Page 13 of You, Only You

The fluorescent lights hummed. The unit smelled like old paper and concrete, and the particular staleness of secrets kept in the dark.

Seven years. Nobody had seen it. They saw the ruined careers and called me a monster. They saw the fear I cultivated and kepttheir distance. Nobody had stood where she was standing and drawn the lines between the points.

"The system failed her." I heard my own voice like it was coming from another room. "She reported through every channel. University. Campus police. DA's office. They all looked at the evidence and decided his career was worth more than what happened to her."

"And you stayed."

"Somebody had to." The words came out harder than I intended. I'd meant them to sound principled. They just sounded tired.

I waited for the lecture. Due process. Becoming what you fight. The slippery slope that ends with a man standing in a storage unit at eleven PM, surrounded by the evidence of his own obsession. I'd rehearsed my counterarguments. I had them organized by theme.

She took a step toward me. Not away. Toward.

"I want to help."

Four words. Different from the three that started this, but they hit harder.

"You don't know what you're asking." My voice dropped, urgent. Somewhere in the back of my head, the contingency playbook was screaming. "Your father's reputation already follows you everywhere. Every job application, every background check. If you're connected to this, to me..."

"I'll be unemployable." She finished the sentence the way she finished equations: cleanly, without flinching at the total. "I know."

"Then why?"

"Because my father stole money so he could feel like a big man." She closed the distance between us, stopping close enough that I could see each shade of green in her eyes. "He wanted the house. The car. The lifestyle. He destroyed forty-three families for his ego." Her jaw tightened. "That's not what this is. This isn't even close."

Something gave. I felt it go, like a cable snapping, somewhere behind my ribs. Not a decision. Not a strategy. Just... a structural failure in a wall I'd been maintaining for seven years.

"Show me who you're hunting now." Her voice was steady, certain. "The current target. Let me help you finish it."

I stood there looking at her, this woman who'd walked into my darkness and was asking for more instead of less. The smart move was still to walk her out. The smart move was always to walk people out.

Without a word, I turned to the locked filing cabinet in the corner. Keyed in the combination. Pulled open the drawer. Extracted the thick folder that had been keeping me awake for four months.

I handed it to her.

Her fingers brushed mine when she took it. Brief. Accidental. A spark that jumped between us like static, and I told myself it was just the dry air in the unit. The concrete. The fluorescent lights. All very reasonable explanations for why that half-second of contact registered in my chest like a detonation.

She opened the file.

I watched her face as she read. The professional assessment came first. I could see her forensic accountant's brain engaging, processing financial data, corporate structures, shell company arrangements.

Then she turned the page.

The color left her face. Her grip on the folder tightened until her knuckles went white. She was looking at the photographs. Surveillance stills of young faces, some of them teenagers, hollow-eyed and haunted. Shipping manifests listing "equipment transfers" that tracked human beings. Forged employment contracts that gave monsters legal cover.

"Oh God," she breathed.

"Victor Reeves." I kept my voice flat. Clinical. Because if I let myself feel what those photographs deserved, I'd be useless. "CEO of Meridian Tech Solutions. Legitimate corporate consulting on paper. In reality, the financial infrastructure for a trafficking operation. At least eighty-seven confirmed victims in eighteen months."

She looked up at me, her eyes wide. "This isn't financial crime."

"No. It isn't."

"The shell companies. The Cayman accounts." Her voice shook slightly. "They're not hiding money. They're hiding people."

"Victims disguised as business relocations. Payroll entries for employees who don't exist. Travel expenses that track with disappearances." I nodded at the file. "Reeves has connections in law enforcement, politics, the judiciary. The kind of protection that makes normal channels useless."

"So you go through abnormal ones."