Glass Houses

Declan

The dinner ends. My family filters out.

Siobhan hugs Seraphina at the door — actually hugs her, which Siobhan does not do with people she's just met, which tells me everything I need to know about my sister's read on this woman —and Seraphina accepts it with only a half-second of visible surprise before her arms come up and she hugs back. My mother takes Seraphina's hand before she leaves. Looks at her for a long moment in that way Maeve has — like she's reading something in a language most people don't know exists. "You're stronger than you're letting them see," my mother says quietly. Not a question. Seraphina

holds her gaze and says nothing, but smiles slightly that she recognized something in her which is the most honest answer she could have given. My mother nods once. Moves on. I hang back. I'm good at hanging back. I've always found that the most useful information lives in the space between the social part of the evening ending and everyone actually leaving. People get sloppy at thresholds. Let things drop. I make a circuit of the second floor under the pretense of finding the bathroom. Learn the back staircase. The service entrance. The fire escape visible from the hall window. The door at the end of the hall with the keypad lock — recent hardware, doesn't match the age of the frame. I stand in front of it for three seconds, memorize the make and model. I'm filing it when the door opens and Seraphina walks out pulling her sleeves down over her forearms with a quick practiced motion that stops the moment she sees me. One second. Just one. Something crosses her face — faster than

surprise, sharper than irritation — and then it's gone and she says “Lost?" in a voice that is perfectly pleasant and means nothing of the kind.

“Bathroom."

"Left end of the hall." She holds my gaze. "The right is a linen closet, I doubt you’ll find anything useful in there.”

“I slightly smirk”

Neither of us moves.

"What's in there?" I nod at the room she came from. A normal person wouldn't ask. I've never been a normal person. That calculation moves through her eyes. She's deciding something and she's deciding it quickly.

"My room."

"Your room has a keypad lock."

"I'm a private person."

I look at her. She looks back. Dark eyes. No fidget. No offer of anything else. Just stands there in her black dress and gives me exactly nothing, which in itself is a kind of answer — the kind that tells me the

thing behind that door matters more than anything else in this house to her.

"Goodnight, Mr. Callahan," she says, and walks past me toward the stairs. I stand in the hallway with the emerald on her finger and the certain knowledge that I just lost the opening move of a game I didn't know I was playing.

I don't lose games.

S e r a p h i n a

✦

Sloppy. Say the word and mean it. Four hours of sleep and the adrenaline of a breakthrough — the second piece I needed, the link between the shell routing and an actual name and I walked out of my room without checking the hall first.

Amateur mistake. Inexcusable. I sit at my vanity and press my fingers to my temples and think about Declan Callahan standing in my corridor with those green eyes cataloguing everything. The keypad. My sleeves. The half-second I wasn't composed. He saw all three. Of course he did. I open his file. Add three lines: Doesn't respect closed doors as social signal. Asks direct questions in inappropriate contexts and expects answers. Zero tells during confrontation eye contact held, no fidget, no deflection. I stare at that last one. Most men who look at me the way he looks at me make me feel like a thing. An object of interest rather than a person of it. I built immunity to that feeling years ago. It's held without failure until

approximately three hours ago in a hallway on the second floor of my family home. He doesn't make me feel like a thing. He makes me feel like he thinks

I'm worth the e#ort of getting wrong before he gets me right. That is a completely different and significantly ore dangerous sensation.

I look at the emerald on my finger. I've looked at it six times since he slid it on. The color of his eyes — he said that without any self consciousness, like stating a fact. I want you to think of me when you look at it. No one has ever said anything like that to me in my life. I don't know what to do with it so I've been filing it under variables personal

and trying very hard not to examine what it means that I keep taking it back out. I have a name. The name behind the operation bleeding both families.

It will change everything when it lands — it's personal, it's surgical, it's been planned for a long time by someone with deep knowledge of

both organizations from the inside — and I need to decide who to bring it to before I move.

My father: acts fast, no finesse, warns the target. My brothers: loyal, not subtle. A man in a corridor who knows which park without being told.

I pull the burner from the false bottom of my vanity drawer and type: I need a meeting. Just us. Tomorrow. The park. 7am.

The reply comes in forty seconds: I'll be there.

I didn't tell him which park.

I sit with that chill for a long time. Then I look at the emerald one more time

and close my eyes and tell myself it's not relevant information.

I'm not convincing.