“How tight and how long,” I say. “In numbers, please.”
“Two weeks to start,” he says. “Full posture. Garage only. No outside food or drink. Blinds down at night; managed light by day. Vary your times by fifteen to thirty minutes. No outdoor walks. You text us when you leave and when you get home. Day fourteen we reassess. If nothing has ticked up—no tails, no weird camera hits, no press—daytime rules relax. Nights stay tight.”
“That’s better,” I say. “But it doesn’t change the part where I feel like a prisoner in my own life.”
“Name the pieces that make you feel that most,” he says.
“Sunlight. Coffee. Walking outside. Having to ask permission to exist.”
“Okay,” he says. “Sunlight: We’ll have privacy film put on your windows tomorrow. During the day, you can open the top-down or tilt the slats down and get light without giving angles. Coffee: Make it at home for two weeks. If you want foam, buy a frother and some milk. It’s not a latte, but you know what’s in it. Walking: office gym only for two weeks. After reassessment, we can discuss short daylight walks with check-ins. No headphones. Phone on loud.”
I force a breath in. “I can live with two weeks.”
“Good,” he says. “Now, what you said upstairs. None of this will stop him if he really wants it. Correct. What it does is makeany move against you harder, slower, louder. He likes quiet. We remove quiet.”
“Friction,” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “It’s a seatbelt, not a force field. We can’t make you immortal, but we can close doors of opportunity. Routine coffee, predictable walks, open windows. If we cut off the easier routes, he has to pick riskier ones. Risk creates evidence. Evidence puts him in a cage.”
“So, he’ll definitely kill me. But at least he’ll go to jail for it.” I blow out a breath and put my hands on my hips. “Not really ideal, Lawrence.” I’m definitely not on a first-name basis with this guy, but I think it’s warranted.
“No, it isn’t,Elena,” he says. I let out a half-laugh. “Look, the coffee he got you wasn’t poison. We knew it wouldn’t be. It’s not the point. Look how easily he picked that information up. We can’t monitor everything and everyone in your life. We can’t stop baristas from giving information out. But we control what we can.”
I look past him at the new parking row under the camera. “You can’t promise anything.”
“No one can,” he says. “I can promise we’re paying attention, and that your compliance buys you leverage. You follow the plan, we can discuss easing it. You cut corners, we keep it tight longer.”
“Understood.”
He watches me for a beat. “What’s the hardest part for you to actually do, not just to accept?”
I think. “The only thing I can cook worth a damn is my mamma’s red sauce, which she got fromhermamma. And that’s only because it would’ve broken her heart not to pass it on to her only daughter. I mean, I’m Italian, but even I can’t eat sugo every night.”
He huffs a small sound. “Fair. Let’s not make this a cooking show. You need a rotation that’s safe and stupid-simple.”
I lift a hand. “Sold. What does that look like?”
“We’ll send some information over. You’re not the first person we’ve come across who can’t cook,” he says. “We do your grocery shopping, you take care of the majority of the meals. A couple of times a week, we place an order for take-out, pick it up, and deliver it to you.”
I lean on the bumper rail and narrow my eyes. “This is starting to sound like more than a two-week thing.”
“Two weeks is provisional. We can’t know for sure. After that, we’ll assess and talk about next steps.”
I blow out a breath and look around at the garage, the new cameras installed in the corners.
“Fine,” I say begrudgingly. “But if I die after spending my last two weeks drinking crappy coffee when I could’ve had my latte, I’m going to haunt your ass.”
He nods. “Fair enough.”
Chapter Seven
Luca
The kitchen is quiet this morning. Not silent—quiet.
The kind of quiet that you only feel in a big house with no one in it. The Sub-Zero kicks in, the espresso machine ticks as it cools, and the breeze drifts in through the open double doors leading out to the garden.
Stone counters, long island, eight-burner range I haven’t touched since coming home. The copper pans that Carlotta picked out still hang over the prep sink. The housekeeper has kept everything shiny and polished, and everything is almost exactly the same as when I last saw the kitchen.
