CHAPTER THREE: FOUR VOICES IN THE DARK

MIA'S POV

My room was on the third floor, at the end of a hallway that smelled like fresh paint and old money, and the first thing I did once the door clicked shut behind me was sit on the edge of an unfamiliar bed and try to remember his voice.

Not the words. The words I had memorized without trying — *I'd rather not know yours either* — but words could belong to anyone. What I needed was the shape of it. The particular low register, the way it had dropped a half-step quieter right before he said something he meant. I closed my eyes in a stranger's guest room and replayed three nights ago like a recording I was only allowed to hear once, and by the time Warren knocked on my door to call me down for dinner, I had exactly nothing to show for it except a headache and four faces I couldn't stop comparing to a voice in the dark.

Dinner was its own kind of ambush.

The dining room was long enough that conversation had to travel, which meant most of it didn't bother — Warren talked, mostly to fill silence, asking me polished questions about London and art history that I answered on autopilot while cataloguing, without meaning to, every time one of his sons spoke.

Julian's voice was clipped, precise, made for boardrooms. Nothing about it matched the low, unhurried warmth I remembered from the dark.

Theo barely spoke at all, three sentences in an hour, none of them longer than five words. I couldn't rule him out. I also couldn't rule him in. He was simply absent from his own dinner table, present in body and nowhere else, and it made my skin prickle with a frustration that had nowhere to go.

Finn filled every silence anyone else left open, funny and easy and entirely unbothered by his brothers' collective iciness, and somewhere around the second course I caught myself relaxing into the sound of him talking the way you relax into a fire on a cold night — grateful, uncomplicated, no hidden weight to it at all. Which meant, I told myself firmly, that it almost certainly wasn't Finn. I didn't want it to be complicated. Finn was the one person in this house who hadn't made me feel like a problem to be managed.

And Sebastian didn't speak until dessert, and when he finally did — passing me a bowl I hadn't asked for, murmuring something short about the water glass I'd been reaching past — the words themselves meant nothing.

But something in the register did.

I went very still, fork halfway to my mouth, and felt every nerve in my body strain toward a five-word sentence about ice water like it might unlock something. He noticed me noticing. I watched it happen — the half-second flicker of awareness crossing his face before he shut it down completely, jaw tightening, eyes dropping back to his plate like the conversation had never occurred at all.

It wasn't proof. A low voice wasn't a fingerprint. Half the men on the East Coast probably had a voice that dropped a register when they were being careful. But it was the first flicker of anything in an entire day of nothing, and I held onto it the rest of the meal like a lit match cupped against wind.

---

I found him again just after eleven, on the back terrace, alone with a drink he wasn't really drinking, staring out at a garden that had gone dark blue in the moonlight.

"Can't sleep?" I asked, because it seemed safer than any of the other four hundred questions currently occupying my chest.

Sebastian didn't turn around immediately. "Jet lag's contagious, apparently." A beat. "You should be asleep. First night in a new house."

"So should you. It's your house."

"Not tonight, it isn't." Something in his voice when he said it — flat, tired, almost bitter — made me want to ask what he meant and made me equally certain he wouldn't answer if I did.

I came to stand beside him at the railing anyway, close enough that I caught the same low, clean scent I'd noticed three nights ago and hadn't let myself think about since — cedar, something faintly citrus underneath it, ordinary enough that half the soap in this city probably smelled the same. I told myself that. I told myself that twice.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You can ask."

"Where were you three nights ago?"

The question landed harder than I meant it to. I felt it land — watched Sebastian's hand go still around his glass, watched something shutter behind his eyes with a speed that told me more than any answer could have.

"Why do you ask," he said, carefully, each word measured out like he was crossing a floor he already knew had weak boards in it.

"No reason." I made myself hold his gaze, my heart going stupid and fast in my chest. "Just making conversation. Getting to know my new family."

"Mm." He looked back out at the garden, jaw tight, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all, the silence between us stretched taut enough that I could hear my own pulse in my ears. "I was out," he said finally. "A party. Nothing memorable."

*Nothing memorable.* The words landed like a slap I hadn't braced for, sharp and unexpected, and I hated — hated — how much it stung to hear him say it, given that I had no actual proof it had been him at all. I was building a case out of a voice register and a scent that half the world probably shared. I had no right to feel the hot, humiliating sting behind my eyes at two words a virtual stranger had said about a party he may not have even attended.

"Right," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was its own small victory. "Well. Goodnight, Sebastian."

I was three steps toward the door when he said my name.

"Mia."

I stopped. Didn't turn around. Some instinct told me that whatever came next mattered more if I didn't let him see my face while he said it.

"For what it's worth," Sebastian said, low, careful, each word sounding like it cost him something to release, "I don't actually remember much about that night at all. It's easier that way. For everyone."

It wasn't a confession. It wasn't even close to one. But it also wasn't nothing — *that night*, specific, unprompted, when I'd only ever mentioned a party in the vaguest possible terms — and I stood frozen in a dark doorway with my back to him, my pulse roaring in my ears, absolutely certain for one white-hot second that I'd just found my answer.

Then Finn's voice cut across the terrace from somewhere behind me, bright and easy and entirely oblivious to whatever had just cracked open in the dark. "There you two are — Dad's asking if anyone wants a nightcap, and by anyone he means specifically you, Mia, because apparently you're already his favorite and we've known you for six hours."

I turned. Sebastian had already put his back to the railing, expression smoothed flat again, the crack I'd just heard in his voice sealed shut like it had never existed at all.

"Coming," I said, to Finn, to the house, to anyone but the boy behind me who'd just handed me half a confession and taken it back in the same breath.

But as I followed Finn's easy chatter back inside, I understood, with a clarity that settled cold and certain in my chest, that whatever Sebastian didn't remember about that night, he'd remembered enough to know exactly which words would make me stop breathing.

And that terrified me more than not knowing ever had.