Page 9 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

I let that settle. "Sources?"

"Two close to Vandosse. One older voice I can't place — patient, careful, paying for quiet at both ends." He closes the folder. "They're watching how you behave when she's mentioned."

The single question I can neither answer nor ignore. "Then we give them nothing useful."

Elias waits.

"No special treatment they can measure. No visible guard shift. No sudden change." I look toward the elevator Adriana used. "If anyone mentions Jasmine, they get the same answer from every mouth. Competent assistant. Useful hire. Nothing more."

"And if they push?"

"They meet boredom." I turn back from the window. "Let them think I dislike being questioned, not that I have something to hide."

"Protection?"

"Quiet. General floor coverage only. More attention on the building, not on her. If anyone asks, we're tightening after the gala because half the city walked through our doors tonight and security always overreacts."

He collects the unopened folder. "You understand what the gala did. You didn't begin a rumor. You made one worth keeping alive."

"I understand."

Elias leaves, and the suite settles behind him, all polished stone and silent glass, while the city throws headlights across the windows below.

Jasmine will wake tomorrow to the same job, same desk, with the same impossible man she thinks she is beginning to understand. Outside that neat shape, old families are retelling one small moment from tonight until it grows teeth.

I did not give them proof. I gave them a question, and among our kind, questions are patient poisons. By morning, they will believe Jasmine Carter is nothing but an assistant good at her job.

7

JASMINE

The revolving doors push me into an evening that has emptied too fast. Quarter past nine, and the plaza outside holds only a delivery cyclist and a guard who clocks me, then finds his clipboard fascinating. I head for the corner where the rideshares line up, phone half-raised, and a half-finished text to my mother.

Footsteps are beating on the sidewalk. I keep moving. But when I slow by the curb, the steps slow too. When I lengthen my stride, they lengthen. The rhythm sits a half-beat off mine, like an echo that never quite learned the song.

I pause at a closed storefront and pretend to study a posted menu. In the glass I catch the street behind me — a man wearing a flat gray jacket, thirty feet back, who stops the instant I do and becomes deeply interested in his own phone.

My pulse shifts up a gear. Running would announce that I know, so I turn left instead, away from my usual garage route, onto the side street toward the avenue. The footsteps follow. I count storefronts to keep my breathing flat — laundromat, shuttered bakery, a nail salon throwing pink light onto thepavement — and aim for the avenue, where the crowd thickens enough to swallow me.

I glance back. He's gone. Not turned-a-corner gone. Disappeared the way a thing leaves when it was never meant to leave a trace. The narrow street stretches empty to another laundromat's glow. A dark car idles where he stood, then eases into traffic, and I never see whether anyone climbed inside.

I stop at the corner with my thumb hovering over the security line, and I don't press it. What would I even report? A man walked behind me, and then he didn't. I waited too long to be certain, and now there's nothing.

My phone buzzes in my hand. Not the main number. His.

"Jasmine."

"Mr. Crowe."

"Are you still near the building?"

I look at the blank stretch of sidewalk where a man stood ten seconds ago. "Why?"

"Security reported a possible concern. Come inside until the car reaches the front."

"That sounds terminal."

"It may be contagious."