see me. I let him see that I was afraid, that I was human, that I had spent three years keeping him outside the walls and I was letting him in for one fractional second because I thought—I actually thought—

He pivoted.

His hands closed around Paige's harness.

He pulled her toward the security team. They grabbed her. They unclipped her cable. They pulled her onto solid concrete.

The scaffolding groaned.

The beam above me shifted. The cable attached to my harness went slack for half a second, then snapped taut again. I felt the jolt through my entire body.

I looked at Adrian.

He was looking back at me now. He was saying something. His mouth was moving. I couldn't hear him over the wind and the metal screaming and Paige sobbing into someone's shoulder.

The cable frayed.

I watched the fibers separate. One. Two. Three.

I had maybe five seconds.

I didn't scream. I didn't beg.

I looked at Adrian and I let him see exactly what he had done.

The cable snapped.

I fell.

Three stories. Not enough to kill me. Just enough to destroy me.

I hit the I-beam on my left side. I felt my ribs crack. Four of them. Separate sounds. Distinct. My leg shattered on impact. Femur. Tibia. I felt those too.

I was on my back on the beam. The sky was very blue. I could see Adrian's face above me at the edge of the floor. He was screaming something.

I understood.

I understood everything.

Then the world went black.