Page 95 of Secret Baby Daddy

Roman enters the archive at 9:17.

I hear him before I see him.

Not footsteps.

Roman has spent too many years teaching men like me how not to announce themselves for something that careless.

It’s the soft click of the service door closing behind him.

One sound.

Then silence.

I stand in the narrow security room behind the archive wall, watching four camera feeds on a monitor Hayes installed forty-eight hours ago.

Roman appears on the third feed in a gray coat and black gloves, moving through the corridor like a man visiting a building he already knows.

Which, of course, he does.

Twelve years ago, his name appeared in the visitor ledger four days before Jonah died.

Today he doesn’t sign anything.

He doesn’t even hesitate at the first security door.

He enters six digits on the keypad.

The lock opens.

Hayes’s voice comes quietly through my earpiece.

“That’s not the code we leaked.”

I already know.

The number Roman entered is an obsolete Merrick master code retired from active use eleven years ago—but never purged from the building’s legacy access system.

No current employee should know it.

Someone who had access to this building twelve years ago might.

“Got it,” Piper says in my ear.

She’s four blocks away, watching the same feed.

Her voice is calm.

It shouldn’t have the effect on me that it does.

“Don’t move yet.”

Every instinct in my body disagrees.

Roman is less than thirty feet away from me.

Twelve years of questions are standing thirty feet away.

Jonah’s safe-house address sits in an evidence file on the table behind me, timestamped four days before two men walked into that house and put two bullets into his chest.