Page 18 of Secret Baby Daddy

Cordelia gave me the extortionist’s entire digital package an hour ago: the manipulated video of Sloane and a secondary folder labeled ‘Incentive’.

I have learned not to open emotionally loaded files first.

Instinct wants immediate answers; discipline insists on process.

I catalog the video’s technical properties before I allow myself to watch it a second time, resolution, compression artifacts, frame rate consistency, because the moment I let myself feel something about Sloane Merrick’s face on that footage, my judgment narrows to exactly the width Roman Vasseur would prefer.

I have three protocols for handling classified material under emotional duress, and I run through them now, in order, the way another man might recite a prayer.

Verify the source.

Isolate the variable.

Separate the fact from the feeling until the feeling has somewhere safer to go.

I open the secondary folder.

Architectural blueprints populate the screen.

These are not public municipal records.

I zoom in on the primary penthouse schematic.

The blue lines detail a secondary emergency exit routed through the north stairwell.

The north stairwell renovation finished exactly twenty-one days ago.

I supervised the final safety inspection myself.

Twenty-one days is not long enough for a floor plan to go stale, which means whoever compiled this package either updated their files after my inspection or has a live feed into systems that should be sealed.

Neither possibility improves my mood.

I pull up the internal Merrick security log and cross-reference the file creation dates.

The extortionist’s blueprints carry a compilation timestamp from three weeks ago.

Someone inside the Merrick network pulled these files after the renovation.

The threat is walking the halls of this building.

I drop the tablet on the leather desk pad and pinch the bridge of my nose.

I need the original source of the old video.

I drag the media file into my forensic parser, which strips away the images of the fire and leaves only raw hexadecimal and embedded metadata.

I scroll through the endless lines of white text on black.

My eyes catch a string buried in the header.

AUTH_KEY: JR_8842_SEC

My hand freezes on the mouse.

The plastic shell creaks under my grip.

The server array hums on, indifferent to the twelve years collapsing in my chest, and I focus on it deliberately, the mechanical drone, the smell of warm dust, the small green light blinking on the surge protector by my foot, because focusing on small, factual things has always been the only method that reliably pulls me back from the edge of a memory before it swallows the room.