Her small fingers curl around mine. Mr. Whiskers is wedged between her arm and the pillow. The crescent moon nightlight casts pale shapes across the ceiling.
The guards are on their routes, the staff retired, the machinery of my life temporarily set to idle.
She shifts beside me.
“Was it something I did, Papa?” she asks in a small voice.
The words cut into my heart.
I turn to face her. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Mr. Whiskers, tracing the stitching along his ear with one fingertip.
“Look at me,malyshka.”
She hesitates. The finger pauses on Mr. Whiskers’ ear. Then she lifts her gaze.
“No,” I say. “It was not something you did.”
“But she left?—”
“She didn’t leave.” I keep my voice steady. “She was taken, Anya. Someone took her away. It was not her choice, and it had nothing to do with you.”
Her chin trembles. The effort of holding it still is visible.
“But Mrs. Kaufmann left because of me. She said I was difficult.”
“Mrs. Kaufmann left because she found—” I stop before I tell my daughter that the woman found a gun in Alexei’s coat. “A mouse, and she was afraid of it. That was about Mrs. Kaufmann, not about you.”
“And Miss Soto?—”
“Miss Soto left because she was afraid of me. Also not about you.”
“And—”
“Anya.” I take her face in my hands gently, tilting it until she has no choice but to see my eyes, and I have no choice but to see hers. “Listen to me. Every person who has left this house left because of adult problems. Complicated, messy, grown-up problems. None of them left because of you. Not one.”
She searches my face.
“Ellie didn’t leave because of you,” I repeat. “Ellie cared about you more than — more than almost anyone in this house. And she didn’t choose to go. Someone made that decision for her, and I am going to fix it.”
She studies me until the tension leaves her features. Not completely. But enough.
She leans into me.
I stay. Long after her breathing has settled into the deep, even cadence of sleep. I stay, and I hold her hand, and I vow tothe quiet room that I will bring Elizabeth back to this house if it costs me everything I have.
It’s been four days since we managed to salvage the video footage from the ruptured security cameras by the west gate.
They watched helplessly as Landon materialized behind Elizabeth, coiled one arm around her waist, and used the other hand to deliver a needle to the side of her neck.
Her body surrendered in stages, a stiffening, a shudder, then the terrible loosening of every muscle as consciousness abandoned her. He caught her before she reached the ground and carried her through the gate.
I watched the footage three times before my fist connected with the monitor, and the screen collapsed. The wall behind it still bears the crack from where the equipment struck.
The void she left is not an absence. It is a presence — a dense, gravitational emptiness that has rearranged the air of every room she occupied. Her jacket still hangs on the hook beside the kitchen door. A glass she used three days before the attack still sits on the counter beside the sink because I told the staff not to touch it, and no one questioned the instruction.
The footage does not depict a woman who fled — at least, not entirely.
Elizabeth ran from the chaos and the violence. She reached the west gate, but she paused, and before she could decide what to do next, she was taken.
