The Quiet Floor

The 41st floor of Ostergaard Holdings doesn't appear on any directory. That's where Cass Lindqvist works, midnight to eight, processing files no one explains. Her boss is Nils Ostergaard, the reclusive billionaire who owns the building, the block, and most of the city's quiet money. He works only after dark. He never rides the elevator when staff are inside. Cass is told the work is routine. Then she notices the names: all women, all between twenty-four and twenty-nine, all former employees who stopped showing up. She starts a spreadsheet she knows is being watched. The gifts begin a week later — a scarf she lost nine years ago, a photograph from her mother's funeral, a key. Cass doesn't run. She needs to know why she was chosen, and the answer is not that she's the target. It's that she was the research. By dawn, one floor of the building will be ash, and one man will still be watching the lobby camera.