The daisy was fresh.
That's what Ivy first noticed.
It hadn't wilted yet. Which meant that whoever had put it there had only just left moments earlier. The stem, neatly snapped in two, was deliberate. Not forceful. Simply symbolic.
She picked it up gingerly, holding it in two fingers as though it would mark her skin. Her workspace was a shambles—papers strewn everywhere, her red folder ripped, even her pen jar over as though it had been knocked over in anger rather than chaos. But nothing had been stolen. No locks broken. No sign of forced entry.
Elias arrived six minutes later, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, face half-asleep.
He stood in the doorway, stiffening at the sight of the commotion.
"I was out for two hours," he complained, slamming the coffee down with an ugly clack. "Did you get anything done?"
"Just this," Ivy said, holding up the daisy.
Elias stared at it like it was a bomb.
"Jesus," he spat. "That's not a warning. That's personal."
Ivy nodded.
For a moment, the room was still. Dust motes floated in the cold morning light, and the buzz of the fluorescent lights above them was the only sound.
"I'll file a report," Elias said finally. "We'll call security, check the logs—"
"No," Ivy interrupted softly but firmly.
He turned to her, surprised. "What?"
"I want to do this my way." If we go through the proper channels, the wrong man may bury it. Or use it against us. We keep it on the down low until we decide to make the announcement."
Elias looked at her—actually looked—and something shifted in his expression.
"You're not scared," he said.
"I am," she said. "But I'm tired of being scared alone."
They walked three blocks to the nearest café. Not the one where Maria worked shifts. Someplace nameless, safer. A place with worn tile, plastic marble tables, and a heater that creaked and whirred as if it would collapse at any time.
Elias ordered black coffee. Ivy ordered tea. Neither of them drank their beverages.
He broke the silence.
"I had somebody tail one of Vortan Solutions' contractors last night," he said. "Guy had a five-minute meeting with an ex-city bureaucrat at a warehouse in Queens. The security cam picked them up exchanging a flash drive."
"What was it?"
"Have no idea. The guy's car was torched two hours later."
Ivy was quiet.
"This isn't amateur work," Elias said. "Whoever is doing this has money. Access. They're not just protecting secrets—they're protecting a legacy."
Ivy picked up her spoon and stirred it through her tea, although the tea did not require stirring.
"There's something else," she said. "When I was lying in wait outside the warehouse last night, I could have sworn I saw someone standing behind one of the windows."
"Thought?"
"I blinked, and they disappeared. "But I knew."
Elias nodded slowly.
"I've been thinking," he'd told her. If they're so desperate to incinerate paper trails, perhaps it's time we begin creating some of our own.
Ivy looked up. "You want to make ourselves public?"
"Not yet. But we start making redundancies. Scan, upload, copy. We hide evidence in plain sight. Disperse it everywhere. Let it be somewhere even we can't control. That way, if something goes wrong with either one of us—
"We won't disappear," Ivy finished.
He locked eyes with her.
And for a moment, everything was quiet—like the world around them just paused long enough for what was between them to grow deeper.
"Why did you save me?" she asked suddenly. "At first. You didn't know me. You barely even wanted to be there."
He stared out the window, his mind in overdrive.
"Because you were right," he said finally. "About the dates. The papers. You were on target. Written up. And you didn't care that I used to be someone."
She blinked. "Used to be?"
Elias smiled, a pitiful, twisted thing. "I was good. Once. But I lost the story. Started running after the spotlight instead of the truth."
He took a sip of his coffee, then continued, "You reminded me what it's supposed to be like. Finding something real."
Ivy remained silent. She did not need to.
After lunch, Ivy went back to the archive, and Elias took the train out to inspect the Queens Storage facility. She left the lights down and the door shut, rooting through each of the papers she managed to retrieve, uploading them to a secure cloud with no name on it. Alias username. No email link. A sequence of letters and numbers scribbled down and stashed in the pocket of a book on her desk.
Occasionally, she'd pause and look back over her shoulder.
Nothing.
But the air still remained denser than it should have.
At approximately 6:00 PM, she also heard heavy steps from the staircase. One pair. Slow.
She leaned up in her chair, heart thumping louder, and grabbed her phone just in case.
Then the door creaked, and Paul, her supervisor, entered.
"Oh," he said, blinking at her. "Didn't expect you still here."
"I'm finishing up," Ivy said. "Was just about to lock up."
Paul stepped further into the room. His face was calm, but something in his eyes looked tired. Faint shadows. A flicker of guilt.
He glanced around at the freshly cleaned-up workspace.
"You doing okay?" he asked, too casually.
Ivy nodded. "Just some misfiled boxes."
He walked to her desk, picked up a folder, and flipped through it without really seeing the pages.
"Have been asking a lot of questions lately."
Ivy stiffened.
"Research," she replied, curtly.
Paul nodded. Then he glanced at her—really did glance—at her and said, "Take care, Ivy." Others don't appreciate it when their histories get rewritten."
Then he departed.
That evening, Elias phoned.
"I discovered something," he told me. "Jordan Rhys didn't exactly disappear—he was eliminated. No forwarding information. No tax filing. But I discovered a name he used once—Matthew Soren. He petitioned for a name change three months prior to his disappearance."
"And?"
"There is a Matthew Soren who works part-time at a Pennsylvania post office in the middle of nowhere. Off the grid. No phone, no email. Just a PO box and the weather forecast."
"You think he's the one?"
"I'd bet my last byline."
Ivy paused. "Then we leave."
"I'll arrange for the car rental," Elias said. "We leave at dawn."