New York hadn't changed, it was still ruthless in the rain.
Zariah Cole stepped off the train beneath a steel coloured sky, dragging a suitcase behind her that felt heavier with memories than clothes. Her heels clicked against the floor, echoing through a station that smelled like wet concrete and old ambition.
Five years ago, she'd fled this place with shaking hands and a broken heart. Now she is back not to rebuild, but to settle the ghosts that refused to die quietly. The cab she flagged moved too slowly. The buildings looked taller, her name felt foreign when the doorman said it; Ms Cole, welcome home.
Home.
As if the penthouse at the top of the Cole residence wasn't soaked in her mother's blood. As if Zariah hadn't been eighteen and alone when they called it a suicide. But grief doesn't evaporate. It steps into floorboards, walls, memories. Stepped out of the elevator onto the top floor and braced herself. The key still fit. The lock still clicked. The silence inside was the same oppressive, humming, alive.
She walked slowly through the apartment, her mother's perfume still lingered in the masters bedroom. A single wineglass stood on the kitchen counter and in the corner of the living room, just behind the shadows of the grand piano, a framed picture faced backward.
Zariah flipped it over.
A candid shot. She and her mother. Laughing. Her mother's hand in her hair. A good afternoon. A time when everything felt simple before secrets began eating holes through their world. Her chest tightened but she didn't cry. Crying was a luxury she had long buried.
Then she saw it. Taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet, yellowed, fragile and untouched, was an envelope. Her name scrawled across the front in her mother's delicate, unmistakable handwriting.
Zariah!.
She reached for it, fingertips trembling.
Before she could open it, the intercom buzzed, loud, unexpected. She jumped.
'Ms Cole' a voice said through the speaker, deep and polished. "This is Dorian Voss. I believe we have business to discuss, unless you'd rather I come up."
Her heart stopped.
Dorian Voss.
That name wasn't supposed to sound familiar but it did. Somewhere between her ribs and her memory, it echoed.
She pressed the button to let him in, then turned back towards the envelope.
On the back, faint and in pencil, her mother had written just four words
"Don't trust Dorian Voss."