Everybody in this room was watching me. I could feel it. About thirty-something people were staring at me, watching my expressions nervously. These were people who knew that my mood exactly depended on what I did next. I kept my face entirely still.
"Get me a copy of every camera feed from this floor," I said to no one in particular, but my head of security, Dante, was already moving before the sentence finished. "And someone clean that table."
Then I turned and walked to the doorway she had used. Matteo appeared on my shoulder immediately. "Caius—"
"She had a birthmark."
He paused. "...What?"
"On her left wrist. When her sleeve was pulled back in the corridor." I had seen it for perhaps three seconds or less. The corridor had been dim and she had yanked her sleeve down immediately, and still, I had seen it with a specific clarity. "A crescent-flame shape. On the inside of her left wrist."
Matteo was quiet for a moment. "You're describing your own birthmark."
"I know what I'm describing."
"Caius." His voice was very careful now, the way it got when he thought I was making a decision he would have to manage the consequences of later. "The contract—"
"The contract can be reprinted." I looked down the empty corridor. The service exit at the far end was slowly swinging shut, making a small hissing sound as it closed. "Find out who she is."
They couldn't find her.
I want to be very precise about how unusual that was: my security team could locate a mid-level government official in a country that officially didn't exist within forty-eight hours. Dante had, on two separate occasions, tracked individuals who had made a significant effort to disappear. His team was not composed of people who failed at things.
But then, they failed at this one.
The staff list had her listed as contracted through a third-party event company. The event company, when they were contacted, said they had no record of the name on the list. The name itself, 'Ava Steel,' just came back to nothing.
Three days after the gala, Dante sat across from me in my office and told me with the specific expression of a man delivering bad news to someone who would not react well to it.
"The name is fabricated," he said. "Whoever built the identity did it well. Not professionally… or not through the usual channels, but well. There's a birth record, an address history, and a work history. But none of it connects. The birth record references a hospital that doesn't cross-reference. The addresses are real places, but the tenancy records don't align with her. It's like someone constructed it from publicly available pieces without access to backend systems."
I looked outside of the floor-to-ceiling window at Milan, this very busy city. I took a deep breath, my jaw clenching.
"Keep looking," I said.
Four months after the gala, Matteo found me in my office at eleven at night, which was not unusual, and sat down without being invited, which was also not unusual.
"You should let this go," he said.
I looked up from my screen. "Let what go?"
"You know what." He was quiet for a moment, his expression doing the thing it did when he had thought carefully about how to say something to me so I didn't spark. "The trail is cold. If she wanted to be found, she would be findable. She's clearly chosen not to be, and whatever the reason for that, it's probably a reason worth respecting."
"You don't know what the reason is."
"Neither do you."
I leaned back in my chair. Only Matteo had the right to speak to me this way. I looked outside through my floor-to-ceiling window and the city lights glittered. "There were two birthmarks," I said. "Identical. Mirror image. Do you know the statistical probability of that being a coincidence?"
"I know you're a man who built an empire on data and probability," Matteo said carefully, "and I also know that sometimes we make data confirm what we've already decided to believe."
I looked at him for a moment.
"She'll surface," I said. "People always surface."
Matteo stood, buttoning his jacket. "I'm just worried about you, bro," he said, tapping my shoulders and leaving. I looked back at the screen.
Ava Steel. 5'4. Brown eyes. Long dark hair. Crescent-flame birthmark, on her left inner wrist.
I had read this file so many times I could have recited it in the dark.
It's been six months since the gala. I built a second mid-tech company and placed a general listing on every platform, ready for my HR to process hundreds of applications and also to conduct rolling interviews to find raw talent.
I told myself that she would surface. She would apply. She would walk back into my sight line and I would have my answers and whatever this was … this thing that has been disturbing my chest would finally make sense.
I was a patient man, I could wait.
And just like that, she came in on a Tuesday.
In a grey blazer and black jeans, with her hair down this time, exactly as it had been half-pinned at the gala, she sat in the lobby of the company I had built to find her and filled out the preliminary intake form with a pen she had brought herself.
I watched the security feed from my office upstairs.
And just as the little bitch felt me watching her, she looked straight at my security camera, the one I was watching her from.