Chapter 4: The Apartment on the Fourteenth Floor
The building was new and expensive and the kind of place that had a concierge who pretended not to notice things.
He noticed Gabriel Moretti.
He stood up from behind his desk, started to speak, and then sat back down without saying a word.
Gabriel walked past him to the elevators.
Nora followed because no one had told her to stay behind and she had stopped waiting for permission.
Two of Gabriel's men came up with them.
The elevator was mirrored on three sides.
Nora watched herself — still in her work uniform, black apron folded over her arm, hair coming loose from its clip.
She looked exactly like what she was: a waitress who had made a very wrong turn somewhere between the bar and the kitchen.
The doors opened on the fourteenth floor.
A man was standing in the hallway outside apartment 1408.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, and wearing a suit jacket over a shirt with the top two buttons open.
He had dark hair and the kind of face that had probably been handsome before something hardened it.
He looked at Gabriel.
"She's not answering," he said.
His voice was controlled.
"I've been knocking for twenty minutes."
"Move," Gabriel said.
Marco didn't move immediately.
His eyes went to Nora.
A flicker of something — not recognition, but calculation.
"Who is she?"
"Move, Marco."
Marco stepped aside.
Gabriel tried the handle.
Locked.
He looked at one of his men, who produced a key within four seconds.
The door opened.
The apartment was dark except for the kitchen light, which was on.
A coat was on the floor near the entrance — dropped, not hung.
One shoe was near the couch.
The other was not visible.
"Sofia." Gabriel's voice was different now.
Not commanding.
Something underneath the command that Nora recognized from a different kind of life — the voice of someone who had learned to be afraid quietly.
A sound from the bedroom.
Faint.
Gabriel moved fast.
Nora stayed in the doorway.
She heard his voice through the wall: low, urgent, saying his sister's name.
Then a woman's voice — thin, disoriented, but present.
Alive.
Nora let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.
Behind her, Marco had followed them in.
He stood in the center of the living room with his hands in his jacket pockets.
"She does this sometimes," he said.
"Takes something to sleep.
She's been anxious."
Nora looked at him.
She thought about the man in the gray coat.
Five seconds in the service hallway.
The name passed to Rick like a piece of paper slipped under a door.
"What does she take?" Nora asked.
Marco looked at her with flat patience.
"Who are you again?"
"Someone who was sitting in your wife's chair tonight."
Something moved behind his eyes.
Gabriel came back into the room.
His face was composed but his hands weren't — the left one had closed into a fist at his side without him seeming to notice.
"She's conscious," he said.
"She's confused.
She says she had one glass of wine before she left and then felt wrong within the hour."
Marco spread his hands.
"I told you.
She's been anxious.
She probably—"
"She didn't take anything." Gabriel's voice was quiet.
"She told me she didn't take anything."
"She doesn't always remember—"
"She remembers tonight.
She remembers the wine.
She remembers your face when she said she was going to dinner."
Marco's hands came out of his pockets.
"Be very careful, Gabe."
"Don't call me that."
The two men looked at each other across the living room.
Nora counted four seconds of silence that felt like something structural — the kind of silence that exists just before a building shifts on its foundation.
"She's going with me," Gabriel said.
"Tonight."
"She's my wife."
"She's my sister.
And until I understand what happened to her in the last three hours, she's staying where I can see her."
Marco's jaw tightened.
"You don't have the right—"
"Marco." Gabriel said the name once, flat and final.
"I know you sent him to the restaurant.
I know what was in the glass.
I don't know yet why you wanted it to look like Sofia did it." He paused.
"But I will."
Marco said nothing.
And the silence this time was different.
May you like
It was the silence of a man who had just realized that the story he had prepared was no longer the story being told.
Nora watched his eyes go to the door.
