CAMPUS UNDERCOVER
Love in Plain Sight
Mật Vụ Sau Giảng Đường
CHAPTER EIGHT
Daniel's Last Lie
Harper didn't call ahead. She didn't trust herself to hear his voice before she saw his face — some instinct telling her that whatever Daniel said on a phone could be rehearsed, but whatever crossed his expression when she showed him the photograph in person would not.
He opened the door of his sparse little apartment already looking like a man bracing for something.
"You knew Graham Bell," Harper said, before he could say hello, before he could offer tea or an explanation or any of the small civilities that might soften what was coming. She held out her phone, the photograph enlarged on the screen. "Eleven years ago. Before any of this. You're standing right next to him, smiling, like old friends."
Daniel looked at the photograph for a long moment. He didn't reach for the phone. He didn't ask where she'd found it.
"Come in," he said instead, quiet. "Sit down. I'll tell you the truth this time. All of it."
"You said that last time."
"I know."
• • •
They sat at his small kitchen table — the same table where, weeks ago, they'd laughed together over Elliot's clumsy attempt at comfort, back when the worst thing happening to any of them was a suspension. Elliot arrived eleven minutes later, summoned by a text from Harper that said only *now*, and took the seat beside her without a word, arms crossed, face carefully arranged into something that gave nothing away.
Daniel poured himself a glass of water he didn't drink, which Harper understood, somehow, as its own kind of confession — a man buying seconds before he had to say something he'd been avoiding for a very long time.
"Thomas didn't disappear because he was investigating this university," Daniel said finally. "Not entirely. He disappeared because four years ago, he made a decision I have spent every day since trying to understand, and failing to forgive, and being too much of a coward to report."
"What decision," Elliot said. It wasn't really a question. It came out flat, already braced.
"He started working for Graham Bell," Daniel said. "Quietly, at first — feeding him information about the Bureau's investigation into Hudson Heights, in exchange for money that started small and grew considerably less small over eighteen months. I found out near the end. I confronted him. He told me Graham had something on him — an old case, a mistake Thomas made years earlier that Graham had somehow gotten hold of, and was using to control him." Daniel's hands tightened around the glass. "I believed him. I still believe him, actually, which is either loyalty or naivety, and I've never quite decided which."
"You believed your partner was being blackmailed into betraying you," Harper said slowly, "and you didn't report it."
"I told myself I was protecting him. I told myself if I gave him time, he'd find a way out, and I could bring him back instead of bringing him down." Daniel's voice had gone very quiet. "Two weeks after our last conversation, he vanished. No note. No trace. For four years, I've told myself that meant Graham had him killed, or hidden, or silenced — because the alternative, the possibility that he simply chose to stay and keep working for the man who'd been paying him, was worse than any version of him being dead."
"And now?" Elliot asked.
"Now Graham says Thomas worked for him," Daniel said. "Past tense, present tense, I don't know which he meant, and it terrifies me that I can't tell the difference anymore."
The room went very still.
"Why did you come to Hudson Heights," Harper said finally. "The real reason. Not the cover story."
Daniel met her eyes, and for the first time since she'd known him, didn't look away.
"I came here to investigate the corruption, yes," he said. "That was real. But I also came here because this was the last place Thomas was assigned before he vanished, and some part of me — the part that isn't a very good agent, apparently — has spent every single day of this assignment hoping I would find something that proved he was a victim instead of a traitor." He set the glass down, hands not quite steady. "I let both of you become part of an investigation that was never entirely about corruption. Part of it was always about a man I couldn't let go of. I should have told you that from the beginning. I didn't, because I was afraid that if I told you the whole truth, you'd stop trusting me enough to help."
"So instead," Elliot said, voice low and dangerously even, "you let us find out from Graham Bell through a boardroom door."
"Yes."
"That's not an answer that makes this better."
"I know," Daniel said. "I'm not asking you to feel better about it. I'm telling you the truth, finally, because you deserve it more than I deserve to keep hiding behind a version of this that made me look less complicit in my own mistakes."
• • •
It should have ended there — a hard conversation, an honest one, the kind that leaves a room feeling scraped raw but ultimately cleaner. It didn't end there, because Elliot, staring at the table with the specific stillness Harper had learned to associate with him deciding something difficult, said, very quietly, "There's something I haven't told you either."
Harper turned to look at him. Something cold moved through her before he'd even said the words, some instinct arriving half a second ahead of the sentence.
"Before any of this started," Elliot said, not looking at either of them, "before the night in the library, before I even knew Daniel was anything other than a professor — someone approached me. A man I didn't know. He offered me money to pull data on Hudson Heights' financial systems. Scholarship records, donor logs, anything I could access through the university's network architecture. I didn't ask a lot of questions. I needed the money. My family was still recovering from what happened to my dad, and I was good at exactly the kind of thing he was asking for, and I told myself it was just data. Numbers. Nothing that could hurt anyone."
"When," Harper said, very carefully.
"Two months before we saw Daniel in the library. I'd already pulled most of what he asked for by the time all of this started. I stopped taking his calls once I realized what I was actually looking at — but I never told anyone, because by the time I understood it mattered, I was already scared of what it meant that I'd done it at all."
"You were working for someone," Harper said, "before any of this. Before Daniel. Before me."
"I didn't know who he was working for," Elliot said, and for the first time all evening, his careful composure genuinely cracked. "I swear to you, Harper, I didn't know. I found out weeks later, doing exactly the kind of digging Daniel taught us to do, that the account paying me traced back to a shell corporation registered to—"
"Graham Bell," Daniel said quietly, finishing the sentence Elliot couldn't.
The kitchen went silent in a way that felt, to Harper, like the floor tilting slightly beneath her.
"You've been lying to me," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "This whole time. Every time we found something, every time you helped me chase this, you already knew you'd handed Graham Bell a head start."
"I didn't know it was Graham until recently. I've been trying to figure out how to tell you since I found out, and every day I didn't, it got harder, because every day made it look worse that I'd waited."
"That's not the same as not lying."
"No," Elliot said. "It's not."
Harper stood up so fast her chair scraped hard against the floor. "I need to think," she said, to neither of them specifically, already reaching for her jacket. "I need to not be in this room right now, with either of you, because I don't currently know who I'm supposed to trust, and that is not a feeling I know how to sit with."
"Harper—" Elliot started.
"Don't," she said, not unkindly, just tired in a way that went all the way down. "Not tonight. I need to go."
Neither of them stopped her.
• • •
She walked back to campus alone, the September evening gone sharp and cold in a way that matched her mood exactly, replaying the last hour in her head on a loop that got no more comfortable with repetition. Daniel had lied by omission for months to protect a man who might have betrayed him. Elliot had taken money from a stranger who turned out to be the same man they were now trying to bring down. Everyone she'd trusted this semester had been keeping some version of the truth from her, and she didn't know, walking alone under streetlights that felt colder than usual, whether that made her naive for trusting them or whether it simply made trusting people in general a losing bet.
She didn't notice the van until it was already too late to matter.
It happened fast, in the specific, disorienting way that violence in movies never quite prepares you for — a door sliding open behind her, a hand closing hard over her mouth before she could scream, the world tilting sideways as she was pulled backward off her feet. She fought, genuinely fought, nails and elbows and every ounce of the adrenaline flooding her system, and it didn't matter even slightly against the size and speed of whoever had her, and within seconds the van door slid shut and the street outside her dormitory — the one she'd walked past a thousand times, the one that was supposed to be safe precisely because it was so aggressively ordinary — was gone.
The last thing she registered clearly, before something was pressed over her nose and mouth and the world went soft and distant and finally dark, was the specific, useless thought that she'd left her phone in her jacket pocket, unlocked, and that whoever had her would find it in about four seconds.
• • •
Elliot found the text forty minutes later, sitting in Daniel's apartment in a silence so heavy neither of them had managed to say anything since Harper left, both of them staring at nothing, both of them absorbing the specific shape of having hurt someone they cared about by trying to protect her from the truth.
His phone buzzed. He almost didn't look at it. He would spend the rest of his life being grateful that he did.
The number wasn't one he recognized. The message was short, precise, and formatted with the specific, chilling efficiency of someone who had planned this exchange in advance, down to the word choice.
*We have Harper. She's unharmed, for now. If you want her to stay that way, bring the data drive to the graduation ceremony. Come alone. Tell no one. You'll be contacted with instructions. If Rowan or anyone else gets involved, she doesn't make it home.*
Elliot read it twice. Then he read it a third time, because some part of his brain refused to process it the first two.
"Daniel."
Something in his voice made Daniel look up immediately, already moving before he'd fully processed why.
"What," Daniel said. "What is it."
Elliot turned the phone around, hand shaking slightly in a way he would later be embarrassed by and, in the moment, couldn't have stopped if his life depended on it.
Daniel read the message once. His face went the specific, terrible white of a man watching every worst-case scenario he'd been quietly rehearsing for months finally arrive all at once.
"They took her," Daniel said, very quietly, and it wasn't a question.
"They took her," Elliot repeated, and the two words felt like the only true thing left in the entire apartment.