Page 100 of The Voicemail

My shoes make soft sounds against the floor. I stop near Claire’s desk.

It’s too neat now. Someone cleaned it before everything happened. The only personal things left are a small tube of hand cream by the keyboard and a mug with chipped gold lettering that reads ART IS NOT A LUXURY, exactly the kind of thing Claire would buy and Bellamy would secretly hate.

I move toward the back.

The intake room is colder. It always is. The air conditioning runs too hard back here because paintings matter more than people. Crate foam is stacked against one wall. A clipboard hangs from a hook. The Marchesi shipment is gone, but I can still see it in my head.

I press one hand to the table. My wrist throbs under the bandage. I was so angry that day because Bellamy dismissed me. He made me feel small and stupid and inconvenient.

I didn’t know he was also making me disposable.

That’s the part I can’t get past. It would be easier if the danger started with Alex. If I could point at him and say he broke my normal life open.

He did, in some ways. He brought guns and guards and secrets. But the rot was already here. It was in the crates, in the signatures, in Bellamy’s office. It was in Claire’s initials on a form she didn’t understand, and in every polite donor who smiled under gallery lights while money moved behind the walls.

Alex didn’t make the world dangerous. He made it impossible for me not to see it.

A sound shifts behind me. I don’t turn around. I already know who it is.

“You can come in,” I say.

Alex steps into the intake room but stops near the doorway. He’s learning. At the very least, he’s trying.

“This place used to feel like home,” I say softly.

“It doesn’t anymore?” he asks.

I turn around slowly and shrug. He’s still by the door in his black suit from the gala, tie gone, hair mussed from his own hands. A bruise darkens one set of knuckles. Bianchi’s throat will probably have matching marks.

“You could have killed him tonight,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you?”

His eyes hold mine. “Because you were standing beside me.”

“That scares me,” I admit.

“I know.”

“But not as much as it should.”

His jaw tightens.

“I saw what you are in that room,” I say. “Not all of it. Enough. You put your hand around Bianchi’s throat in front of the cameras, the federal agents, the senators, all of them. You chose being seen over letting him look at me like that.”

Alex’s face goes still. “I won’t apologize for that.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

The silence stretches between us. I lean back against the table, careful of my ribs.

“I thought I wanted to come here to remember who I was before,” I say. “Before you. Before all of this.”

“And did you?”

“That girl is gone.”