POV: Nova
I knocked on his door at four in the morning.
I did not feel good about it. I had spent an hour arguing with myself turn it over, do not turn it over, handle it yourself, you do not know who to trust in this building, you do not know him. The argument went in circles until I got tired of the circle and just got up.
If someone inside the compound had written that note, then either Zane already knew about it in which case seeing his face when I showed it to him would tell me everything or he did not know, and he needed to.
Either way I needed information more than I needed sleep.
His light was on. I could see it under the door.
I knocked twice.
"Come in."
He was at his desk with papers spread in front of him, the same focused stillness he had in the vehicle, like his default state was simply concentration. He looked up when I entered. His eyes went to my face first and then to my hand and the folded paper in it.
He did not say anything. Just waited.
I crossed the room and put the note on the desk in front of him.
He read it once. Then he read it again. His face did not change no alarm, no confusion, no dismissal. He just read it and then set it flat on the desk and looked at it the way you look at something you are about to take apart carefully.
I had expected him to tell me it was nothing. A prank. Someone testing the new arrival.
Instead he picked up his radio.
"Full sweep," he said into it. "Corridor seven, rooms twelve through eighteen. Now." He set it down. Looked at me. "Sit down."
"I am fine standing."
He looked at me for a second. Then he let it go, which I appreciated more than I would have admitted.
The sweep took twenty minutes. I stayed in his office while it happened, standing near the wall, watching him work through the papers on his desk with the radio in one hand and the note in his other sightline the whole time. He did not make conversation. I did not either. It was not uncomfortable. It was just two people waiting.
The radio crackled. Mira's voice.
"Corridor is clean. No one there. No sign of entry from the exterior." A pause. "The corridor camera has a three-minute gap at two forty-seven. Someone knew exactly where the blind spot was."
"Thank you," Zane said. He put the radio down.
The room was very quiet.
"Nobody in this building should know our camera blind spots except senior operatives," he said. Not to me specifically. To the room, or to himself.
"So it is someone senior," I said.
"Or someone who got that information from someone senior." He picked up the note again. His jaw was tight. Not angry contained. There was a difference. Angry was heat. This was cold, which was somehow more serious. "How long have you been awake?"
"Since I found it."
He looked at me properly then. That direct, steady look that I was starting to understand was just how he looked at things fully, without glancing away. "You were not scared," he said.
"I was," I said. "I just needed to know if you already knew about it before I decided to be scared in private."
Something shifted on his face. Not the almost-smile. Something quieter than that. Like recognition.
"I did not know," he said.
"I know," I said. "Your face when you read it was real."
He set the note down. "I am going to ask you to stay in the compound while we look into this. Not as a prisoner. As a "
"As someone you would rather keep where you can see them," I said.
"Yes."
I appreciated the honesty. I sat down.
"Who would do this?" I asked. "Who inside this building would want me gone?" I paused. "Or want me scared."
He was quiet.
"Those are different things," I said. "If they wanted me gone they would have just told me a way out. The note said I was not safe here and not safe near you. That is not just about moving me. That is about separating me from you specifically." I watched his face. "So who would want that?"
He did not answer.
I studied him the way I studied the cameras in the holding room looking for the useful details. The slight tension across his shoulders. The way he looked at the note instead of at me when I asked the question. The deliberate quality of his silence, like it was something he was choosing rather than something that was just happening.
The silence was the answer.
He knew who it was. Or he had a strong idea. And he was not telling me, which meant either he was protecting someone or he was protecting me from something he did not think I was ready to hear.
I did not push. Pushing right now would just make him go quieter. I filed it and waited.
Mira appeared in the doorway. She looked at me, then at Zane, then at the note on the desk. She came in and read it without being invited, which told me she did that regularly and he had long ago stopped reacting to it.
"The camera gap was professional," she said. "This was not a spontaneous decision. Someone planned for her arrival." She looked at me. "Which means someone knew you were coming before we brought you here."
"We did not decide to bring her until the raid," Zane said.
"Someone knew about the raid then." Mira's voice was flat and careful. "And they knew she would be there. And they wanted her gone before she settled in." She looked at him. He looked back at her. Something passed between them a whole conversation in three seconds that I was not part of.
I was tired of not being part of things.
"Tell me," I said.
Mira looked at me. Then at Zane. He was quiet for a moment. Then he gave her something not a nod, just a slight release of the tension in his shoulders, permission in body language.
Mira sat down across from me.
"Zane has a lot of enemies," she said. "Most of them are rivals, former targets, people whose operations he has dismantled. They hate him but they operate outside this compound. They do not have reach inside these walls."
"But?" I said.
"But there is one person who does." She paused. "Who always has. Because he helped build some of it, years ago, before things went wrong between them." Another pause. Deliberate. Like she was giving me a second to prepare.
"His brother," Mira said. "Calder Voss."
I looked at Zane.
He was looking at the note.
Not at me.
And in the set of his jaw and the careful way he was holding himself very still, I saw something I recognized.
Not because I had seen it on him before.
Because I had felt it myself, standing in my living room watching my father take that envelope.
The specific pain of being betrayed by someone who was supposed to be yours.
"His own brother," I said quietly.
Zane did not answer.
He did not need to.