KATHERINE'S POV.
My apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a building that had no doorman, no concierge, and no Alpha tenants on my floor. The last detail being something I had specifically verified before signing the lease three years ago.
It wasn't a large apartment. It wasn't meant to be. One bedroom, a kitchen I actually used, a living room that had slowly been swallowed by bookshelves and the overflow paperwork from my consulting work. The kind of place that looked, to the untrained eye, like it belonged to someone who hadn't quite settled yet.
I had settled. I just didn't need much space to do it.
I dropped my bag on the kitchen counter, filled a glass of water, and stood at the window drinking it while the city moved fourteen floors below me like it had no idea what I had just spent my morning doing. Which it didn't. Which was the point.
Nobody's business but mine.
My phone buzzed again on the counter. I glanced at it.
Grandma Ada - Calling.
I picked it up.
"You're out." My grandmother's voice was not a question.
"I'm out."
"Are you eating?"
I looked at the glass of water in my hand. "Yes."
"You're lying."
"Grandma…"
"I made pasta. Come eat."
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes briefly. Ada Roberts, my grandmother, was seventy-one years old Omega, four foot eleven, and had the emotional accuracy of a sniper. She had also been my alibi for the night of Wang Moira's murder, a fact which I was certain Grandma considered secondary to the pasta situation.
"I'll come on Sunday," I said.
"You'll come today. You sound hollow." She made a brief pause, and then, more quietly. "How bad was it this time?"
How bad was it.
I turned away from the window.
My honest answer was that it was the same as the first two times and the same as it would be the fourth time if they dragged me back in. A slow, deliberate grind designed to wear someone down until they either cracked or lost their composure completely and gave the detectives something to work with. I hadn't cracked. I hadn't lost my composure.
I had, however, spent approximately forty minutes fantasizing about scratching out William Brent's right eye, which probably said something about my composure I would rather not examine too closely.
"It was fine," I told Grandma. "The same detective."
Grandma made a sound that communicated everything she thought about the same detective without using a single word.
"Sunday," I said firmly. "I promise. I'll be there before noon."
There was a pause. Then, in the tone Grandma used when she was deciding to let something go for now but absolutely not forever. "Before noon. And call your lawyer back. He rang me when he couldn't reach you, which tells me whatever he has to say is not small."
"I know. I will."
"Katherine."
"Yes Grandma?"
"I know you didn't do it."
It was such a simple sentence. Four words that I had been waiting, without realizing it, to hear from someone who didn't have a legal obligation to believe me. My chest tightened with something I didn't have the emotional or mental capacity to sit with right now.
"I know you know," she said.
I could hear the smile in Grandma's voice when she replied. "Sunday. Before noon."
—----
I called my lawyer back from the couch with my feet tucked under me and a notepad on my knee out of habit, because Marcus Webb had never once in four years called me with information I could hold in my head without writing it down.
He picked up on the first ring.
"Katherine. Finally." He sighed.
"I was in interrogation, Marcus, not on holiday."
"Third time in two weeks." His voice carried the specific exhaustion of a man who had been fighting a losing bureaucratic battle and knew it. "They're fishing. They don't have enough to charge you and they know it, so they're hoping you'll hand them something."
"I haven't."
"I know. But I need you to listen to me carefully because what I'm about to tell you changes the situation significantly." There was a dreadful pause, the kind Marcus used when he was organizing words into the least alarming possible order. I had learned to dread that pause. "New evidence came in this morning. Security footage from the building adjacent to Wang Moira's residence. It's timestamp-corrupted, which means it can't be used definitively in court, but it shows a figure entering Moira's building at eleven forty-seven on the night she was killed."
I waited.
"The figure is wearing a coat registered to an account in your name."
The notepad dropped from my knee.
"That's not possible," I said in a flat voice of certainty. "I was at my grandmother's. You know I was at my grandmother's."
"I know that. Your alibi holds. But Katherine," Marcus exhaled heavily. "Someone went to considerable effort to put you at that scene. And effort like that costs money. Significant money. Which means whoever is doing this isn't opportunistic."
They planned it.
The thought settled in my stomach like cold water.
Someone planned this.
"The footage won't hold up," I said, because I needed to say something concrete and true. "You said it yourself, it's corrupted—"
"It won't hold up in court. But it will absolutely hold up in a headlines. And Wang Moira's family has connections to three separate media outlets." Marcus let that land. "If they release this footage before we can challenge it, you won't just be a suspect in a murder investigation. You'll be convicted in public opinion. And then the pressure on the department to charge you becomes—"
"Overwhelming." I finished the sentence quietly.
"Yes."
I stared at the middle distance of my living room. The bookshelves. The stack of consulting files on the corner of my desk I hadn't touched in two weeks because two weeks ago a woman I hadn't particularly wanted in my life had died and taken my ordinary existence with her.
Wang Moira.
Even now, dead, that woman managed to make herself my entire problem.
I never asked for this, I thought, and it wasn't anger this time, just something tired and honest underneath all the anger.
I never asked for any of it.
But here I was anyway.
"What are my options?" I asked.
There was another pause from Marcus. Longer this time.
"There's a call you haven't returned," he said carefully. "Voss Industries."
My eyes went to my phone on the cushion beside me. The unread notification still sitting there.
"What do you know about it?" I asked.
"Only that Lucian Voss's legal team reached out to mine this morning before they reached out to you directly. Whatever he wants…" Marcus chose his next words with the precision of a man walking across ice. "It may be worth hearing. Given the circumstances."
Lucian Voss.
I knew the name the way everyone knew the name. The way you know the names of natural disasters and international landmarks and things that are simply too large to ignore. CEO of Voss Group. Wang Moira's longtime rival, nemesis, and if the gossip columns were to be believed, a great deal more than that at some point in a past that neither of them had ever publicly confirmed.
He was also, according to the same police department currently dragging in for questioning every five days, a person of interest in Moira's murder.
Which meant both of us currently had something in common.
How delightful.
"I'll think about it," I told Marcus.
"Katherine..."
"I said I'll think about it, Marcus." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Thank you for the call."
I hung up.
Then I sat in the quiet of my apartment for a long moment, the city humming fourteen floors below, the Voss Industries, I corrected myself, the Voss Group notification sitting on my phone screen like a question I hadn't decided whether to answer yet.
I picked up my phone.
Looked at the number.
Put the phone face-down on my cushion.
Stood up, went to the kitchen, and started making myself something to eat, because whatever came next was going to require that I not be running on an empty stomach and wounded pride only.
Lucian Voss can wait, I decided, cracking two eggs into a pan with more force than strictly necessary.
He's waited this long. A few more hours won't kill him.
I paused at my own thought.
Poor choice of words on my part if you ask me.
—