I turn a page.
By midday the study door has not opened without purpose once. Every time it opens someone goes in or someone comes out and the ones coming out all have versions of the same face, rearranged, tightened, the specific arrangement of a person who has been looked at very closely and is still feeling it.
I eat lunch alone in the dining room because the kitchen has two men in it. Carla brings my food and sets it down and turnsto leave and I keep my voice easy, casual, the tone of a woman making small talk on an ordinary afternoon.
"Carla."
She stops and turns. Her hands are folded in front of her, the professional composure fully in place, but her eyes do a brief involuntary flick toward the kitchen doorway before they come back to me.
"Is everything alright?" I ask. "The house feels… I don't know, different today."
She pauses, her eyes staring right into mine, she looks at the doorway again. Then she steps closer to the table, just slightly, just enough that her voice won't carry past the room.
"The boss is questioning everyone," she says. Low and quick, the voice of a woman who has decided that the wife probably deserves to know. "About last night. What happened with the transport." Another glance at the door. "He started with the overnight staff at six this morning. He's been through half the house already."
I keep my face arranged into mild, appropriate concern. "Everyone?"
"Everyone with access to schedules. Routes." She presses her lips together. "Fredo's been in there twice. He came out thesecond time and he looked—" She stops herself. "The boss wants to know how the route got out. Who knew. Who talked."
The soup in front of me has gone cold. I don't look at it.
"I see," I say. "Thank you, Carla."
She nods and goes, her footsteps quick and quiet back toward the kitchen.
I sit very still in the empty dining room.
Who knew. Who talked.
My father used to have a saying about the difference between men who talk under pressure and men who don't. He said the difference wasn't strength or loyalty or any of the things people like to believe about themselves. The difference was whether they had something worse waiting for them outside the room than inside it.
Rafael will find whoever did this.
He is not a man who raises his voice. He is not a man who makes speeches about consequences. He is a man who is quiet about it, methodical, and thorough, and the people it happens to do not come back to the dinner table.
He will skin you alive, and he will be calm while he does it.
I push the soup away.
By three o'clock the mood in the house has shifted again, into something denser. There's a new man at the bottom of the main staircase.
I walk past him to go upstairs.
Surveillance.He's put surveillance inside the house.
Not just the perimeter. Inside. Rafael is pulling the thread from every end he can find and he is going to follow it and he is thorough.
I have watched him be thorough, and the question that is sitting in the center of my chest right now is not whether he will find the leak.
It'swhen.
I go to the window. Everything looks exactly the way it looked yesterday. Everything feels completely different.
I think about the burner phone.
I should move it. The jewelry box is too obvious and if Rafael's men search the room with any seriousness the jewelry box is the third place they look, maybe the second.
I don't move it.
