I heard about the accident the way I heard about everything in that penthouse—secondhand, through walls, through the particular silence that follows a phone call that changes things.
Anastasia had been quiet for two days before it happened. Not her usual quiet, the kind that meant she was performing patience. Something else. Something watchful. I noticed it the way you notice a change in air pressure before a storm—not consciously, just in the body, a low hum of warning I'd learned not to ignore.
On Tuesday afternoon, Collin's phone rang.
I was in the kitchen. I heard his voice shift from the other side of the door—that particular drop in register, the one that meant something had broken through his control. I stood very still and pressed my thumbnail into my palm.
He came through the kitchen without looking at me. Coat already on. Keys in hand. His jaw was set in the way it got when he was solving a problem.
He didn't say a word to me.
The front door closed.
I stood in the kitchen for a long time after that, my hand flat against the counter, and I thought: *this is it. This is the move she's been building toward.*
I didn't know the details yet. I didn't need them. I knew Anastasia.
---
I found out later what she'd done.
The FDR Drive. A clear afternoon. A car that lost control at exactly the right moment, at exactly the right speed—enough to look terrifying, careful enough not to be. She walked away with a cut above her eyebrow and a bruised shoulder. Cosmetic. Photogenic.
From the hospital bed, she called Collin. I can imagine exactly how her voice sounded. I'd heard that register before. The trembling. The barely-contained fear. The long pause before she said the name.
*Julissa.*
She said she didn't understand why I would do this. She said she'd never been so frightened. She said she just wanted to feel safe.
Collin didn't call me. He didn't come back to the penthouse first. He went straight to the hospital, and whatever he saw when he walked into that room—Anastasia pale against white sheets, that small careful cut above her brow, her hands reaching for his—that was the only evidence he needed.
He has never once asked me for my version of anything.
---
They came for me that evening.
Two men I didn't recognize. Collin stood in the doorway of my room while they waited in the hall. He didn't come inside. He looked at me from the threshold like I was a problem he had already finished solving.
"You're being moved," he said.
I looked at him. I didn't ask where. I already knew there was no point.
"Do you have anything to say for yourself?" His voice was very quiet. It always was, when he was most dangerous.
I thought about the clinic. The paper pillow. The recovery room where I had bled alone into the silence. I thought about Indy's brother and a scholarship held hostage. I thought about eight words on a screen: *Take your time. I will be ready.*
I said nothing.
He turned and walked away.
---
The basement room was exactly what it sounded like.
Concrete walls. A cot with a thin mattress. A bare bulb overhead on a pull-string. The door was metal, and it locked from the outside. There was no window. No way to know if it was day or night except by the sounds that filtered down from somewhere above—footsteps, the distant hum of an HVAC system, the occasional muffled voice.
I sat on the cot and looked at the walls.
I was still bleeding. Not much. Just enough. My body was still finishing what I had started in that clinic three weeks ago, and now I was sitting in a concrete room beneath Collin Henderson's corporate tower because a woman who had never once told the truth had told one more lie, and a man who had never once looked closely had chosen, again, not to look.
I pressed my thumbnail into my palm. The small sharp sting. Grounding.
I didn't cry. I had already spent that.
---
The guard stepped away from the door sometime in the second day. I heard his footsteps recede down the corridor and I moved immediately, no hesitation, no second-guessing.
The coat was with me. I had made sure of that.
I reached into the lining, found the hard rectangle, powered it on. My fingers were steady. I typed fast and kept it short.
*I am ready. Get me out at the next opportunity.*
I powered it off. Hid it. Sat back down on the cot.
The response came the next morning, in the window before the guard's first check.
I read it once. Then I sat very still on the cold cot with the phone in my hands and the bare bulb burning overhead and the concrete walls pressing in from every side.
*I know where you are. My people are already in position. There will be an opportunity soon. Hold on.*
I powered the phone off.
Put it back in the lining.
And I held on.
