The Palm Reader's Secret

Elena traced the life line on her left palm, the skin slightly damp from the condensation on her whiskey glass. The office was dark except for the emergency exit sign—red, like the warning she'd been ignoring all month.

She'd been running from something, hadn't she? Not the metaphorical running everyone did in corporate America—running from responsibility, running toward promotion. No, this was different. Someone had been in her system.

The cat, a stray she'd named Oracle, wound around her ankles. Elena had started feeding it three weeks ago, the same week she'd noticed the discrepancies in the quarterly reports. Small things. Untraceable things. The kind of things only someone with access—real access—could hide.

"You know something," she whispered to Oracle. The cat's amber eyes glowed in the darkness. "You've been watching him too."

Him. David from Risk Management. Who always arrived early. Who always lingered by her desk when she stepped away. Who'd mentioned, casually over coffee, that his sister read palms in college—said he could always tell when someone's life line was about to fork.

Elena's palm still bore the indentation from where David had grabbed her hand yesterday. "Let me see," he'd said, jovial, friendly. "Just curious. My sister swore by this stuff."

She'd laughed it off. But now, tracing the shallow curve where her fate line should've been, she remembered his thumb pressing into her skin. Measuring. Calculating.

The cat meowed—a sharp, demanding sound.

"Right." Elena downed the rest of her drink. "Tomorrow morning. I'll transfer the files before he gets in. Then we'll see who's really been reading whose palm."

Oracle jumped onto her desk, tail twitching, watching her with something like approval. Outside, the city hummed with secrets and running footsteps and hundreds of thousands of people just trying to stay ahead of whoever was following them.

Elena smiled, finally, and opened her laptop. The spy in her organization had made one mistake: he'd thought he was the only one who knew how to read the signs written in skin and silence and the careful architecture of lies.