Chapter 1 - The Question Behind the Closed Door

Not into anger.

Into something closer to disbelief.

Gabriel stopped three feet from Paige and studied her as if the question had rearranged the room.

“Hurt you?”

Paige hated that her voice trembled. “You just told me the men calling me work with people you know. I’m standing in an office with no elevator buttons and a man outside the door who looks like he could fold a refrigerator in half. So, yes. I think it’s a reasonable question.”

For a second, Gabriel said nothing.

Then he crossed to his desk, set the blue folder down, and pushed a leather chair toward her with his foot.

“Sit.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“Fine.”

He opened a drawer and removed a thin gray file.

Paige’s name was written on the tab.

Her stomach tightened.

Gabriel laid the file on the desk but did not open it.

“I am not going to hurt you,” he said. “Neither is anyone who answers to me.”

“That distinction is doing a lot of work.”

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile.

“Kevin borrowed thirty thousand dollars from a lending operation run by a man named Paul Danner. Danner is not one of my employees. He is an associate who pays for access to certain freight contracts.”

Paige folded her arms. “That sounds incredibly legal.”

“It isn’t.”

The bluntness disarmed her more than denial would have.

Gabriel opened the file.

The first page was a photocopy of a loan agreement.

Paige saw Kevin’s signature near the bottom.

Beneath it was hers.

She stepped forward.

“That’s not my signature.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I had it examined yesterday.”

Paige stared at the page. The signature looked good at first glance. Too good. It had the long descending loop she used in her surname and the slight backward slant on the P.

Then she saw it.

A tiny break in the line through the middle of the W.

Her breathing changed.

“That came from our old lease.”

Gabriel’s eyes sharpened.

“What?”

“When Kevin and I renewed our apartment lease last year, the management company scanned our signatures. Their scanner was terrible. It left a white gap through mine exactly there.”

She pointed without touching the paper.

Gabriel looked at the signature again.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I still have the lease email.”

“Do not send it to anyone yet.”

Paige looked up. “Why?”

“Because the forged signature is not the only reason you’re here.”

Of course it wasn’t.

Nothing in that building ever seemed allowed to be simple.

Gabriel took out three shipping manifests.

They looked ordinary: container numbers, dock windows, destination codes, routing stamps.

Paige recognized the format. She had cleaned up dozens of them.

“These passed through your workstation over the last month,” he said.

“I format reports. I don’t approve shipments.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you showing me?”

“Because two of the containers listed here never reached their destinations.”

Paige glanced at the pages again.

“Stolen?”

“Redirected.”

“And you think I did it?”

“No.”

His answer came too quickly to be comforting.

Paige lifted her chin. “Then what do you think?”

Gabriel leaned one hip against the desk.

“I think someone wants me to believe you did.”

The office suddenly felt colder.

He pointed to a line near the bottom of the second page.

“Your employee login was used to alter the release window at 4:12 a.m. last Tuesday.”

“I was at the gym.”

“We confirmed that.”

Paige remembered the front desk, the smell of rubber mats, the old man who complained every morning that the treadmill televisions were too loud.

She had been nowhere near Moretti Logistics.

“My password—”

“Was changed that morning.”

“Yes, because IT required it.”

“And who helped you reset it?”

Paige opened her mouth.

Then closed it.

“Sylvia.”

Gabriel’s expression did not change.

Paige immediately shook her head. “No. She’s petty, she’s nosy, and she would sell my desk chair for a better parking space, but she wouldn’t steal cargo.”

“I didn’t say she did.”

“Then who?”

“That is what I am trying to determine.”

He slid the manifests toward her.

Paige did not pick them up.

“You have security people. Accountants. Lawyers. Men who apparently know when I get sleepy at two in the afternoon. Why do you need me?”

“Because whoever altered these expected the documents to survive inspection.”

“And?”

“They did.”

“That doesn’t answer me.”

Gabriel looked at the blue folder she had handed him downstairs.

“You corrected six formatting inconsistencies in those manifests without being asked.”

Paige blinked.

“You noticed that?”

“I notice what keeps my company running.”

Something about the answer landed differently from his earlier intimidation.

He tapped one page.

“You saw spacing errors nobody else did. You aligned fields that had been drifting for months. You fixed a font substitution our compliance department missed.”

Paige looked at him.

For eight months, Sylvia had treated her design degree like an amusing mistake that had somehow followed her into clerical work.

Gabriel Moretti had noticed kerning.

The absurdity nearly made her laugh.

Instead, she picked up the first manifest.

“What exactly do you want?”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“For what?”

“You review these and the originals. You tell me whether someone altered the files in a way my people missed.”

“And after forty-eight hours?”

“If you find nothing, you go back to your desk or you leave with severance. Your choice.”

“And the debt?”

Gabriel’s gaze hardened.

“The debt attached to your forged signature is not yours.”

Paige stared at him.

“That isn’t how Danner sees it.”

“It is how he will see it.”

“You can just decide that?”

“Yes.”

The quiet certainty in the word made her skin prickle.

She set the manifest down.

“I don’t want a favor.”

“It isn’t one.”

“It certainly sounds like one.”

Gabriel straightened.

“Paige, someone forged your name, used your credentials inside my company, and may be using the collection calls to keep you exhausted and frightened. Clearing a fraudulent debt is not generosity. It is correcting a problem that now belongs to me.”

She hated how much she wanted to believe him.

She hated even more that his logic made sense.

“What happens to Kevin if you find him?”

Gabriel’s face became unreadable again.

“That depends on what he did.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only honest one I can give you.”

Paige looked toward the windows.

The city below seemed very far away.

Forty-eight hours.

She could refuse. Walk out. Find another job. Hope the forged contract mattered to men who communicated in burner-phone threats.

Or she could stay long enough to learn why Kevin’s disappearance had somehow become entangled with stolen shipments and her computer login.

She turned back.

“I have conditions.”

One of Gabriel’s eyebrows lifted.

“Nico was right,” he said softly.

“About what?”

“You are either very brave or very tired.”

“Both. My conditions.”

“Go ahead.”

“No one follows me into my apartment. No one talks to my mother. No one touches Kevin because of me. And if I find something, you tell me the truth about it. Not the version you think I can handle.”

Gabriel was silent long enough that Paige wondered whether she had gone too far.

Then he nodded once.

“Agreed.”

“And I keep my salary.”

“You’re negotiating salary while standing in the office of a man you thought might kill you five minutes ago.”

“I have bills.”

This time, he did smile.

Barely.

It transformed his face just enough to make Paige forget, for one dangerous second, that she was afraid of him.

Then the smile disappeared.

Gabriel pressed the intercom.

“Nico.”

The door opened almost immediately.

Nico looked from Gabriel to Paige.

“She stays,” Gabriel said.

Nico’s expression suggested that this outcome had not been in his top ten predictions.

Paige pointed at him.

“And he stops looking at me like I’m a body he has to hide.”

Nico stared at her.

Gabriel picked up his drink.

“I can control his assignments,” he said. “Not his face.”

For the first time all day, a laugh escaped Paige before she could stop it.

It was small, tired, and completely inappropriate.

Gabriel watched her over the rim of his glass.

Then Nico placed a slim laptop on the desk and said, “There’s one more thing.”

The humor vanished.

He turned the screen toward them.

A security still showed the fifth-floor service entrance at 4:08 the previous Tuesday.

The image was grainy, the hooded figure turned partly away.

But Paige knew that jacket.

She had bought it for Kevin on his birthday.

Her hand tightened around the back of the chair.

“He was here.”

Nico nodded.

“Four minutes before your login changed the shipment.”

Paige looked at Gabriel.

The fear inside her finally found a shape.

Kevin had not simply run from a debt.

He had come back to her workplace after disappearing from her life.

May you like

[COMPLETED] “GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY DRESS! YOU’RE NOTHING BUT AN OLD SEAM...

[COMPLETED] At the Mafia Boss's Engagement Party, I Served His Hungry So...

[COMPLETED] The Mafia Boss’s Fiancée Tried to Dismiss His Father’s Loyal...

And someone inside Moretti Logistics had let him in.

Paige no longer believed any coincidence in that building was harmless.