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My free hand grips the edge of the bench, knuckles pale, holding on to something solid while everything else about this moment feels anything but.

Somewhere outside the room, a floorboard settles, an ordinary house sound, and I go still until I’m sure it’s nothing.

I check the door one more time before I let myself go any further. Latched, just as I left it.

I check the hallway through the thin gap under it too, no shadow crossing, no footsteps drawing closer, just Nadia’s radio still humming faintly from somewhere below and the guard’s chair sitting silent down the hall where I left it.

My shoulders drop an inch at that, some of the tension I’ve been carrying for eleven straight days finally letting go, muscle by muscle, and my hands loosen their grip on the edge of the bench enough that my knuckles stop aching.

The house stays as still as it’s been since I climbed those stairs, and I let that give me every bit of confidence I need, the last of the tension in my back finally settling into something close to rest for the first time since this all started.

I turn the object over one final time, my thumb running along the same edge again, and my other hand drifts to the hem of my shirt without me deciding to move it there.

My breath comes out unsteady in the still room, louder than I expect, and I glance at the door once more just to be sure before I let my hand finish what it started, sure beyond any doubt that no one in this house knows where I am right now.

8

ARTEM

Marek radios in from the ground floor a few minutes past one, his voice flat with the kind of report that isn’t urgent enough to interrupt whatever I’m doing.

“She’s not in her room.”

I set down the folder I’ve been reading for the last hour, half the words in it not registering anyway. “Since when?”

“Since lunch. The guard on that hallway says she stepped out and didn’t come back. He didn’t think much of it, figured she was headed to the kitchen.”

I don’t like the gap in that report, the stretch of time nobody accounted for her. It’s a small house by the standards of what I usually deal with, but small doesn’t mean safe, and every door in this place that isn’t locked is a door I’ve decided, at some point, that she’s allowed near. I push back from the desk and head down the main staircase myself rather than waiting on Marek to widen the search.

She isn’t in the kitchen. Nadia’s radio is still going when I pass through, some pot simmering low on the stove, and she barely glances up from it long enough to tell me she hasn’t seen anyone since she brought the trays up.

I check the sitting room next, then the library, neither holding anything but empty furniture and afternoon light coming in flat through the windows.

Her absence starts to feel less like an oversight and more like something intentional, and I run through the list of places in this house I’d want to disappear into if I were her.

The east wing isn’t on the guard’s usual rotation. Nobody goes up there, not staff, not most days, not even me, except for the one door at the end of that hall I had fitted out myself years ago and haven’t opened in longer than I’d like to admit.

If she’s found her way up there, it means she’s covered more ground in this house than I gave her credit for, and some small, unwelcome part of me is already wondering whether that ground includes a door that’s supposed to be impossible to reach without my knowing.

I take the back stairs two at a time, the same way I imagine she must have, and the hallway at the top is quiet in a way that tells me nothing useful. Dust on the guest room frame, undisturbed except for one smudge near the handle. A storage room with its door hanging open an inch, boxes shifted just enough to know someone’s been through them recently, a stack of old picture frames.

The last door in the row sits open.

I stop outside it, one hand already reaching for the grip I keep at my hip, old instinct kicking in before thought does. It’s the door I was already dreading downstairs, the one private space on this property nobody touches without my say, staff included, kept locked behind a code only Yuri and I have ever had reason to know. Finding it standing open confirms exactly what I didn’t want confirmed.

I ease closer, weight on the balls of my feet, and the light spilling out from inside is low and warm, not the kind of light that comes with a break-in or a threat, nothing about it reading as the danger my body’s already bracing for. That doesn’t make sense either. If the door’s open, someone got past a lock that’s never failed once since I had it installed.

I look through the gap in the doorframe before I commit to stepping into view, and what I find stops the assessment running through my head completely.

She’s sitting on the bench, hair loose from wherever it was pinned this morning, one hand gripping the edge of the seat, the other occupied in a way that makes it very clear she has no idea anyone’s watching.

Her breathing comes uneven, quiet, catching every few seconds on something I can hear even from the hallway. She has her back mostly to the door, angled toward the mirror on the far wall without seeming to notice her own reflection catching in it.

For a second I don’t process what I’m looking at correctly, my mind still running the threat assessment I walked up here with. My eyes drop to the keypad first, checking the panel for scoring, scratches, anything that would explain a forced entry. The casing’s untouched. Whatever got this door open, it wasn’t force.

There’s no threat here, nothing except Harper, alone. I’ll need to find out how later. Right now, I can’t make myself care enough to leave and ask.

I should announce myself. Every instinct I’ve built over fifteen years of running this operation tells me to knock, step back, give her the privacy she clearly believes she has. My hand doesn’t move off the doorframe.