The text came in at 11:58, and it was from her own number.

Don't go down to the parking garage.

Elena read it twice, standing at the elevator bank with her keys already in her hand. Her phone hadn't been out of her sight all night. She checked the sender field again. Her name. Her photo. Her number, the one only three people had.

She called it. Straight to voicemail, her own voice telling her to leave a message.

The building was empty this late, just her and the cleaning crew two floors down, their cart wheels squeaking somewhere far off. She thought about calling security, but security was Marcus, and Marcus was the reason she was working this late in the first place, going through the expense reports he thought nobody would ever cross-check.

Another text. You have six minutes. Take the stairs instead.

Six minutes to what, she didn't ask, because some animal part of her brain had already decided to believe it. She pushed through the stairwell door instead of the elevator, and the metal clang of it behind her sounded too loud, like it wanted to be heard.

Fourteen floors. She counted them out loud, which she never did, but the counting kept her legs moving and her mind from doing the thing where it built the worst possible version of Marcus waiting in a parking garage with three weeks left before an audit he could not survive.

At floor six, her phone buzzed again. Good. Keep going. Almost there.

She stopped on the landing, back against the cold concrete, and really looked at the message this time. Not the words. The timestamp. It matched her phone's clock exactly, down to the second, which meant whoever was sending these either had access to her carrier or access to her phone directly, and either option turned her stomach.

She thought about the badge reader logs. Every door in this building logged entry and exit times, tied to badge ID, and Marcus had asked her, three days ago, in that too-casual way of his, whether the system also logged elevator calls.

It did. She was the one who'd set it up.

Elena opened her badge history app right there on the landing. Her elevator call, 11:57 PM, floor fourteen to floor one, cancelled at 11:58 when she'd taken the stairs instead. Below that, a second entry she hadn't made. An elevator call to floor fourteen, placed at 11:56, from a badge registered to Marcus Voss, currently checked in at floor one.

He'd called the elevator to come get her one minute before she'd have pressed the button herself. He knew her habits. He knew she stayed until midnight on Thursdays. He'd been waiting in the garage the whole time, and the elevator would have opened right into wherever he was standing.

The messages weren't a warning from a stranger. They were from her own number because she'd forwarded her work phone's texts to her personal number two months ago, back when she thought she was being careful, and someone in IT, someone with Marcus's clearance level, had quietly mirrored the forward without telling her.

Someone else had seen the messages Marcus never intended her to see. Someone else was watching the same badge logs she was.

Her phone buzzed one last time.

Not Marcus. Me. Go back up. Tell no one you got these. I'll explain everything at your desk. I already called the police from the lobby.

The sender ID was still her own name. Elena looked down the stairwell, then back up, and for the first time all night, she started climbing instead of running.