The Kingsport wind doesn’t just blow; it interrogates. It slices through the layers of my thrifted wool coat, searching for weaknesses in my resolve or holes in my thermal leggings. I tuck my chin deeper into my scarf, the fabric scratchy against my skin, and feel the dull, rhythmic throb in the arches of my feet.
Twelve hours. Eight up and down and all around at a luxury real estate agency, answering phones, filing paperwork, and running errands for men who look through me like I’m a smudge on their glass partitions, and another four spent running the linoleum floors of The Midnight Griddle, a twenty-four-hour diner that specializes in “deluxe” breakfast burritos and the kind of quiet regret that starts to settle into my bones the moment I walk through the door.
I stand on the transit platform, the air thick with the smell of wet metal and my own exhaustion. I surreptitiously count my tips for the night, my fingers numb as I keep the money close to my chest and out of sight.
Fifty-two dollars and some change. I smooth out the crumpled fives, my thumb tracing the worn green paper as if I can squeeze more value out of it. It’s enough to keep the heat from being cut off for another month, provided the radiator in my living room doesn’t decide to stage another noisy, clanking protest against the Upstate New York winter.
I shove the bills into my pocket, my fingers brushing against the cold, smooth metal of my lipstick tube. Signature Pink.
It’s a ridiculous little thing to cling to—a ten-dollar tube of matte color—but it’s the only thing I own that doesn’t feel like it belongs to a ghost or a debt collector. Even when my eyes are bloodshot from the fluorescent hum of the diner and my strawberry-blonde hair is a wild, static-charged frizz, that sharp, defiant line on my lips is a promise. I am still Clarissa Leonard. Or at least, I’m the version of myself that refuses to let this city grind me into dust.
Mark, my ex-husband, preferred me invisible. A marriage without desire is a slow-acting frost that leaves a woman wondering if she ever truly existed outside of the grocery lists and the laundry cycles.
He didn’t want me—not my curves, which I carry with professional, careful grace, and certainly not the hyper-competent mind that now spends its energy managing important people’s schedules and detailed paperwork, following the letter of the city code, and refusing to be drowned under the mountain of paperwork all of that generates.
He looked through me until I started to believe I was made of glass. Now, three years after the divorce, I’m free of him, but the invisibility has stuck. It turns out survival is a lonely, quiet business, especially because I’m the only one doing the heavy lifting.
The train arrives with a screech that sets my teeth on edge, the brakes throwing black muck into the already-dirty slush beyond the tracks. I get on and find a seat near the back, then lean my head against the humming window.
Outside, Kingsport is a study in contradictions: the immaculate stone of the historic district and the decaying brick of the industrial fringes. The city is a masterpiece of Victorian ambition, from steep roofs and lancet windows, if you live high enough up in a penthouse to ignore the trash in the gutters. But from the transit tracks, it’s just a cage of gray.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, the vibration startling me. A text from Brayden. Hey Liss, did you manage to get that extension from the bank? The foreman on the site mentioned some contract shuffling. I might need to move sites, and I don’t want to lose the seniority hours.
The familiar tightening in my chest returns, a physical pressure that makes it hard to draw a full breath. Brayden is twenty-two, earnest, and completely unaware that I’m currently siphoning my life force into a mountain of debt just to keep him in that trade school. To him, our mother’s medical bills are a hurdle we’re clearing together. To me, they’re a landslide I’m holding back with my bare hands, one double shift at a time.
I’m on it, Bray, I type, my thumbs stiff from delivering so many frozen strawberry smoothies during tonight’s diner shift. Don’t worry about the site shuffle. Just do the work and keep your head down. I’ll handle the bank.
I lie because the alternative is unthinkable. If my brother knew how close we were to the edge, or the interest rates on the loans I’ve taken to pay for Mom’s funeral and the final three weeks of hospice care, he’d drop out. He’d try to save me, and in the process, he’d end up exactly where I am.
I won’t let him inherit the invisibility, and I certainly won’t let this city crush him into nothing the way it has me.
The walk from the station to my apartment is six blocks of shadows and flickering streetlights. The wind intensifies here, funneling between the tall, old townhomes with a low, mournful howl.
My building, a derelict conversion that’s seen better decades, looms at the end of the block. It smells of damp brick, old clothing, and the faint, citrusy tang of the industrial cleaner the landlord uses to mask the fact that the pipes are rotting. It is a smell I encounter every night, and I’ve actually started to appreciate it.
I reach the heavy metal door of the stoop, my fingers already digging for my keys, when a flash of white catches my eye.
An envelope flaps against the door.
It isn’t a standard utility notice or one of the landlord’s eviction flyers. Those are always printed on cheap, neon-yellow paper that sends a scream through my nervous system.
No, this is a heavy, creamy, linen-textured vellum that looks like it belongs in an archives museum or as a high-end invitation to a city event I wouldn’t even be allowed to cater.
My name is written across the front in a hand that is both arrogant and terrifyingly precise. The thick, black ink hasn’t bled into the grain as it forms the letters of my name.
Clarissa Leonard.
Not Lissa or Liss, which is what people who know me call me.
Clarissa. Formal. Final. Not friendly.
I pull the tape free, the sound of the adhesive tearing from the tin echoing in the silent street. My heart starts a frantic, uneven beat, like a bird trapped in a box. I look up to the windows of my unit on the third floor. They’re dark, as they always are when I return from the Griddle, but the building somehow feels…different. Hollow.
Sudden fear floods me, and I unlock the main door and sprint up the stairs, the ache in my feet forgotten under a tide of adrenaline. The hallway sits silent, the air still and smelling of nothing. No music from the neighbor in 3B, no smell of burnt cabbage from apartment C.
I reach my door, my heartbeat pounding and pounding and pounding. It stands ajar an inch, maybe less. I reach out and touch it with one finger, barely a push, because it isn’t locked. The door drifts open, and I could easily flick on the light.
But I don’t. I can’t. I inch forward into the doorway, staring as the sickly orange glow of the streetlamp beyond the living room window spills across the linoleum floor.
The apartment is empty.
My used sofa, the one with the sagging left cushion I’d fixed with a piece of plywood underneath—gone. The wonky dining table I’d spent a weekend painting white with the hope that it would make the room feel bigger—gone. The rows of paperback mysteries I’d meticulously organized by spine color, my only luxury—gone.
Even the rug, a faded indigo thing that had belonged to my mother, is missing. The walls are bare; the floors show the faint, ghostly outlines of where my life sat only twelve hours ago.
I walk into the center of the room, my breath coming in short, jagged gasps that hurt my lungs. This can’t be happening, and my brain seems to fracture into a hundred different thoughts.
How can this be? What do I do now?
I always lock my door. Always. Someone would need a key to get into the building at all, and my apartment sits at the end of the hall. No one else’s apartment has been emptied—why mine?
Maybe my brother…
“Brayden?” I whisper, my voice sounding small and fragile. I know he won’t be here, but the silence is so absolute I need to break it.
I stumble toward the kitchen. The cabinets stand wide open, their shelves picked clean. The mismatched plates I’d collected from various thrift stores over the years don’t wait for me to make myself a microwavable meal and then use the plates to try to feel like it’s home cooked.
Even the jar of strawberry jam I’d bought as a treat—a three-dollar luxury I’d been savoring—is gone.
As my eyes continue to fly from the missing kitchen curtains to the wall calendar I’d put on the side of the cabinet—now gone—my mind arrives at the only conclusion. “This isn’t a robbery.”
Thieves don’t take the extra shower curtain rings I’d tossed in a drawer and forgotten about. Thieves don’t take the spare lightbulbs and the half-empty box of tea. Thieves don’t leave a place smelling of professional-grade floor wax and expensive, cedar-noted industrial cleaner.
This is a removal.
Fear, as sharp and as cold as the Kingsport wind, slices through me. Is this the debt collectors? But why take my things? My belongings aren’t worth more than a few hundred bucks at a garage sale.
Somehow, the envelope still gripped in my hand suddenly feels so heavy. I look at it, seizing onto the possibilities it might hold.
I tear it open, the heavy paper resisting for a second before giving way. A single card, matching the envelope in weight and quality, sits inside. At the top is a gold-embossed crest—a hawk or a falcon, its wings spread wide, its talons curved and lethal. Beneath the gold bird is a series of coordinates and a street address.
Bellamy Court.
Ground East Wing, Suite 1.
The name hits me like a physical blow, because everyone in Kingsport knows the name. Bellamy Court is the fortress on the edge of the historic Gilded District, a four-sided monument of old money, quiet power, and the kind of wealth that only has to whisper to be obeyed.
Bellamy Court houses the main office of Ainsworth Property Investments, and only the most important executives and agents work there. Yes, they have secretaries too, but those jobs are earned over time, and no one ever gives them up.
I’ve been working for Ainsworth for only a couple of years, and there’s no way I belong in the main office. The women there will eat me alive, and I can’t even imagine what the men will be like.
Bellamy Court is also where the man the tabloids call Falcon lives in reclusive silence. His real name is Arthur Fairchild Ainsworth. The man who owns the skyline, who lives behind glass and shadows, and who—Rumor Number One—killed his own brother to secure the family empire.
I’ve spent my time at the company as a ghost in his system. I’m a junior secretary in a satellite office three miles away, a name on a payroll sheet that probably never crosses a senior executive’s desk, let alone the CEO’s. I get coffee for people far more important than I am. I file relocation permits. I handle the paperwork for people being moved out of derelict and newly purchased properties.
I look at the empty room, the realization sinking in with the weight of a stone.
“I’ve been handled.”
I’m now one of the files I used to check and then sort during my day shift. My choice to stay in the shadows, to endure the rat-infested apartment and the linoleum floors, has been overruled by a man with a gold-embossed bird on expensive stationery.
I pull the lipstick from my pocket. My hands shake so hard I have to use both to steady the tube. I don’t have a mirror, not even the small one that had once hung on the refrigerator, so I use the reflection in the dark, cold window.
The pink line is bright, almost vibrant against the pale, terrified cast of my face. It’s a mark of ownership, maybe, but I draw it on myself. My last act of self-definition before entering the machine.
“Okay,” I whisper to the void, the word echoing off the bare walls. “You want Clarissa? You’ve got her.”
I turn, walk out of the empty unit, and begin the long trek toward the Gilded District. Sure would’ve been nice to get this note at the diner, as it’s far closer to Bellamy Court than my apartment.
It’s not your apartment anymore.
I don’t know if I’m being rescued from my life or arrested by his, but as I leave the building, I don’t tuck my chin against the wind. I meet it head-on, my lips a sharp, pink line, ready for whatever Falcon Ainsworth has planned for the woman he’s summoned to Suite 1.
