Riverton had gone quiet.
The kind of quiet that doesn't soothe, it unsettles. It was the kind of silence that carried secrets in its belly, whispered them into the air like poison laced in perfume.
Grace Laurent stood on the balcony of Élan Mode's glass-tower headquarters, watching the fog roll in over the city's sleeping skyline. Her jaw was tight, arms crossed, black blazer hugging her frame like a second skin. Beneath her, the world bustled in a hush, but her mind was loud.
Something wasn't right.
She had always been attuned to shifts—subtle energies, minor changes in behavior, the sound of footsteps that didn't belong. The last few days had been a study in such shifts. Open drawers she hadn't touched. A strand of her long black hair was found in a place it shouldn't be. Her pillow was slightly off-center.
It felt like someone had been there.
Eva had dismissed it, at least on the surface. But Grace had seen the flicker in her friend's eyes. The tightening of her grip on the wine glass. The pause in her perfectly delivered legal advice.
Now, inside the penthouse, Eva paced, phone glued to her ear.
"No, I don't care who he's worked for. If he can't find a signal breach, he's useless to me. Find someone who can."
Grace walked in silently, barefoot, wrapping her arms around herself as if trying to hug her own unease back into its cage.
"Eva," she said softly.
Eva turned, ending the call. "He still says there's no interference. Everything's working. On paper. But the feed is dead. Like someone's one step ahead."
Grace exhaled. "Someone is."
There was a silence between them, one lined with unspoken truths and heavy questions.
"Do you think it's someone we know?" Grace asked.
Eva's response was sharp, immediate. "No. It's someone who wants to be invisible. Someone who's not just watching you, he's studying you."
Grace moved to the window, her grey eyes scanning the skyline. "Then why does it feel like he already knows me?"
Eva didn't answer. She didn't have one.
A gust of wind rattled the glass, and Grace flinched.
"Maybe it's nothing," she whispered, but the tremor in her voice betrayed the fear coiled beneath her skin.
Eva stepped closer, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder. "Or maybe it's everything. And we're just a few steps behind."
That night, as Grace finally drifted into sleep on her bed of ivory silk, the camera in her room blinked twice, then went still again.
Across the city, Silas Vale sat in the dark, watching the black screen with an expression carved from desire and madness. The glow from his monitors cast eerie shadows over his face. He leaned forward, fingers lightly brushing the screen as though it were skin.
He whispered something to the void.
"Soon."
He had memorized the pattern of her breath in sleep, the way she curled slightly to the left, how her hands folded beneath her cheek like a child seeking warmth. There was poetry in her silence. And he would claim it.
And the city, as if in response, shuddered in its sleep.