The blood drains from my face so fast I feel dizzy. I hadn’t known about the digital log. I thought it was a standard mechanical deadbolt.
My stomach turns over, a sick, greasy slide of pure adrenaline. I can feel the sweat beginning to prickle at my hairline. If I standup, will my knees buckle? If I keep sitting here, will he see the way my pulse is leaping in the hollow of my neck?
As he stands up, slowly, and begins to walk around the island toward me, the kitchen feels like it’s shrinking. The exit is ten feet away, but it might as well be on the moon.
"You look pale, little Gia," he says, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder. His fingers are warm. They feel like a brand. "Are you feeling alright?"
"I'm just..." I swallow hard, the lie sticking in my throat like glass. "I'm just worried for you. If someone has a key..."
"Don't be worried for me," he whispers, leaning down until his breath brushes my ear. "Be scared for them. Because when I find them, and I will find them, I'm going to make sure they never walk again."
I can't breathe. I am staring at the crumbs on my plate, counting them, trying to find a way to make my legs move, but the terror has turned me to stone.
He knows. He has to know. And the hunt hasn't even begun yet.
"I'm telling you," he says, "because I'm increasing security in that part of the house. Guards on rotation through the east wing at night. I'm also changing the locks." He pauses. "I need you to be careful. If there's a traitor inside this house, I don't want you moving around alone at night until I've found them."
Oh.
He's worried about me...
That's what this is?
He's standing in this kitchen in the morning telling me to be careful because he thinks someone dangerous has access to this wing, and he doesn't know that the dangerous someone is me, is the woman sitting here with his coffee, his frittata and his name.
"O-Of course," I say. "I'll be careful."
He nods once, slow. Still watching me. His thumb moves on the side of his cup, one small circle, and I notice it the way I notice everything about him now, which is a problem, a significant problem, and I have nothing to do about it.
"You're not eating," he tilts his head to watch me.
I pick up my fork automatically.
He pushes off the counter. Sets his cup down. Then he's moving past me to leave and the distance between us closes briefly to almost nothing as he passes behind my stool, and I feel the warmth of him at my back for half a second before he's gone, through the door, into the hallway, the sound of his footsteps receding on the parquet.
I sit with my fork over a frittata I no longer have any appetite for.
Marco refills my coffee without being asked and says nothing.
I stare at the kitchen wall. He's putting more guards on the east wing at night. He's changing the locks. My father's next message is already forming itself in my mind, the careful language, the coded shapes of things I can and cannot say. I have to tell him something. I have to give him enough. The phone is upstairs in the jewelry box and Laura is somewhere I still can't reach and the math of all of it is very simple, has been simple since the day my father showed me that footage.
Simple doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
He told me to be careful. He came down here and told me himself.
I eat the frittata. It's excellent. I tell Marco so. He nods. That's the end of the conversation, and I carry everything else back upstairs alone.
Later that day, I find out about the east wing guard rotation by accident.
Not the rotation itself, Rafael told me that at breakfast. But the specifics of it, the gaps in it, the exact window between shifts that a person who paid attention could use. I find this outbecause I spend the better part of the afternoon doing what I've been doing since I arrived: moving through the house quietly, learning it.
By four o'clock I need air, or at least a different ceiling to stare at, so I go down to the ground floor and take the long corridor toward the east garden entrance, the one that runs past the utility rooms and the back staircase used by the household staff. It's quieter this way. Less chance of running into anyone I have to perform for.
I'm almost at the end of the corridor when I hear it.
A slow, uneven step. Then a pause. Then the careful scrape of something being set down and picked up again.
I round the corner.
