Chapter 5

The mansion was the kind of beautiful that made you nervous and it was not because anything was wrong with it but because nothing was. Every surface was deliberate, every room was a statement about what kind of man lived here and what he expected from the people around him. The ceilings were high and the lighting was low and the staff moved through the corridors with the quiet efficiency of people who had learned that being noticed was its own kind of risk.

Ava noticed all of it on the way in.

The car had pulled through a gate she hadn't seen coming until they were already past it. Two men on the inside, two on the outside, the kind of security that wasn't meant to be subtle. The driveway was long and curved and the house at the end of it sat back from the tree line like it was watching you approach. She'd counted three cameras before they reached the front entrance and stopped counting because it was starting to make her hands sweat.

A woman was waiting at the top of the steps.

Lucia Moretti was fifty-six and looked exactly like what she was, a woman who had spent three decades in a world that ate people alive and had not been eaten. She was elegant in the specific way that old money makes people elegant, effortless on the surface and absolutely calculated underneath. She looked at Ava the way you look at something that has arrived in the wrong room.

"Mrs. Moretti," she said, and the title in her mouth sounded like a question she already knew the answer to.

"Mrs. Moretti," Ava said back, because two could play at that.

Something moved in Lucia's expression. Not quite surprise. More like a woman recalibrating.

She stepped aside and let Ava through the door without another word, which was its own kind of message.

Inside was worse. Not worse in a way she could point to, just worse in the way that beautiful cages are worse than ugly ones because the beauty makes you want to stop noticing the bars.

A staff member whose name she didn't catch yet led her up a staircase that curved in a way staircases in normal houses didn't curve, and down a corridor lined with doors that were all closed, and into a room at the far end that was larger than her entire apartment.

"Mr. Moretti thought you would be comfortable here," the woman said.

Ava looked at the room. King bed, heavy drapes, a sitting area near the window with two chairs angled toward each other the way furniture gets angled when someone wants to suggest a conversation might happen there. A vanity mirror on the far wall, framed in dark wood, the kind of mirror that cost more than her car.

"Thank you," she said.

The staff member left and Ava stood in the middle of the room and did what she always did in a new space. She measured it.

One door in, one door out, same door. Window on the east wall, drop to a garden she hadn't seen the perimeter of yet. Connecting door on the left wall, locked from this side but that didn't mean much. Bathroom through the right door, no window, which meant no secondary exit.

She sat on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off and thought about Leo.

He'd be up in a few hours, early the way he always was, and Nadia would give him cereal and he'd complain it was the wrong kind and then eat two bowls of it anyway. He'd ask where she was. Nadia would tell him what Ava had told her to say — that Mom had a work thing, that she'd be back soon — and Leo would accept that the way he accepted most things, with a practicality that still surprised her sometimes in a five year old.

He was going to be here tomorrow. In this house. In this world.

She pushed that thought down because thinking about it straight on wasn't useful yet. She needed to understand the space first. She needed to know what she was dealing with before she could figure out how to protect him from it.

She got up and started moving around the room properly, running her hand along the top of the dresser, checking the corners near the ceiling, pulling the curtains back to look at the window latch.

Lucia's voice came from the doorway behind her.

"The room is satisfactory, I hope."

Ava turned. Lucia was in the doorway with her hands folded and her expression arranged into something that was technically polite and actually wasn't.

"It's fine," Ava said. "Thank you."

"Dante asked me to make sure you had everything you needed." She said it the way you say something you were asked to say and don't agree with. "Breakfast is at eight. The staff will show you where."

"I appreciate it."

Lucia looked at her for a moment. "You handled yourself well tonight. At the reception."

Ava waited, because that sentence had a but in it somewhere.

"But I want you to understand something." Lucia's voice dropped, not threatening, just direct, the kind of direct that doesn't need to raise itself to land. "This house has a way of operating. There are things that are asked and things that are not asked. There are doors that are opened and doors that are not opened. You would do well to learn the difference quickly."

"I'll keep that in mind," Ava said.

"See that you do."

Lucia left without closing the door all the way, which Ava was fairly certain was deliberate.

She stood in the middle of the room for a moment, then crossed to the door and pushed it closed herself.

Then she went back to measuring.

She checked the bathroom twice. She checked the connecting door and found it locked on both sides, which was something at least. She checked the window latch and found it stiff but functional. She moved to the vanity mirror and ran her fingers along the frame, top first, then sides, then along the bottom edge where the frame met the wall.

Her fingers found it on the left side, tucked into the gap between the frame and the plaster, small enough that you'd miss it if you weren't looking and she only found it because she was always looking.

She didn't pull it out. Didn't touch it again. Just stood there with her hand still on the frame and her heart doing something loud and unpleasant in her chest.

She looked at herself in the mirror. At the ring on her left hand. At the room behind her reflected back at her in the glass.

Someone had put a microphone in her room.

And they had put it there before she arrived.