Page 37 of His Stolen Bride

The technician nods and starts, and I turn back to the footage, and I watch guard positions. The garden corridor where Alina was walking has three patrol points, and two of them were occupied, and one of them was empty for twenty-seven seconds.

Twenty-seven seconds is a lifetime.

“Why did post three shift?” I ask.

The commander answers again, and his voice is steady but his eyes aren’t. “Bathroom break, Boss.”

“On rotation?” I ask.

“Yes,” he replies.

“On whose order?” I ask.

He hesitates, and the hesitation is small, but it’s there. Enzo doesn’t move, but his attention sharpens. Keeping my hands behind my back, I step closer to the commander. I don’t want to touch him, and I don’t want anyone to think I’m emotional. “Say it,” I tell him.

He clears his throat. “It was verbal, Boss. It came through one of the senior corridor captains.”

“Name?”

He gives it, and I nod at Enzo. “Bring him in.”

Enzo is already gone before I finish the sentence.

I don’t waste time on theories, and I don’t waste time convincing myself this is an outsider. An outsider doesn’t get camera maintenance approved under my code, and an outsider doesn’t time a post vacancy that cleanly. This was either inside help, or it was inside incompetence that someone exploited.

Either way, the inside pays.

Within twenty minutes, the first man comes in.

He’s a corridor captain, he’s been in my house for three years, and he tries to stand straight like posture will save him. I don’t offer him a chair or water.

I point at the screen. “Explain the vacancy,” I say.

He starts talking, and he talks too much. He says rotation, he says bathroom, he says the guard was ill, and he says it in the tone of a man who thinks I’m looking for an excuse to forgive.

I let him talk, and I don’t interrupt, and I watch his hands. They don’t shake, but they move too often, and that tells me he’s rehearsed.

When he finishes, I gesture to the technician. “Play the hallway feed from camera seven,” I say.

The feed runs. It shows the guard leaving post three, another man stepping into the corridor, and that man pausing at the service door for half a second, like he’s checking something, then continue.

That man is the corridor captain. He wasn’t in the control room with me today, and he wasn’t where he claimed he was.

The captain’s face drains.

He opens his mouth, then closes it. I look at him. “Try again,” I say silkily.

He speaks faster. “Boss, I went to check the service door because the lock has been sticking, and I didn’t want⁠—”

“You didn’t want what?” I ask.

He swallows. “I didn’t want a breach.”

I step closer. “A breach happened,” I tell him, “and the person it targeted was my wife.” He tries and fails to hold my gaze and looks down at the floor like the floor will give him a better answer. “Look at me,” I say.

He does, and his eyes shine, and he’s begging without words.

“Who told you to clear post three?” I ask.