CHAPTER 3: The Estate

I expected a warehouse or maybe a penthouse somewhere cold and anonymous with concrete walls, and no windows because that was the kind of place you put people when they become a problem you hadn't solved yet. But as the car turned through iron gates at the end of a long private road lined with cypress trees standing like soldiers in the headlights I understood immediately that I had been completely wrong about what kind of man Dante Marchetti was.

The estate rose up beyond the gates and I forgot for one whole second to be afraid.

Three stories of pale stone with dark windows and ivy climbing the entire east side like the building had been standing long enough for nature to start claiming it back and a fountain in the circular drive lit from underneath, so the water glowed silver in the dark. And formal gardens spread out on both sides further than I could see in the night. Guards positioned at intervals trying to look like they weren't guards and only halfway succeeding.

The car stopped and a man in dark clothes opened my door before I had even registered we've arrived, and I stepped out onto the gravel and stood completely still, trying very hard not to look as overwhelmed as I felt.

Dante came around the car and he didn't look at the house because he had seen it ten thousand times. He looked at me instead watching my face the way he seemed to make a habit of doing and reading my reaction before I had finished having it.

"Come," he said.

I didn't move. "How many people live here?"

"Staff. Guards." He tilted his head slightly. "You. For now."

Inside was everything the outside promised and more. Ceilings high enough to make me feel small and dark wood floors that had been old for longer than anyone in my family had been alive, and art on the walls that belonged behind museum glass. The kind of home that didn't announce its wealth loudly because it had never needed to. This family had been powerful for so many generations that every single room just knew it.

A woman appeared from a corridor to the left. Fifty something with dark hair shot through with silver and the posture of someone who had been running this household since before Dante could walk, she looked at me with eyes that were carefully giving absolutely nothing away.

"This is Elena," Dante said. "She manages everything here and if you need something reasonable she will help you."

Elena's gaze moved between us with the quiet control of a woman who had seen many things and made the decision a long time ago to keep her opinions firmly to herself. "The east suite is prepared," she said.

"Good." Dante looked at me one last time. "Go with her. Sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

"And if I don't want to?"

He considered me for a moment with no irritation and no patience exactly either. Just certainty. "Then stand in the entrance hall all night but either way you're not leaving."

He walked away down the corridor without looking back like the conversation was finished because he had decided it was. That was simply how things worked in his world and I stood there and felt the particular helpless fury of a person with no leverage, and absolutely nowhere to put it.

Elena touched my arm gently. "Come Miss Russo. You're tired."

She was right and I was so tired I could barely feel my own feet anymore.

The east suite was beautiful in a way that felt almost insulting given the circumstances. A large room with high ceilings and a four poster bed buried under white linen and tall windows looking out over dark gardens, and fresh flowers on the dresser. A wardrobe standing open along the far wall already stocked with clothes in what I could already see were roughly my sizes.

That detail made my skin crawl more than almost anything else that had happened tonight.

"These are all new," Elena said opening the wardrobe wider. "Various sizes and the bathroom is through there." She moved toward the door unhurried like this was all completely ordinary.

I waited until she reached the threshold. "It locks from the outside."

She stopped and turned back and her expression stayed neutral but something moved through her eyes that was considerably more complicated than neutral. "Yes," she said simply.

"So I'm a prisoner."

"You are a guest in a house where the doors happen to lock." She paused with her hand resting on the door frame and something shifted in her expression then. The smallest crack in all that careful control. "He brought you here and in all the years I have worked for this family he has never brought anyone here the way he brought you tonight, so whatever you think of him right now I want you to hold onto that because if he brought you here there is a reason."

She closed the door before I could say a single word back, and the lock engaged on the other side with a soft definitive click that felt very permanent.

I stood in the center of the room, crossed to the first window and checked the latch. Sealed from outside. The second. The same. The third. Sealed. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the fourth, and looked down at the garden below and counted what I could see. Six meters down at least and two guards visible from this angle and a stone wall beyond them. And beyond the wall nothing but dark countryside and roads I didn't recognize going places I didn't know.

I stepped back and sat on the edge of the bed, looked at the locked door and the sealed windows and thought about the wardrobe full of clothes in my size waiting like someone had known I was coming. I made myself a simple choice right then and there because I was inside a locked room in a house full of armed men. Somewhere outside a city I knew well with no phone, no way out, no one who knew where I was, and I could either fall apart or pay attention.

I lay back on the white linen and started paying attention. I counted the guards I had seen and thought about the layout of the corridors between here and the front door. I thought about Elena's face when she said he had never brought anyone here like this before, what that meant, what it didn't mean and why it mattered.

I hadn't slept at all.