“You will,” I say automatically.
“For snacks,” she giggles, already moving toward the bathroom. She returns with her eyes wide. “Double sink. The towels feel like sins. The shower has one of those overhead rain things. There’s a robe. And slippers. And a tiny sewing kit like we’re debutantes who might be asked to fix a hem.”
“Please don’t saydebutante,” I groan.
She ignores me and flops on the foot of my bed like a teenager. Her phone is already in her hand, muscle memory. She opens her camera and then closes it so fast she drops the phone onto the duvet like it burned her. “Right,” she says, cheeks pink. “Confidential. I’m going to treat that word like a god and not anger it.”
“Good plan,” I say. My palms are sweating even though it isn’t hot. I use my sleeve to pick up the envelope because I don’t want my hands to leave a handprint on it and immediately hate that I’m policing prints in a room that will have them catalogued whether I leave them or not.
Cassian’s handwriting is neater than a man who deals with emergencies has a right to.Welcome. Create freely. You’re safe here. —C.There’s a separate line in smaller ink.Dinner whenever you want it. The garden is quiet after four. —C.
The words aren’t long. They’re doing too much. They look like a promise and read like a threat if you know how to read.
My throat tightens and I hate it. Lila leans over. “Ugh,” she says, snatching the paper and turning it so the light catches the ink. “Of course his handwriting is controlled. He probably writes grocery lists like a sermon. The nerve of this man.‘You’re safe here’.From whom, sir?”
“From himself,” I say before I can stop my mouth. The sentence lands between us with a weight out of proportion to its syllables.
Lila’s eyes soften. She puts the note back where it was, her fingers careful. “So,” she says. “Plan. You nod, you smile, you don’t give away anything you don’t mean to. We ask boring questions the way bad interns do so they underestimate us. We see the house, not the show.”
“Reconnaissance,” I say, because naming things keeps them from naming you. “We’re not guests. We’re not clients. We’re not residents. We’re a pair of eyes and a pen.”
“And a cousin who will fight a clause with a dessert fork if necessary,” she says, referencing Mateo’s promised arrival later. “He’s texting me from the lobby of HQ like a bouncer in a suit. He’ll join us for the paperwork check at four.”
I glance at the corner of the room near the door where the baseboard meets the casing. New paint sits over what used to be a hairline crack. The brass panel on the hall side has a twin inside, flush with the wall under the chair rail, disguised as an old bell pull plate. It hums if you put your hand near it. Not enough to startle. Enough to tell you it’s alive.
“He’s here,” Lila says, reading my face. “Notherehere, but here-here. He’ll pretend he isn’t the one who opened the door in your head when the concierge said your name.”
“We’re going to see where the locks are,” I say. “And where the exits pretend to be. And where the walls are thicker for no visible reason.”
“After I find the kitchen and charm Simone into making me something that will keep me from fainting when a man saysprotocollike it’s a pet,” she says, already up and moving. She pauses at the threshold and points to my face. “Rory. Breathe.”
I hadn’t realized I wasn’t. She closes the door with a little thud that sounds like a word that isn’t goodbye.
I stand still until the part of my body that wants to run has exhausted itself in a tiny circle and then sit on the edge of the bed because I don’t want to open dresser drawers before I’ve decided whether I want to feel like I live here. The easel is in the best possible place given the light. Of course it is. The paper is thick enough to accept abuse. Of course it is.
I go to the window. The harbor sits below like a plate someone forgot to clear. Water nobody should callblueat this hour. Crane arms making slow shapes against thin sky. A black SUV glides along a perimeter road that a person could call a service lane if they didn’t know what service can mean. The windows of the SUV are the kind you can’t peer through easily. The angle is wrong for me to see. Still—my brain insists my eyes just caught the slope of a jaw that will make my hands shake in anger later if I let them. My pulse spikes like I just ran up the stairs instead of being carried. I lean my forehead to the glass and let the cool take a degree of heat I don’t need.
I whisper it to the window because it’s better there than in my head. “Your house, your rules. But I’m not here to be saved.”
The glass gives me nothing back. Good. I don’t need a mirror. I need a plan.
I leave my bag zipped and check the bathroom, not because I need to rinse my face, but because I need to see what kind of medicine they think we need. The cabinet is stock-photo neat: painkillers, bandages, antiseptic, a small sewing kit Lila wasn’t lying about, cotton swabs, a jar of balm with no label, unfragranced everything. No pills that make you sleep on command. No labels that would make a story if they ended up in a journalist’s photo. They’re good at this. It almost impresses me. It mostly makes me angry.
The closet holds a robe and slippers in my size somehow. Either they guessed well or someone saw me somewhere I didn’t want to be seen and made a note. The robe stays where it is. The slippers do too. Bare feet on this wood will make noise the room can digest. Rubber soles make a different sound. If I need to move like a shadow, I’ll do it in my socks.
A knock comes soft, then a second later, the same knock again. That’s Lila’s code. I open the door.
She’s got a little plate balanced on her palm and a grin. “Simone says she’s not a chef, she’s a witch, and with this scone she gives you fortitude and me patience.”
“Can she make a clause disappear?” I ask, taking the plate. Warm, not hot. Lemon. Sugar where it belongs—on the outside.
“She says her job is to keep blood sugar from turning women into weapons,” Lila says. “I told her sometimes we want to be weapons.” She steps in and lowers her voice. “Okay, reconnaissance Part One: there’s a small office near the front hall with a door that looks like a closet. It smells like toner. The frame has a dinger so, if you tug wrong, it pings somewhere. Also, the library ladder’s wheels squeak exactly once, which means either someone purposely left it or someone’s about to get fired for crimes against squeaklessness.”
“She left it,” I say. “Houses need one sound.”
“Agreed,” Lila squeals, delighted I noticed the same thing. “Also, there’s a garden with a “healing path” sign and river stones. The sign font is Doing The Most. We will not faint at the herbs.”
“We will not faint,” I echo, mouth full of lemon. The citric acid brings my brain into focus like flipping a switch that’s been corroded. “We’ll walk it, though. Someone built it for a reason.”
