Chapter 6 — Someone Is Watching

He hadn't slept.

The photograph was still open on his phone when the sun came up. He had read the message enough times that it had stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like something worse.

A signal.

Someone had been close enough to get a clean angle on his face. Had his personal number — not the company line, not anything publicly listed. And had chosen to send one message and then go completely silent. No follow-up. No demands. No conditions attached.

Just a question left sitting in the dark like it knew he'd still be awake when it arrived.

"How long are you planning to pretend to be Alex?"

He called Marcus at six.

"I need you to trace a number," he said. "Unknown sender, last night, nine-oh-three. Run it against everything we have."

"And if it doesn't match anything registered?"

"Then keep running it." He paused. "Someone had my personal number, Marcus. Not the office line. Mine."

A longer pause this time. "Understood."

"Are you going back in today?" Marcus asked carefully.

Xander looked at the photograph on his screen. The warehouse floor. His face, unmistakable.

"Yes."

"That's not—"

"Find the number."

He ended the call and sat in the silence of his apartment and thought about the fact that someone had been watching him from the moment he arrived. Maybe before.

Kimberly had been awake since four.

Not because of the bruises, though her shoulder had stiffened overnight and there were two dark marks along her left side she'd found in the bathroom mirror. That wasn't what was keeping her up.

It was Simmons.

She kept replaying it in the dark: Alex's voice cutting through the chaos, calm and directional, and Simmons — six years as senior manager, the kind of man who needed a room to register his presence — moving without question. Without looking to anyone else first.

She had worked this floor for two years. She had watched Simmons dismiss safety complaints, override shift supervisors, and correct people in front of their entire teams. She knew exactly what kind of authority he responded to.

And it wasn't the kind a first-day warehouse employee carried.

She got up at five, made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table with the mug between both hands. She tried to build herself a reasonable explanation. Crisis training. Military background. Emergency services. Something that would make a person move the way Alex had moved, speak the way he'd spoken.

The explanation sat there in her mind and wouldn't attach to anything.

She drank her coffee and watched the kitchen window get light.

He arrived before the shift started.

Marcus texted while he was still in the locker room.

"Burner phone.

Purchased with cash, two weeks ago.

Activated once. For that message only"

Xander read it. Read it again.

Two weeks ago he hadn't been in the building yet. The paperwork for his transfer hadn't even been finalized. Which meant whoever had sent that message had known he was coming before he'd set foot on the floor.

He stood in the locker room for a moment with the phone in his hand and thought about what that meant. About how many people had access to internal HR transfers. About who would have reason to watch for something like that.

He put the phone away and went out to the station and started work.

Kimberly found him at the conveyor forty minutes in.

She had decided on the drive over that she was going to be direct. Not confrontational. Just direct, the way she'd learned to be after two years of a workplace that rewarded people who didn't ask questions with more problems to stay quiet about.

"Yesterday," she said, keeping her voice under the floor noise. "The way those managers responded when you called it—"

"People move toward whoever sounds like they know what's happening," Alex said. His eyes stayed on the intake scan. "In a crisis that's just how it goes."

"Simmons doesn't move for anyone."

"He moved for the situation."

"He moved for you." She kept her voice level. "I watched it happen. That's not the same thing."

Alex was quiet. She could see something working in his jaw, small and controlled.

"I did crisis management work before this," he said finally. "Incident response. Team coordination. When something goes wrong your body just — falls back into what it knows." He glanced at her briefly and then away. "It wasn't authority. It was muscle memory."

She looked at him for a moment.

"Right," she said.

She turned back to the conveyor. He didn't add anything. She didn't ask anything else.

But the explanation sat between them like something neither of them fully believed, and both of them knew it

Denise appeared at her elbow during a belt rotation, moving in that particular way she had when she didn't want the conversation to be visible from across the floor.

"You hear people talking about your new assignment?" she said quietly.

"I've heard some of it."

"Perry's got a whole theory. Military. Corporate security. Some people are saying ex-government." Denise glanced toward the far station where Alex was working. "Nobody can figure out what someone like that is doing on intake."

"People are speculating," Kimberly said.

"Sure." Denise looked at her. "But Simmons hasn't been near the north section all morning. You notice that?"

Kimberly had noticed.

She didn't say so.

Denise moved off without pushing it further, which was more unsettling than if she had.

By midmorning the pattern was clear enough that she couldn't explain it away.

Perry had redirected himself twice to avoid walking past their station. Greta, who had a comment for everything, had made eye contact with Alex once and then found somewhere else to be. Even the maintenance crew that came through to assess the north corridor damage moved differently near him — not deferentially, the way they might around someone they respected.

Carefully. Like people who had sensed something they didn't have language for yet.

It wasn't admiration.

It was the specific nervousness of people who had realized the person beside them was something other than what they'd been told.

Kimberly worked and watched and said nothing.

Marcus messaged during the break.

"Cameras 4, 7, and 9

the three covering the north corridor

corrupted files.

Two-hour window before the collapse.

It's not a malfunction."

Xander stared at his phone under the break room table.

'Someone wiped it,

he typed.

"Cleanly. It'll read as a system error to anyone who doesn't know what to look for."

He set the phone face-down and stared at the wall.

The shelving in the north corridor had been flagged eight months ago. Documented. Left in place. Weight limits ignored, anchor bolts not replaced, cross-supports that had been written up in an internal audit and never touched. All of it on paper. None of it fixed.

And now two hours of footage gone.

He thought about the burner phone. Purchased before he arrived. Activated once.

He thought about Kimberly on the floor under that racking, and how long it had taken anyone else to reach her.

The collapse hadn't been the result of negligence that had gotten out of hand.

Someone had maintained the conditions. Deliberately. And then erased the record of what those conditions looked like in the hours before everything came down.

He sat with that for a long moment, and then put his phone away and went back to work, because there was nothing else to do yet and the floor was watching.

---

The shift ended at four.

Kimberly took her time, working her coat on carefully around her shoulder. The locker room had mostly emptied. The building had gone quiet in the way it only did at shift change.

There was an envelope inside her locker.

White. Unsealed. No name on the front.

She stood very still and looked at it.

She didn't reach for it immediately. Her mind went through the possibilities quickly and practically — someone's forgotten paperwork, a note from management about yesterday's incident, something administrative.

None of those felt right.

She picked it up.

One photograph inside. Properly printed on photo paper, not a phone screenshot — someone had taken time with it, had wanted it to be clear.

She turned it over.

Two men at what looked like a private event. Good lighting. The kind of background that came with money and access. One of them she didn't recognize: dark-suited, composed, the easy stillness of someone accustomed to being in charge of things.

The other one she knew.

She would know that face in any light, in any context. She had spent three years looking at it in the photographs she kept in the top drawer of her dresser because she couldn't put them out where Ava would see her looking at them, but she couldn't throw them away either.

Daniel.

He was laughing. Not the polite, social laugh he'd used at work events — she had seen photos of that and knew the difference. This was the real one. The one that reached his whole face and meant he'd forgotten anyone was watching.

His hand was resting on the other man's shoulder.

Relaxed. Familiar. The way you only ever stood with someone you had known long enough to stop being careful around.

She looked at the man Daniel was standing beside.

She didn't recognize him.

She stood in the empty locker room and looked at the photograph for a long time, trying to place the face, trying to understand the context, trying to fit this image into the Daniel she had known and grieved and built her entire last three years around.

She couldn't.

Because whatever this was — whatever friendship, whatever relationship, whatever part of her husband's life this photograph represented — she had never heard about it.

Not once.

Not in seven years of marriage. Not in anything he had ever told her.

Her hands had gone cold without her noticing.

She looked at Daniel's face.

He looked happier than she had seen him in years.