Chapter 3 - The House With No Curtains
Adrian Varga lived in a house with no curtains.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Floor-to-ceiling glass overlooked Lake Washington, rain turning the city lights into streaks of gold and white.
For a man whose reputation apparently made people leave restaurants rather than question him, he seemed remarkably unconcerned with privacy.
“You don't have curtains,” I said.
He removed his jacket.
“You've been here eleven seconds.”
“I'm observant.”
“You hid under furniture.”
“You really need new material.”
His mouth twitched.
The house wasn't what I expected.
No marble statues.
No gold.
No obvious evidence that a supervillain lived there.
Dark wood.
Books.
A piano.
A kitchen that looked actually used.
A framed photograph of an older woman beside a boy around twelve.
I stopped.
“You?”
He followed my gaze.
“My mother.”
“You looked less terrifying.”
“I was twelve.”
“You looked grumpy.”
“I was twelve.”
Fair.
Adrian had placed me in a guest suite at the opposite end of the house and given me the room's only key.
“Lock it,” he said.
“From you?”
“Especially from me, if that helps you sleep.”
That silenced me.
Jared had spent years teaching me that boundaries were insults.
Adrian treated them like architecture.
Solid.
Necessary.
Not personal.
Downstairs, his security team had already begun mapping the Northline intrusion.
I joined them despite Adrian's objections.
“I need you rested.”
“I need answers.”
“You've been awake since six.”
“So have you.”
“I make bad decisions professionally.”
“And I apparently make them romantically.”
He had no answer for that.
Good.
A laptop sat open on the dining table.
I almost laughed at the irony.
Four days earlier, I had been beneath one.
Now I was sitting beside Adrian at another.
We reviewed everything.
Emily Ross had been detained at the airport but insisted she knew nothing about the shipment.
She claimed somebody had offered her ten thousand dollars to take a last-minute “consulting trip” to Belgium.
The payment had come through Cascade Technical Services.
Jared's company.
“She's lying,” I said.
“Probably,” Adrian replied.
“You don't sound convinced.”
“People do stupid things for money without understanding what they're part of.”
I thought about Emily.
Single mother.
Two children.
Always complaining about rent increases.
Maybe Adrian was right.
Then a security analyst named Mateo enlarged a network diagram.
“Northline wasn't the only company accessed.”
Three dots appeared.
Northline.
Cascade Technical.
Varga Maritime Holdings.
My stomach sank.
“What was taken from your company?”
Adrian's voice turned flat.
“Routing schedules.”
“For what?”
“High-value electronics shipments.”
“And somebody substituted cargo?”
“Sometimes. Other times containers simply vanished for twelve hours and returned before delivery.”
“Why didn't you report it?”
He looked at me.
“I did.”
That surprised me.
I had assumed—because of the whispers, the restaurant staff, Jared's reaction—that Adrian operated outside normal systems.
“What happened?”
“Not enough evidence.”
“So you investigated yourself.”
“Yes.”
“How very mysterious-billionaire of you.”
“I prefer efficient.”
Mateo interrupted.
“We found something else.”
He placed two authorization logs side by side.
Mine.
And Adrian's.
Someone had used my account to approve the container.
Someone had also used an executive token belonging to Adrian's company to confirm its transfer.
Whose token?
Adrian's.
I stared at him.
“You're framed too.”
“Yes.”
The idea changed everything.
Until that moment, some part of me had wondered whether Adrian himself was orchestrating the situation.
Now we were linked by the same invisible hand.
“What does Jared get?” I asked.
Adrian leaned back.
“Money.”
“Too simple.”
“Money is usually simple.”
“No. Jared doesn't just want money.”
I knew him.
That was my terrible advantage.
“He wants control. He needs to feel smarter than everyone else. If he was stealing cargo, he wouldn't only take the profit. He'd want somebody else to know he beat them.”
Adrian studied me.
“You're describing narcissism.”
“I'm describing Tuesday.”
Mateo looked away to hide a smile.
I continued.
“He'd keep records.”
“Why?”
“Trophies.”
That word hung in the room.
I suddenly remembered an old external hard drive Jared had kept locked in his home office.
When we lived together, I had once asked what was on it.
“Receipts,” he'd said.
I thought he meant taxes.
Maybe he hadn't.
“There might be evidence at his house.”
Adrian immediately said, “No.”
“I haven't even finished.”
“I know the ending.”
“I lived there for two years.”
“Which is exactly why you won't go back.”
“I know the alarm code.”
“He could change it.”
“He never changes passwords. He thinks complexity is for people who forget things.”
Adrian's gaze narrowed.
“You are not going into Jared Sloan's house.”
“You said you don't decide where I go.”
“I was hoping you'd forgotten.”
“I remember inconvenient statements.”
“So do I.”
Mateo cleared his throat.
“We don't need to enter. If Khloe knows the device model or cloud service, we may be able to identify backups through lawful channels.”
That was sensible.
I hated sensible.
But I agreed.
At midnight, Adrian made coffee.
At one, we found the first break.
Jared's consulting company had billed Northline for “security vulnerability assessments” eighteen months earlier.
I stared at the invoice.
“I remember this.”
“Why?”
“Because I processed the vendor compliance review.”
Adrian turned.
“You approved Jared's company?”
“No. Martin asked me to review documentation. Jared and I had been dating six months. I disclosed the relationship and another analyst approved it.”
“Who?”
I searched my memory.
“Thomas Reed.”
Mateo stopped typing.
“Northline's chief security officer?”
“Yes.”
The same man who had questioned me earlier that morning.
The same man who had told us the cameras had conveniently failed.
I felt cold.
Adrian stood.
“Mateo.”
“Already checking.”
Thirty seconds later, Thomas Reed's employment history filled the screen.
Before Northline, he had worked for a company called Pacific Sentinel Group.
Before that?
Varga Maritime Holdings.
Adrian went still.
“You know him.”
“He worked for me.”
“What happened?”
“I fired him.”
“For?”
Adrian didn't answer immediately.
“Selling internal information.”
There it was.
The missing bridge.
Thomas had worked for Adrian.
Then Northline.
Then brought Jared's company into Northline.
Jared gained access.
My credentials were used.
Adrian's token was used.
Emily was sent toward Antwerp.
This wasn't a collection of coincidences.
It was a machine.
And we were finally seeing the gears.
Mateo's laptop chimed.
“I've got something.”
An encrypted file archive had been detected on a cloud server associated with Cascade Technical.
Its name:
TABLESETTING
I frowned.
“That's strange.”
Adrian stared at the screen.
“Open the metadata.”
Mateo did.
Seven folders.
Each named after a restaurant.
One name made my blood turn cold.
VELVET ROOM — SATURDAY
The restaurant where I'd hidden beneath Adrian's table.
Inside were three image files.
The first showed me arriving at the coworker dinner.
The second showed Jared waiting outside.
The third showed Adrian entering the private dining room forty minutes before I arrived.
I looked at Adrian.
“They knew you'd be there.”
“Yes.”
“They knew I'd be there.”
“Yes.”
“They sent Jared after me.”
His jaw tightened.
“Possibly.”
“No. Not possibly.”
I pointed at the screen.
“They wanted me to run into that restaurant.”
“But nobody could guarantee you'd hide at my table.”
“Maybe they didn't need that exact part.”
A worse thought came.
“What if they just needed us in the same place?”
Mateo clicked the metadata for the third photograph.
The file had been created six days before Saturday.
Not taken Saturday.
Created.
Which meant someone had predicted Adrian's arrival nearly a week in advance.
A text document sat beneath the images.
Mateo opened it.
Four lines.
SUBJECT K.B. enters through service corridor.
SUBJECT A.V. seated private room.
CONTACT EVENT expected between 8:40–8:55 PM.
After contact, initiate Northline authorization.
I felt my skin go cold.
They hadn't reacted to our meeting.
They had scheduled it.
Then I noticed the final line.
If Varga protects her, proceed to Phase Two.
I looked at Adrian.
“What is Phase Two?”
His phone rang.
He checked the screen.
Unknown number.
He answered on speaker.
Nobody spoke.
Then a recording played.
My own voice.
From years earlier.
Laughing.
I recognized the room.
Jared's apartment.
Then Jared's recorded voice said:
“Khloe always wants to save people.”
The recording stopped.
A distorted voice followed.
“Let's see if Varga does too.”
The line went dead.
Adrian looked through the curtainless windows at the dark lake.
For the first time, I understood why his house had no curtains.
Maybe it wasn't because he had nothing to hide.
Maybe it was because Adrian Varga had spent his whole life refusing to let people believe he was afraid.
May you like
But somebody out there had just found the one thing that might change that.
Me.
