Everything We Locked Inside

Renato is already at the door, running his hands along the frame, looking for the mechanism. There is nothing visible. The door is steel, set flush into a reinforced frame. No gap at the bottom. No window. The ventilation grate in the ceiling is eight inches wide and covered with a welded screen. The room was designed, I realize — I realize it in a way that settles cold and heavy in my chest — not just to keep things in, but to keep people in.
This is not a storage room. Not primarily. Someone converted it, or always intended it, as something else.
Renato says, “The contact set us up.” His voice is flat, which with Renato means he is frightened.
Ifeoma says nothing. She takes out her phone and finds what we already suspected: no signal. The walls, we later determine by tapping, are lined with something dense — concrete reinforced with metal mesh, the kind of construction that kills radio frequency dead.
Seve is gone. The comms are dead. The door is locked from outside. And we are four stories below a building whose owner we have never met, carrying equipment that constitutes evidence of a crime, in the middle of a city that does not know we are here.
The slow part comes now. The part that takes hours.
We go through every inch of the room. Methodically, together at first, then in pairs, then alone as the frustration between us begins to find edges. Renato checks the shelving units for structural weaknesses. Ifeoma examines the ventilation. I go through the filing cabinets — all of them, not just the target — looking for anything that might tell us what this room is actually for, who Delacroix is, what we have walked into.
What I find, in a cabinet near the back, does not help us escape. But it changes the shape of what I understand.
There are personnel files. Not financial documents. Personnel files with photographs — men and women, various ages, some of them with notations in a shorthand I don’t immediately recognize but that resolves, slowly, into something like a ledger of people who were brought here and did not leave through the front door. The dates go back fifteen years. The most recent entry is eleven days ago.
I close the cabinet. I stand with my hand on it for a moment.
Then I go back to the others and I say, “We need to get out of here before someone comes back.”
I don’t tell them what I found. Not yet. I tell myself it is because we need focus, not panic. I tell myself it is the tactically correct decision.
Renato and Ifeoma argue for two hours about the vent. Ifeoma believes, correctly, that the screen can be removed with enough sustained pressure on the mounting bolts. Renato believes, also correctly, that the shaft beyond it is too narrow for any of us to fit through. They are both right and neither is useful. I watch them argue and I feel a strange detachment, a flatness, that I recognize and do not examine.
Seve comes back on comms at the three-hour mark. The signal is weak, intermittent, cutting in and out. He is outside the building. He tells us the guard rotation changed early — there are two guards now, not one, and they know someone is in the building. He cannot get back in. He is telling us this from a parking structure across the street, watching the building’s exits.
He tells us something else. The keycard we used was flagged the moment we entered. Someone was monitoring. Someone wanted us inside.
Renato sits down. Just sits down on the floor in the middle of the room and puts his face in his hands. Not dramatic. Just tired. Just someone who has finally run out of the particular energy that keeps you from knowing what you know.
“I vouched for the contact,” he says. “I vouched for this whole thing.”
Ifeoma looks at me. There is a question in her expression that I understand completely: did I know something I didn’t share? I hold her gaze. I say nothing. Which is, I understand in the looking-away that follows, its own kind of answer.

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About the Author

Adrian Chervinsky — studied Criminal Psychology not to catch them but loose the cops tail … Dark narrow streets you prefer to avoid? He calls them home.

— Adrian Chervinsky

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July 28, 2026

10min-stories