Chapter 1 - The Neighbor Upstairs
At 3:12 in the morning, Elena Renner decided diplomacy had failed.
She stood in the middle of Apartment 4B wearing pale pink pajamas, ridiculous rabbit-shaped slippers, and the expression of a woman who had been personally betrayed by the concept of sleep.
Above her head came another set of footsteps.
Slow.
Heavy.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Elena stared at the ceiling.
“Do it again,” she whispered.
The footsteps stopped.
For three hopeful seconds, there was silence.
Then something scraped across the floor above her.
A door opened.
Men spoke in voices too low for her to understand.
Another set of footsteps crossed the penthouse.
Elena closed her eyes.
For nearly three weeks, the apartment above hers had transformed from an empty luxury penthouse into the headquarters of the world’s least considerate insomniac. The noises came at midnight, two in the morning, four in the morning—footsteps, doors, conversations, furniture shifting, once even a crash so heavy she had sat straight up in bed wondering if someone had dropped a refrigerator.
Management had answered her first complaint with an apology.
The second with a promise.
The third with silence.
Tonight she had reached complaint number six.
And Elena was done.
She had spent sixteen hours bent over a seventeenth-century oil painting whose varnish had yellowed so badly that the woman in the portrait looked as if she had been preserved in tobacco smoke.
Restoration required steady hands.
Patience.
Microscopic precision.
It did not go well with three weeks of interrupted sleep.
Elena marched into the small utility closet beside her kitchen.
Her gaze landed on a broom.
She grabbed it.
“This is reasonable,” she informed nobody.
The broom did not disagree.
Five minutes later, the elevator doors opened onto the penthouse floor.
Elena stepped out.
And stopped.
The hallway alone cost more than everything she owned.
Cream walls. Dark polished wood. Brass fixtures. Marble that reflected the warm glow from expensive sconces.
At the end of the corridor stood a pair of enormous mahogany doors.
Two men guarded them.
Not doormen.
Not security guards of the friendly, “Good evening, ma’am” variety.
One had an earpiece.
The other had a pale scar cutting from his temple toward his cheek.
Both wore black.
Both looked at Elena.
Then at the broom.
Then at her slippers.
Scar-face spoke first.
“Ma’am, you need to go back downstairs.”
Elena tightened both hands around the broom.
“Wonderful. Tell your boss to stop marching over my bedroom, and I’ll happily go.”
“He’s unavailable.”
“So am I. I’m unavailable for being awake.”
The man with the earpiece shifted as if suppressing something.
Scar-face remained professionally miserable.
“This floor is private.”
“My bedroom is private. Your boss has apparently mistaken the ceiling over it for a parade route.”
“Ma’am—”
Elena walked between them.
Scar-face moved to block her.
She dodged left.
He blinked.
She swung around him and reached the penthouse door before either man seemed willing to physically grab a woman wearing rabbits on her feet.
Elena knocked.
Not with her hand.
With the broom handle.
Three hard strikes.
“Open the door!”
Everything inside went silent.
The click of the lock suddenly sounded much louder than the footsteps had.
The door opened.
And Elena’s courage immediately reconsidered its career choices.
The man standing there was barefoot.
He had dark hair that looked as if someone had run impatient fingers through it a hundred times. Black trousers sat low on his hips. His white shirt was only partly buttoned, revealing ink across his chest and the edges of old scars.
He was tall enough that Elena had to tilt her head.
Behind him, six men sat around a long table covered with folders, laptops, phones, photographs, and enough serious expressions to make Elena suspect she had interrupted something far more complicated than poker.
Two firearms rested on the far end of the table.
Elena looked at them.
Then at her broom.
A small, sensible voice inside her said, Go downstairs.
Unfortunately, that voice had slept approximately eleven hours in the last three days.
She pointed the broom at the stranger.
“You.”
His eyes traveled slowly from the straw end of the broom down to Elena’s pink pajamas.
Then lower.
He stopped at the bunny slippers.
Something shifted in his face.
Not quite a smile.
That somehow annoyed her more.
“Yes?” he said.
“You need to stop walking.”
The room behind him became perfectly still.
Elena continued.
“You have been pacing for weeks.”
The man leaned one shoulder against the doorframe.
“Have I?”
“At all hours. Back and forth. Back and forth. Doors. Talking. Moving things around. Tonight something crashed.”
Behind him, one of the men coughed.
Elena looked past the stranger.
“Did one of you drop a refrigerator?”
Nobody answered.
She turned back.
“It’s three in the morning.”
“Three twelve,” the man said.
Elena stared at him.
“That is not better.”
For the first time, there was definite amusement in his eyes.
That was dangerous.
Not because Elena knew who he was.
Because she didn’t.
People usually revealed something when confronted unexpectedly. Anger. Embarrassment. Defensiveness.
This man gave away almost nothing.
It made Elena think of paintings covered in blackened varnish. The image was there, but you had to work to reach it.
“I restore paintings,” she told him.
He glanced at the broom.
“With that?”
Someone behind him laughed.
The stranger turned his head slightly.
The laughter died instantly.
Elena noticed that.
She also noticed how quickly it happened.
“No,” she said. “With tools that require my hands not to shake. I spent sixteen hours today working on something that survived hundreds of years. I refuse to be the person who destroys it because the lunatic upstairs won’t stop pacing.”
“Lunatic?”
“Possible lunatic.”
“Better.”
“With unresolved emotional problems.”
One of the men at the table lowered his face into his hand.
The stranger stared at Elena for several seconds.
“What apartment?”
“Four-B.”
That changed something.
It lasted only a fraction of a second.
His eyes sharpened.
The amusement vanished.
Elena caught it because noticing tiny changes was her profession.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
“You always interrogate strangers at three in the morning?”
“Only inconsiderate ones.”
He studied her.
“What’s your name?”
“Why?”
“I like knowing who’s pointing cleaning equipment at me.”
“Elena.”
“Elena what?”
“Renner.”
This time the reaction was unmistakable.
His shoulders became still.
Behind him, a chair creaked.
Elena glanced toward the table.
Several of the men were looking at her differently now.
Not amused.
Interested.
She lowered the broom a few inches.
“Okay. What was that?”
The stranger recovered first.
“Nothing.”
“Again, you’re terrible at that.”
He reached into his pocket.
Elena watched his hand carefully.
He removed a folded stack of bills.
Hundreds.
He held them toward her.
“Buy earplugs.”
Elena stared at the money.
Then at him.
“You’re serious?”
“Very.”
She took the cash.
His expression relaxed with the faint satisfaction of a man accustomed to making problems disappear.
Elena opened her fingers.
The bills fluttered between them and scattered across the marble floor.
Every man behind him froze.
The stranger looked down.
Then back at Elena.
“I don’t want your money,” she said.
His voice cooled.
“Most people do.”
“Well, congratulations. Tonight you met someone annoying.”
“I noticed.”
“I want sleep. Five hours would be miraculous. Six might turn me religious.”
The corner of his mouth moved.
“And I want a neighbor who understands that having the penthouse doesn’t make him emperor of the building.”
“You came upstairs carrying a broom to say that?”
“Yes.”
“In rabbit slippers.”
Elena looked down.
“They’re comfortable.”
“I’m sure.”
“Can you stop pacing?”
A pause.
Then, unexpectedly, he said, “I’ll try.”
Elena blinked.
That was not the answer she had expected.
“Good.”
She turned.
“Elena.”
She looked back.
The amusement had disappeared again.
“Go directly downstairs.”
She frowned.
“That was the plan.”
“Don’t stop on another floor.”
“Why would I?”
His gaze shifted toward Scar-face.
“Walk her to the elevator.”
“I can walk twenty feet without an escort.”
“It wasn’t a question.”
Her irritation returned instantly.
“And there’s the emperor again.”
She entered the elevator before anyone could answer.
Scar-face remained outside.
As the doors began closing, Elena saw the stranger standing in his doorway.
Watching her.
Not with annoyance.
With concern.
The realization made her pulse jump.
Then the doors shut.
Back in the penthouse, Owen Mercer—the man Elena had mentally named Scar-face—looked at Luca Vescari.
“Well,” Owen said.
Luca did not answer.
He was still staring at the elevator indicator.
One of the men at the table said, “She doesn’t know.”
“No,” Luca replied.
“You think Marcus told her anything?”
“If he had, she wouldn’t have come upstairs carrying a broom.”
A few tired smiles appeared.
Luca ignored them.
He looked at the money scattered across the floor.
“Mason.”
The man wearing the earpiece straightened.
“Sir?”
“Check every camera between this floor and Four-B.”
“Why?”
Luca’s gaze snapped toward him.
Mason immediately corrected himself.
“Right away.”
Owen crouched and collected the abandoned bills.
“You’re worried.”
“I’m always worried.”
“No. You’re pacing worried.”
Luca gave him a look.
Owen handed him the money.
“She’s funny.”
“She’s a complication.”
“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Luca walked back to the table.
Spread across it were photographs of Elena’s father.
Marcus Renner entering a train station.
Marcus outside a bank.
Marcus speaking to a man Luca recognized and did not trust.
And one photograph taken two days earlier.
Marcus entering Elena’s conservation studio carrying a narrow wooden crate.
Luca stared at it.
“Where is Marcus now?”
“No confirmed location,” said Nadine Park, Luca’s attorney, from the far end of the table. “His phone stopped moving at nine sixteen tonight.”
“Car?”
“Found at Union Station.”
“Tickets?”
“Nothing under his name.”
Luca’s jaw tightened.
Three weeks of watching Marcus.
Three weeks of warnings.
Three weeks of hearing the same promise.
She doesn’t know anything.
Leave Elena out of it.
Luca had intended to.
Then Elena had marched into his penthouse wearing cartoon rabbits.
“Double the watch on Four-B,” he said.
Owen’s expression changed.
“You think they know she has it?”
“I think Marcus came here two days ago.”
“And?”
“And I think Felix knows.”
Nobody spoke.
The name alone changed the atmosphere.
Luca walked toward the windows.
Far below, traffic crawled through the sleeping city.
His reflection hovered in the glass.
He had spent three weeks trying to prevent the past from repeating itself.
He had failed once before because he had waited for certainty.
He would never make that mistake again.
Behind him, Mason took out his phone.
Nobody noticed his thumb move across the screen.
Nobody except Owen.
Owen said nothing.
Not yet.
Four floors below, Elena reached her apartment.
She locked the door.
Set the broom against the wall.
Then leaned back against it.
Her heart was pounding.
“That,” she whispered, “was incredibly stupid.”
She smiled despite herself.
The stranger’s face appeared in her mind.
Dark eyes.
That almost-smile.
The way everyone obeyed him without being asked twice.
And the strange reaction when she had said her last name.
Elena crossed the apartment and checked the lock again.
She finally crawled into bed.
Above her, there were no footsteps.
For the first time in weeks, the penthouse became completely silent.
Elena closed her eyes.
She never saw the man sitting in a parked sedan across the street.
He watched the fourth-floor windows go dark.
Then typed a message.
RENner’s daughter made contact with Vescari.
A reply appeared almost immediately.
Did she see anything?
The man looked toward the glowing penthouse windows.
Not yet.
Another reply.
Make sure it stays that way.
The man smiled faintly.
Then added one last sentence.
May you like
You should see her slippers.
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