Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I intentionally stayed late that night to work overtime.

Nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock. One by one, the people in the office left. I dimmed my computer screen and sat at my desk, waiting. Just before midnight, I grabbed my bag, turned off the lights, and exited through the west security door.

The stairwell was even quieter than the night before.

I set my phone to recording mode and tucked it into my chest pocket, leaving only the camera lens exposed. I kept my footsteps as light as possible.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Still a landing beneath my feet.

I stood there, motionless.

After about half a minute, the lighting for the entire floor suddenly dimmed, as if entering a nighttime power-saving mode. The regular lights cut out, and the emergency and exit signs flickered on, bathing the stairwell in a miserable, sickly greenish-white glow.

In that exact moment, I heard a click by my feet.

Looking down, I saw the front edge of the very bottom step slowly flip outward.

It was like a tongue hidden inside the landing.

Once it finished unfolding, it perfectly compensated for the height of a single stair. The Eleventh Step.

And that white shoe was already sitting right on top of it.

My scalp went numb instantly.

Someone had beaten me here.

Just as I was about to retreat, the beam of a flashlight suddenly swept up from downstairs. I quickly shrank into the corner and held my breath. Han Zeqian walked slowly up from the fourteenth floor, his pace unhurried, as if he were on a routine patrol.

He didn’t look anywhere else; he walked straight toward the shoe.

The flashlight beam hit the surface of the shoe, and his expression darkened immediately.

“Still one missing,” he whispered.

I almost didn’t catch it.

The next second, he crouched down and reached his hand under the flip-out step, as if feeling for something. After a few seconds of searching, he came up empty-handed and let out a curse.

Then he looked up, his gaze snapping directly toward where I was hiding.

My heart stopped.

“Come out,” he said. “Miss Tang.”

Sweat instantly broke out across my back.

He couldn’t possibly have seen me, yet he had called out my name with absolute precision.

I gritted my teeth and didn’t move. The stairwell was so silent I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.

After a dozen seconds, he actually chuckled. He picked up the shoe, turned around, and headed back downstairs.

I waited until the sound of his footsteps had completely vanished before I dared to breathe.

On the phone recording, I had only captured half of his profile and a muffled, “Still one missing.”

But what truly chilled me to the bone was something else.

When I returned to the first floor, Han Zeqian was already sitting behind the security desk, looking as if he had never left. He swiped me through the security gate and looked up at me, smiling with polite professionality.

“It’s not safe to film things at night,” he said. “There was a little girl last week who also liked investigating the stairs. She disappeared later.”

I stared at him fixedly.

The little girl he was talking about could only be Lu Qingchuan.