“Tonight,” Lovell said as Monk punched in the code and the gates started their slow inward swing. “I don’t want a box of drugs sitting in my car any longer than necessary.”
Monk chuckled. Yeah, he wouldn’t either. “What about you, Dulcie? Want to move out of whatever hotel you’ve been staying at and crash here?” he asked as the castle came into view.
“Not tonight. Maybe if I stick around,” he responded. “I have my stuff there and already paid for the night. Doesn’t make sense to leave now. The beds are comfortable.” He paused. “The walls are thin, but the beds are comfortable.”
“Amorous neighbors?” Lovell asked, grinning.
“A couple with three kids under four,” Dulcie countered. “Cute as hell and not bad kids, just the typical chaos.”
Having helped raise his sisters, Dulcie was the most outspoken about loving kids. Despite her husband’s flying fist, his mom had managed to keep both her relationship with her kids and their relationship to one another tight ones.
“Well, you won’t have that problem here. The walls are ten inches of stone in most places,” Monk said. Although the wide-plank floors on the upper floors creaked more than he remembered.
No one mentioned the fact that he still had a bed set up on the tasting room couch. He’d left his things in his old room but hadn’t fully committed to crashing there yet.
A few minutes later, he let himself into the castle, toeing off his boots at the entrance. Halfway down the hall, he detoured into the small kitchen to grab some water, drawing up short when he spied a glass, half full, sitting on the counter.
Silently, he shifted, putting his back to a wall rather than the open doorway, and listened. No one could have entered the castle while they were out, not without the new code, which nobody knew but him. He was equally certain, though, that none of them had left the glass there when they’d gone for dinner.
Which meant someone had been in the house when they left.
The military had taught him the benefit of patience, and he settled in. The long hand of the clock hanging on the opposite wall ticked by. Ten minutes passed, then another six. Then he heard it. A creak coming from the second floor.
Staying light on his feet, he exited the kitchen and headed for the side stairwell, bypassing the three squeaky steps as he made his way up.
When he reached the landing of the second floor, he stilled once again.
There, the sound of footsteps above him, hurried, but muted and sure. Without overthinking it, he continued up the last flight.
Moving swiftly, he cursed Roger, again, for being the person he was. Had he put cameras in the tasting room, like every other major winery in the area, Monk would have some idea what he was hunting. As it was, all he knew was someone was in the castle with him. Someone who might have been there a while, maybe all along. And if that wasn’t creepy as fuck, he didn’t know what was.
With his own weapon locked away and Roger’s pistol on its way to HICC with Lovell, he quickly went through his options as he hit the landing of the third floor. Unless his father had changed things up, there should be several sets of armor along the western hallway. The swords they held would be dull as shit, but they’d be heavy.
Turning left, he darted toward the back of the castle. Rounding the corner, eight suits of armor came into view. As did a flash of white. A flash of white that disappeared around the far corner, heading away from him along the north hallway.
Stalking down the hall, he grabbed a sword along the way and considered what he’d seen. Not a man; it was too small, and the glimpse of the garment he’d spotted seemed too fluttery to be men’s clothing.
Was it a woman?
Roger Wilde liked nothing more than to surround himself with willing women, so it wouldn’t surprise him to find one loitering around. But he had the security app on his phone and except for his arrivals and departures, no one had come and gone.
Christ, how long had she been in the house?
That question brought him up short. Slowing his steps, he pulled out his phone and brought up the app, clicking through to find the history. On the day Roger died, someone, presumably the cleaning crew who found him, entered at seven in the morning, resetting the alarm behind them. Twenty-one minuteslater, it disengaged again, likely for the first responders. At four twenty-two that afternoon, the system reengaged. None of the doors had been opened again until his arrival a few days ago.
The situation wasn’t adding up. He hadn’t been to the castle in nearly two decades, but nothing looked missing, messed up, or tossed. If someone wanted to get away with hundreds of thousands of dollars of art and antiquities, they could have easily done it.
So who the hell was in the castle?
The quiet snick of a door being carefully shut echoed through the silent building. He knew the sound of that tumbler. Whoever it was had entered the hall closet two doors down from his old room. He smiled; if his intruder had explored the house at all in her time there, Monk knew exactly where he’d catch her.
Doubling back the way he came, he approached his room from the opposite direction, ensuring he wouldn’t pass the closet. Slipping inside, he waited in the shadows.
Two minutes passed before he heard another familiar click. Slowly, the door to the enormous armoire opened. Very few people knew the castle hosted a labyrinth of secret passageways. Centuries ago, they’d been designed to hide people—servants, those being persecuted for whatever happened to be a popular topic at the time. Roger used them to sneak in on people. Usually women he’d drugged with enough coke and ecstasy that when he showed up, they had no idea what they were consenting to, only that they wanted sex.
A toe peeked out from the armoire, pulling him back to the moment. Barefoot with a small chain clasped around the ankle, the thin leg that followed wasn’t a woman’s.
Monk’s stomach felt as if someone had launched it from a trebuchet. A girl. A girl was living in this house. As vile as Roger was, to the best of Monk’s knowledge, he’d never been interestedin children. The thought that his tastes might have changed nearly had Monk running to the bathroom to throw up.
