Chapter Three: Faye POV

I don't sleep.

I sit on the edge of the bed in this bare, clean room and I think, which is what I do instead of sleeping when everything is too loud inside my head. The room is not what I expected. Not a cell. Not what captivity looks like in the movies. A real bed, a lamp, a window with actual glass that actually opens, and a lock on the door that locks from the inside, which he told me about deliberately.

Why tell me that, unless he wanted me to feel it?

I turn the lock. Then I turn it back. Then I sit on the bed and I look at the ceiling and I think about the way he said no, you weren't when I said I was leaving, and the specific quality of certainty in it, not a threat, not a boast. Just a statement of fact from someone who is accustomed to being correct.

His name is Lucien Varga. I heard one of the others say it in the courtyard, with the particular deference of people who have calibrated their behavior around someone dangerous. Varga. The name means nothing to me, which means he operates below the surface where my father's world floats, which means he is probably far more dangerous than anything I have previously encountered.

My father's dangerous men wear suits. They smile at dinner tables. Their violence is clean and deniable and expressed through lawyers and financial instruments and the kind of threat that never quite coalesces into something you can name.

Lucien Varga's dangerous is different. It is in his hands, the way they move, the way they don't move, the way he stepped off that motorcycle and the four men who had me cornered found somewhere else to be without a single raised voice. That is the kind of dangerous that doesn't need a lawyer.

I should be more afraid of him than I am.

I am afraid of him. I want to be precise about that. The specific quality of fear I feel when I think about his face, the dark eyes taking inventory is real and I am not dismissing it. But I also spent three years being afraid of Anton Reves and what that marriage would mean, and compared to that particular fear, the compound and the motorcycle and the flat-voiced certainty of my territory is almost manageable.

Almost.

I give myself until four in the morning.

That is the window, the dead hour when compounds like this run on skeleton crews, when attention lapses are most likely, when the gap between observation and reaction is widest. My father's security team runs on the same logic. I have been observing security patterns for three years from the inside of a gilded cage, and whatever else the Harmon household taught me, it taught me that.

I use the three hours to catalogue what I know. Entry point: the main courtyard gate, keycard operated. The east wall: lower, older, the mortar between the stones looks soft in places climbable. The motorbike I arrived on is in the courtyard, keys unknown. On foot, the road north leads back to the main highway.

On foot is fine. On foot has always been fine.

At four, I go to the window.

It opens quietly, good hinges, maintained. The drop to the ground is eight feet, manageable. I ease my bag out first, lower it on the strap, let it drop the last two feet into the darkness below.

I am halfway through the window when the light comes on.

Not in my room. Outside. The courtyard floods with a warm amber glow from overheads I hadn't clocked, and in the center of the space leaning against the wall directly below my window with his arms folded and his face turned upward... is Lucien Varga.

He is looking at me with the expression of a man who set his alarm.

I stare at him.

He stares at me.

"Eight feet," he says. "You'd have made it fine. The ankle, you'd want to roll on landing, you were angled wrong for the drop."

I stare at him.

"I clocked the window in the first five minutes," he says. "East room is the obvious choice if someone wants to go over the wall. I'd have put you somewhere else but I wanted to see what you'd do."

A test. He ran a test on me.

"What happens now?" I ask. My voice comes out level, which I am proud of.

He looks at me for a long moment. "Now you come back inside," he says, "and we have a conversation we should have had earlier."

"About what?"

"About Anton Reves," he says.

The name lands like cold water. My hands grip the window frame.

"And about why," he continues, in the same flat unhurried voice, "he has had three separate people asking questions in this town about a girl matching your description since nine o'clock tonight."

Three people.

Since nine.

Which means they were already here before I even arrived. Which means the SUV at the depot was real. Which means the gap I thought I created was narrower than I believed.

I look down at Lucien Varga's upturned face, and I think about eight feet and a rolled ankle and three of Anton Reves's men somewhere in this town in the dark.

I climb back inside.