All Doors Locked (eBook)

Some Offices Hide More Than Just Secrets

Bilal Salman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
270 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-112338-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Twelve employees clock in for the night shift. By morning, one of them is missing-and the building is sealed from the inside.

When Mira joins a last-minute overnight project in a locked-down corporate office, she expects long hours and flickering lights... not silence, panic, and a vanishing colleague. The security footage is wiped. All the doors are electronically jammed. And their boss-the only person with override access-died mysteriously just one week earlier.

As fear turns inward and paranoia takes hold, secrets begin to surface. No one is exactly who they claim to be. Not even Mira.

And someone inside has orchestrated the entire night.

Some offices hide more than just secrets.
Some never unlock at all.

A claustrophobic psychological thriller perfect for fans of Lucy Foley, Sarah Pearse, and Netflix dramas like Behind Her Eyes and The Silent Sea.
If you love tense, twisty fiction where the truth hides behind every locked door, you'll devour All Doors Locked.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

 

 

The night began with a broken vending machine and a stuttering light.

Mira Blake stood outside the glass security doors, staring upward as the fluorescent panel overhead flickered like it was caught between breaths. The bulb buzzed, coughed, then sputtered back to life, casting its pale glow across the tiled entryway. The light washed everything into the wrong shade, like the building itself had been dipped in static. Her badge hung loose from her lanyard, heavy against her chest, untouched. She hadn’t swiped in yet.

The moment stretched longer than it should have. Mira had worked enough shifts in buildings like this to know when silence was ordinary and when it wasn’t. Tonight’s silence pressed at her ears like water, thick and oppressive, making her skin tighten.

She adjusted the strap of her bag and breathed in the air. Even from outside the checkpoint, she could taste the recycled chill bleeding through the seams of the glass. The building was wide awake. Not in the way of bustling lobbies and elevators packed with chatter, but in the low, restrained way of something holding still — too still — like it was waiting for someone to step too close.

She’d told herself this was just another job, but Tower 9 had a way of making promises unravel before they were even spoken. The steel-and-glass monolith had stood here for decades, aging badly against the city skyline, its once-proud ambition sealed under dust and neglect. The top floors had been abandoned to renovations that never came. Half the offices remained wrapped in plastic and plastic-smelling emptiness. And still, for reasons no one cared to explain, security protocol had only grown stricter, as though the emptier the building became, the more dangerous it was to be inside it.

Mira finally stepped forward, badge cold between her fingers as she swiped it across the reader. The scanner blinked green, but there was no pleasant tone, no automated welcome. Only the sharp metallic thunk of a lock disengaging, followed by the sigh of pressurized air releasing, like the building resented letting her in.

The door slid open, slow and reluctant.

She was the ninth to arrive.

Inside, the lobby stretched out like a hollow shell. A single security desk sat near the center, buried under stacked clipboards and coffee-stained reports. Behind it, a tall, sharp-featured man bent over the paperwork without glancing up. His lanyard swung loosely from his neck. The name printed in bold across it caught Mira’s eye.

Grant Hale. Night Operations Lead.

“You’re late,” he said, still scribbling, as if the fact were already logged.

“Seven minutes,” Mira replied.

“Seven minutes is long enough to wipe a server clean, walk out with half a backup in your shoe, or disappear without anyone noticing.” His voice was flat, his words clipped, not an accusation so much as a calculation. Then he finally looked at her, dark eyes level. “Or long enough to arrive unnoticed.”

She kept her expression steady. “I was briefed on the schedule. This isn’t my first lockdown.”

Grant gave a half-shrug, as if the point didn’t matter, and motioned toward the elevators. “Fourth floor, east wing. Conference Room C. Everyone’s waiting.”

She lingered for a breath, instinct prickling. “No keycard updates?”

“You won’t need one tonight,” he said. “Once the system rolls over, the building locks down. No exits. No network access. No elevators.”

Mira tilted her head. “No elevators?”

“Shut down at nine sharp. Stairs, too. Procedure.”

Her jaw tightened, but she gave a small nod and stepped toward the nearest lift. The metal doors yawned open, and she entered alone. The air inside smelled faintly of oil and stale carpet, the sort of industrial odor that seeped into her skin and clung long after leaving. The panel lights climbed too slowly, ticking upward with the drag of a second hand stretched to its breaking point.

When the doors opened again, the hall beyond was darker, cooler.

Only one light worked above her, buzzing faintly with each flicker, and beneath it stretched a corridor lined with half-assembled cubicles, wrapped furniture, unplugged monitors, and the sour tang of dust sealed too long. It felt like walking through a memory of an office rather than the thing itself, like a place paused mid-thought.

Muffled voices carried from ahead — low, tired, detached. Mira followed them until she reached Conference Room C.

The others were already there, scattered around a long table, and Grant hadn’t exaggerated about their energy. Their expressions were heavy-lidded, their movements sluggish. A blonde woman scrolled endlessly through her phone, thumb flicking though there was no signal inside the building. Two men in matching maintenance uniforms leaned over a crate, playing cards half-heartedly, their laughter brittle. A nervous technician with glasses sliding down his nose scribbled something in a notebook and quickly shoved it under his folder the moment Mira entered.

The room smelled faintly of burnt coffee and the faint chemical tang of old carpeting.

No one introduced themselves. No one smiled. Mira nodded without direction and claimed a chair near the back, her instincts already scanning.

Twelve people. She counted without meaning to, her eyes catching each face, each presence. Including herself.

The elevator chimed again.

The final arrival slipped through the doorway quietly, hood drawn low, head tilted down. No one acknowledged them. No one even looked up. They drifted into a dim corner near the wall where the light barely touched.

Mira’s gut tightened. The movement was too smooth, too deliberate. Like someone who had trained themselves to go unseen. She blinked once — and they were already gone, swallowed by shadow.

A moment later, Grant entered, clipboard under his arm. His expression never changed as he looked around the room.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s go over tonight’s procedure.”

But Mira wasn’t listening.

Her eyes stayed fixed on the corner.

And the figure who stood there didn’t move at all.

The briefing dragged on like a sermon no one believed in.

Grant Hale stood at the front of the conference room, pacing with his clipboard, voice steady but flat, reciting protocol as though the words themselves were supposed to be enough to keep the building from unraveling. Server maintenance schedules. Hard backup rotations. Access restrictions. Local-only firewalls. Code freeze until morning. Each instruction landed with the dull weight of routine.

But Mira couldn’t focus. Not really.

The room felt wrong.

The overhead lights flickered every so often, the brief interruptions forcing her eyes to recalibrate, stretching the shadows and bending the angles of faces around the table. Across from her, the technician with the slipping glasses looked as though he hadn’t slept in weeks. His hand twitched each time he adjusted his pen. The blonde woman with the dead phone sat unnervingly still, her thumb scrolling against a dark screen as if she didn’t realize nothing was moving. The men with the playing cards had abandoned their game and were staring blankly at the tabletop.

But Mira noticed most of all the one who wasn’t participating at all.

The figure in the corner.

Still. Silent. Hood up. Head down.

They hadn’t moved since entering. They weren’t taking notes, weren’t fidgeting, weren’t even pretending to listen. They stood like a shadow that had forgotten it wasn’t supposed to be seen.

Mira leaned back slightly in her chair, shifting under the pretense of stretching, giving herself an angle to glance toward the corner again. The light stuttered once more, stretching the room in a wash of static gray.

And the figure was gone.

She blinked, her pulse quickening.

The corner was empty.

She swept her gaze quickly across the room. The others were still half-listening, half-asleep, none of them registering anything amiss. Grant kept speaking, his voice steady, clipped, unbothered.

“…all doors remain locked until 6:00 a.m.,” he said, tapping his pen against the clipboard. “No overrides. No access in or out. Keycards deactivated once this briefing concludes.”

His tone didn’t waver, didn’t crack.

Mira’s stomach did.

She wanted to interrupt, to call attention to what she had seen—or hadn’t seen—but her instincts held her back. Something told her that breaking the rhythm of the room would shift more than just attention. It would disturb whatever thin veil kept this night from tipping further into something worse.

Grant flipped a page. “Your stations are listed in the folders provided. If a workstation malfunctions, log the error, stay put, and wait for redirection. Do not move floors without clearance. Do not use alternate stairwells. And above all, do not touch the server closet.”

One of the maintenance men laughed under his breath, the sound small, brittle. Grant didn’t even blink.

“I’m not joking,” he said, his tone so flat it carried more weight than shouting. “That closet is under audit. Cameras on Level 3 are down. Nobody goes near it until morning.”

Mira raised her hand slowly, forcing her voice into something calm. “That wasn’t in the shift memo.”

Grant’s eyes met hers briefly. No irritation. No surprise. Just an unreadable calculation. “It wasn’t cleared until this afternoon.” He turned away as if the matter were settled. “Follow the procedure. You’ll all be...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 0-00-112338-6 / 0001123386
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-112338-0 / 9780001123380