Novels by Victoria Jombo

The east perimeter was doubled by midnight.Daniel didn’t know that. He was asleep by then, or trying to be, lying in the dark of his room with the particular restlessness that had become familiar over the weeks he had spent in this house. The kind of restlessness that had nothing to do with the bed or the room and everything to do with the thoughts that moved through him when there was nothing else to occupy him.He had started keeping the notepad on the desk instead of in the drawer.Small thing. But it meant something.He reached for it sometimes in the evenings, not to write anything specific, just to have something in his hands that was his. The pen moving across paper had always been the thing that quieted him when nothing else did. Even now, even here, that hadn’t changed.He wrote that night without planning to.Not about Tim. Not about the mansion or Webb or the shape of his days here. He wrote about Red City. About what it looked like from the second-floor window at differen

Tim didn’t sleep well anymore.He hadn’t said this to anyone and wouldn’t. But it was true. He would lie in the dark of his room, and his mind would run through the day the way it always did, checking things, verifying things, and then, somewhere in the middle of that, it would find Daniel and stop.Just stop.Like everything else, it became background noise.He got up at five, dressed in the dark and went down to the study. There was always work. That had never been the problem. The problem was that work had always been enough and now there were stretches of time when it wasn’t, when he would be looking at numbers or reading a report and his attention would move without permission to the floor above him where Daniel was sleeping.He didn’t like it.He sat behind the desk and opened the folder Rafe had left for him the night before. Movement in the east. Three of Webb’s men spotted near the outer edge of Tim’s territory, casual enough to be deniable, deliberate enough to be a message.

It started with breakfast.Small things usually did.Daniel had come downstairs at half past eight to find the kitchen occupied by two men he didn’t recognize, both of them large and quiet and positioned in a way that took up more space than was strictly necessary. They weren’t doing anything threatening. They were just there, eating, existing in the kitchen that Daniel had started to think of as a space that belonged to him and Leo and the occasional appearance of Mrs Alves.He stopped in the doorway.One of them looked at him briefly and then looked away. The other didn’t look at all.Daniel went to the coffee machine and made his coffee and stood at the counter and felt the wrongness of it settle over him like a temperature change. Not fear exactly. Something more like the feeling of finding furniture moved in your own home without being told why.He took his coffee and left.He found Leo in the hallway near the front of the house, checking something on his phone with a focused exp

The phone call with Nina lasted forty minutes.Daniel had told Tim it would be short. It was not short. It never was with Nina, conversations with her had their own momentum, their own internal logic that had nothing to do with how long you intended to talk and everything to do with how much there was to say.She had started with relief, genuine and unguarded, the kind that came out as mild anger the way it often did with people who had been scared and were now safe enough to be annoyed about it.“Eleven days Daniel,” she had said. “Eleven days of nothing and then one email that says I promise and then silence again and then you call me like it’s a normal Tuesday.”“It’s a Wednesday,” Daniel had said.“I will hang up this phone.”“Nina.”“I’m serious.”“I know you are. I’m sorry. I’m okay. I just needed some time.”There had been a pause on her end, the kind that meant she was deciding how hard to push. Nina was good at reading the difference between someone who needed space to talk a

Nina replied within minutes.Her message was short but Daniel could hear her voice in every word of it. You have exactly 24 hours to call me before I start knocking on doors. I don’t care whose doors they are.He stared at it for a long moment.Then he typed back. Give me a few days. I’ll call. I promise.He closed the laptop before she could respond again and sat back in the chair and pressed his fingers against his eyes. The brief contact with her, even just through words on a screen, had done something unexpected to him. It had made everything feel more real in an almost painful way. Like he had been existing inside the strangeness of this house in a kind of managed numbness and Nina’s name on his screen had punctured it.He was still here.Behind these walls, in this room, in this life that had been decided for him by a man he hadn’t known existed two weeks ago.He got up from the desk and moved to the window.The garden was the same as always. Still and perfect and going nowhere.

Daniel found the notepad three days after the dinner.Not the one he had been writing in since he arrived, the one with his observations and his careful map of the house and its people. That one he kept in the desk drawer, tucked under a book so it sat flat and unobvious. This was a different one, smaller, that had slipped between the desk and the wall at some point and wedged itself into the gap.He pulled it out and opened it without thinking.It was empty except for the first page.On it, in handwriting he didn’t recognize at first and then did, were two columns of numbers. Not a list, not notes, just numbers arranged in a pattern that meant something to whoever had written them and nothing to Daniel. He looked at them for a moment and then closed the notepad and set it on the desk.Then he picked it up again.The handwriting was Tim’s.He didn’t know why that mattered. It was just a notepad with numbers in it, probably left in this room before it became his room, before any of thi