The moonlight slashed the ballroom in blue ribbons. The chandeliers overhead was off, but the floor still gleamed like a polished lie. I was barefoot on wooden floor, spine arched, arms lifted—dancing like no one was watching.Which, of course, meant someone definitely was.The air was humid with gathering storm and yesterday’s cigar smoke. My pulse was doing a tango with my ribs, but I moved slow, liquid—Marta called it dancing, but she never saw what it supposed to look like in my head. I wasn’t really dancing. I was remembering how it feels to be happy. And then I felt the heat.Not from the fast movement or polished floor or the tired moon. But from the shadow in the doorway.He didn’t speak or breathe, not in a way a normal human does. Just stood there like a question I didn’t want to acknowledge, watching me dance with the kind of attention you only give to something you’re thinking of breaking. I swore in my mind, didn’t say anything, and stopped.“Elky,” I said eventually with
The house was quiet. Not the peaceful kind, but the kind that walks in after men leave with guns and come back with holes in their bodies. I could feel their absence like a weight in the air, heavier than those brass chandeliers in the hall and just as likely to fall on your head if you weren’t careful.They’d gone. All of them. A full-pack raid on the competition, Rick’s lot, I guessed—one of those revenge things that end with bullet casings and at least one tooth on the floor. That’s in the best case scenario. Even Marta had disappeared somewhere with her brand new mop and a foul mood. That left me alone. Or as alone as a woman pretending to be blind in a house full of cameras focused on her could be.I wasn’t supposed to be walking, not mentioning thinking and snooping around. I was supposed to be sitting quietly in a pretty French toile armchair like a sad little statue. But I was restless. The letter I’d seen in Jennings’ study itched under my skin like a bite I couldn’t scratch
I even cried a bit after he’d left. I sobbed until I decided all that crying business was too lame for a tough cookie like Leo Christofides. So I’ve caught up with resting, and I had my dreamless beauty sleep until someone turned the engine on in the early hours. That morning rolled in like a punchline—gray, slow, and a little too full of itself. Light leaked through my French windows in long, arrogant shafts, catching on the polished edges of a breakfast spread. The house was quiet, but not peaceful—more like a poker room after the shooting, when the bodies are gone but the death’s still playing its hand on the table.I sat across from Elky. My face wore the mask of polite vacancy I’d practiced in mirror while having a crying session the other day, the kind that says, “No, officer, I didn’t see a thing.” Only now it was breakfast theater, and I was the star who never got her well-deserved applause.He sat with his arm bandaged and his ego glowing faintly through the bruises. Big bad
The next morning the breakfast room had become the kind of place that made silence feel frightening. Sunlight slanted in through the east windows, fat and brazen like it thought it was doing me a favor. It didn’t do any favors to old Marta though. The chandelier looked like it hadn’t seen a proper polish since the Cold War. Dust hung on it like faded glory, and the room smelled faintly of stale air freshener, burnt toast, and dark secrets no one wanted to own.I sat at the round table with my hands in my lap and my eyes on nothing, which suited the mood just fine. The oatmeal in front of me had been dressed up like it was headed to a gala—sliced strawberries, a tasteful sprinkle of cinnamon, and a drizzle of something that probably had a French name and a criminal record for making people fat. I lifted the spoon delicately, aiming somewhere to the left of the bowl before correcting myself. It took years of living in boring darkness to perfect the act. Now days I could blind my way th
The hallway didn’t creak—it confessed. Each step down the east wing was a whispered scandal under my bare feet, and the storm outside hadn’t even started telling me badly off. The air was thick with that heavy, electric silence you get right before God flips the switch and the lightning starts sketching death scenes across the sky.I moved slow, careful, trailing my fingers along the wall like a blind girl in a haunted house—because that’s what I was supposed to be. The marble was cold under my feet, slick, and slippery. My silk nightgown whispered more than I intended, and that’s didn’t help my mission.Behind me, the west wing slept like it supposed to. But in the east, the lights didn’t obey the rules. That’s where the shadows had ambition and the ghosts wore suits, I imagined. The corridor narrowed near the old accounting office—Elky’s murder-friendly accounting wing, where ledgers bled and men retired with bullet in the head. I froze.A line of gold leaked out from under the door
The rain hit the windows like it was personal. Heavy, wet, full of old grudges. Outside, the sky had the kind of hangover that made you want to light a cigarette just to feel something. Inside, the foyer was all shivering chill and menace. It smelled a lot like waxed pride and dirty money, and the chandelier overhead looked like something a dismantled tsar would’ve pawned in a hurry.I was perched on the edge of the hallway settee, waiting for rain to stop to go for a walk in a garden. Accompanied by Marta, naturally. My cold bluish hands folded neatly in my lap. I kept my face still, eyes unfocused. It was the same trick I used on stage back when I danced for real applause—stillness, silence, steel in satin wrapping.I heard footsteps on polished stone, too confident for staff, too smooth for Jennings. Voices followed—male, familiar. Voices of men that didn’t tip waiters and smiled too wide at funerals.It was his voice. Rick’s. My ex’s. Rick was kind of guy who’d kiss your neck whi