Nora’s POV
Danny has been gone for four minutes, and I can feel every second like a tooth being pulled.
The gala continues around me in its oblivious choreography — champagne, laughter, the string quartet cycling through something that sounds expensive and forgettable.
My father's keynote has ended to enthusiastic applause. He's descended from the stage and been absorbed back into the crowd, surrounded by admirers whose handshakes last precisely as long as their net worth warrants.
I circulate. Smile. Distribute attention with the calibrated precision of a woman who learned social arithmetic before she learned algebra. Every interaction has a purpose — not connection, not pleasure, but coverage. I am building a wall of witnesses.
Fifty people who will remember speaking to Eleanor Wilson during the exact window when her boyfriend was in the basement, because alibis are constructed from social proof and I've been constructing mine since Danny disappeared through the northeast corridor.
My champagne is untouched. I carry it the way you carry a prop in a play — present, visible, never consumed. The glass is warm from my hand. The bubbles have gone flat. I don't care. The champagne exists so that my hand has something to hold that isn't shaking.
"Wonderful event," I say to a woman whose name I've already forgotten. "Dr. Cross has built something truly remarkable."
"Hasn't she? The therapeutic applications alone—"
"Absolutely. The potential is extraordinary."
The words come out of a mouth that belongs to Eleanor Wilson while the rest of me — the real rest, the Nora underneath — is tracking the northeast corridor from the corner of my eye, counting seconds, mapping the distance between where I'm standing and where Danny is crouched in a basement with a USB drive and a closing window.
Five minutes. He said ninety seconds for deployment, plus the walk down and back. He should be returning soon. Should be slipping back onto the gala floor with a champagne glass and a forgettable expression. Should be finding my eyes across the room and nodding once.
He hasn't appeared.
Six minutes.
I excuse myself from the woman whose name I've forgotten and drift toward the bar — not the northeast corridor, not yet, because moving toward the corridor would be moving toward Danny, and moving toward Danny would be a tell I can't afford. The bar is neutral. The bar is where a woman goes to refresh a drink she hasn't been drinking.
"Nora."
The voice arrives at my elbow like a knife slipped between ribs — quiet, precise, positioned to maximize damage while minimizing scene.
Tristan. Standing beside me at the bar with a champagne glass and a smile that could pass for pleasant if you didn't know what lived behind it.
His long brown hair is swept back, his suit immaculate, his posture the studied ease of a man who believes every room is a stage and he's always playing the lead.
"Lovely event," he says. Conversational. The tone of a man discussing the weather, not detonating a bomb. "Your father's speech was inspiring. Really moving. The bit about emotional wellness as a human right — I thought that was particularly elegant."
"What do you want, Tristan?"
"Just catching up." He takes a sip of champagne. Holds it on his tongue. Swallows with the deliberate pleasure of a man who savors things.
"Though I couldn't help noticing your plus-one seems to have wandered off." His eyes find mine over the rim of the glass. "He's in the basement, isn't he?"
My blood freezes. The sensation is precise — not metaphorical, not poetic. My circulatory system physically constricts, the capillaries in my hands and face narrowing in the mammalian response to threat, the body pulling blood toward the core to protect the organs that matter.
My face does not change. Twenty-one years of training with Arthur Wilson gave me this — the ability to receive a killing blow and maintain a smile so flawless that the person delivering it has to look twice to confirm it landed.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Your little biker boyfriend." Tristan sets his glass on the bar. The gesture is unhurried. Everything Tristan does is unhurried, because urgency implies vulnerability, and Tristan Calder does not do vulnerable.
"Trying to be a hero. Borrowed suit, stolen keycard, some device his hacker friend built in a garage." He shakes his head with performative disappointment. "It's actually sort of sweet. In a doomed, working-class kind of way."
The room continues with music, laughter, and the clink of glasses. Nobody within earshot registers what's happening at this bar — two people in evening wear having a conversation that looks, from any distance, like a casual exchange between old acquaintances.
"Security feeds are live, Nora." Tristan leans closer. His cologne reaches me — the same one he wore for two years, the scent I used to associate with safety before I understood it was the smell of a cage. "Your father is watching right now."
The words land one at a time: security feeds are live, and they are watching right now. The basement cameras. The closed circuit that Raf said he couldn't access remotely. Someone is accessing them locally — someone inside the building, someone with the clearance to monitor a system that exists precisely to protect the servers Danny is standing in front of with a USB drive plugged into the primary rack.
"You have about five minutes to decide whose side you're on." Tristan straightens. Adjusts his cuffs. The gesture of a man who has delivered his payload and is now arranging himself for the aftermath.
"Come back to the right side of this, Nora. Your father will forgive you. He always does. But the window is closing, and your boyfriend is about to find out what happens when you break into a building owned by someone who can afford better lawyers than God."
I hold his gaze for three seconds. The same duration as the audio clip he played in the café. The same duration as every weapon he's ever wielded against me — brief, devastating, precisely timed.
In those three seconds, I calculate.
Danny is in the basement. Arthur knows. Security is coming — if not already moving, then within minutes. The three-minute camera window during shift change was supposed to be their blind spot, but Tristan's access means someone was watching the feeds in real time.
The window was never blind. We walked into a room we thought was dark and the lights were on the entire time.
I have five minutes. Maybe less.
I set my champagne on the bar. Untouched. Flat. A monument to every minute I spent performing tonight.
"Excuse me," I say. My voice is Eleanor Wilson's — smooth, composed, the social autopilot of a woman extracting herself from a conversation. "I need to use the restroom."
Tristan's smile widens. He thinks I'm retreating. He thinks the threat landed and the girl he broke is running for the bathroom to fall apart the way she used to — the way she did the night she found him in bed with someone else, the way she did when he called her frigid, the way he's always expected her to respond to his cruelty: with collapse.
He's wrong.
I turn from the bar and walk toward the northeast corridor. Not toward the restroom. Toward Danny. My Danny, who has no idea that we could lose each other now.
My heels click against the marble with a rhythm I don't try to muffle. Each step is a small percussion — sharp, deliberate, the sound of a woman who has stopped performing and started moving.
The gala noise fades behind me as I pass the event boundary, the music and laughter thinning into the institutional quiet of a corporate corridor.
My heart hammers against the black dress. My hands are steady. My face is still Eleanor Wilson's, because the mask has one more job to do — get me past anyone between here and that stairwell without raising an alarm.
Forty-seven steps. Danny counted them. I didn't.
But I'm counting now.