Page 10

“Yes.” He nods at her once and keeps walking down the hall, already pulled into whatever’s next on his list.

I don’t know the word. It sounds old, like a title from a book I never read, and the way she says it, half greeting and half bow, tells me it isn’t a nickname.

The second he’s out of earshot, the whole shape of her shifts.

It’s not dramatic. If I weren’t looking right at her, I might miss it entirely. Her smile stays exactly where it was, but the warmth behind it drops out like someone flipped a switch a room away, and what’s left is a flat, assessing look aimed straight at me.

“You should be careful wandering around a house that isn’t yours.” Her voice hasn’t changed volume at all, still pleasant enough that anyone overhearing would think she’s making small talk. “People get the wrong idea about guests who don’t know their place.”

“I’m not a guest. I’m being held here against my will, in case that context is helpful.”

“Is it,” She says it flat, not even bothering to make it sound like a real question, and turns back to whatever she’s got simmering on the stove like the conversation’s already over for her. “Dinner’s at seven, if you decide you’re hungry after all. I wouldn’t want you to go without.”

The kindness in her voice doesn’t reach anywhere near her eyes this time, and I stand there a second longer, trying to figure out if I imagined the whole thing.

I didn’t. I know I didn’t.

“Noted,” I say, and leave the kitchen before she can decide whether she wants to say anything else.

Halfway down the hall I glance back once, just to see if she’s watching me go, and she’s already turned back to the stove like I never existed in the first place.

That’s almost more unsettling than the cold voice was. It’s easy to write off one bad moment as a fluke, a bad day, something explainable.

It’s harder to write off someone who can turn the warmth on and off that cleanly and go right back to stirring a pot like nothing happened at all.

Pakhan. I repeat the word in my head until it stops sounding foreign. Nadia said it like a woman bowing without bending her knees, and the more I turn it over, the less it sounds like a title anyone gets to ask for.

I spend the walk back to my room running the two versions of her side by side, the warm one that showed up the second Artem walked in, and the cold one that dropped the act the moment he was gone.

It’s not subtle once you catch it, but she’s clearly been doing it long enough that nobody else in this house has ever noticed the seam between them. Whatever’s going on with her, it’s got nothing to do with hospitality and everything to do with him.

I think back on the exact moment her face changed, trying to pin down what triggered it.

It wasn’t anything I said. It was the second Artem’s footsteps faded down the hall, like she’d been holding a pose the whole time he was in view and finally got to drop it.

That kind of thing doesn’t come from nowhere. People don’t perform that consistently for a man unless something’s tangled up in it that goes back further than one afternoon of me wandering into her kitchen.

I file that away next to the exits I mapped this afternoon, the guard rotation at the gate, the side door that might be less watched than the rest.

All of it useless information right now, locked up the way I am, but useless information has a way of turning useful eventually, and I’ve got nothing but time to keep collecting it.

Dinner comes up to my room a little after seven, delivered by someone who isn’t Nadia, a tray with more food on it than I could finish in three sittings.

I eat some of it, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the tray balanced on the bed in front of me, because apparently captivity doesn’t come with an appetite suppressant no matter how much stress I’m running on. The bread’s still warm. I hate that it’s good.

My door locks behind me when I get back, and I sit on the edge of the bed running through the whole day one more time.

The threat that didn’t land. The exits that might not matter yet. The woman who smiles with her mouth and nothing else the moment nobody important is watching.

I don’t know what any of it adds up to yet. But I’m starting to understand that in this house, nothing is as simple as it looks the first time you see it, and the type of things you get shown depends entirely on who’s standing close enough to hear.

7

HARPER

The house has a rhythm to it once you’ve been trapped inside it long enough to learn one. Meals come up at the same three times every day.

The guard outside my door changes shift with a knock and a low exchange of voices I’ve stopped trying to make out. Nadia’s radio clicks on in the kitchen around nine and stays on until whatever she’s cooking gets pulled off the stove.