Chapter 35: TRUST NO ONE

Kira found it at seven-fifteen in the morning, forty minutes after Victor left her room. She had been standing in front of the mirror fixing her hair when the light from the window shifted with the movement of clouds outside and caught the smoke detector at an angle it hadn't caught before, throwing a tiny reflective glint from a point that had no business being reflective. She looked at it for exactly one second before looking away, returning her eyes to the mirror and her hands to her hair as if nothing had interrupted her.

Her heart was moving quickly but her face was not, and she was grateful for every year of performing in front of men who watched for weakness.

She finished with her hair and took her time choosing a cardigan from the wardrobe, shaking it out and holding it up to the light as if she was looking for an invisible stain… Then she put it on and went to the window and stood there looking out at the frost on the garden for a while, giving herself the time to think without her expression betraying the fact that she was doing it.

The smoke detector was on the ceiling above the wardrobe, which put it at an angle that covered most of the room including the bed, the bookshelf, and the door. Whoever installed it had chosen the position carefully, and the fact that it had been there long enough for her not to notice it in her first weeks at the estate meant it had been there before her arrival. This was not something installed in response to her… This was clearly standard practice in Victor Hawthorne's house.

She thought about everything she had done in this room since she arrived, every private moment, every unguarded expression, every time she had let her performance slip because she believed she was alone, and she felt like screaming out in anger. Instead, she picked up her phone, checked it with the casual interest of someone looking for messages, and went downstairs for breakfast.

…

She performed through the entire meal with a thoroughness that would have been exhausting if she'd had room to feel exhausted. She laughed at the right moments, responded to Victor's remarks with warmth and attention, and ate her eggs like someone who had slept well and had nothing weighing on her mind. When Maria refilled her coffee, Kira thanked her with an easy smile and focused on her meal.

Rex was watching her from across the table, and she kept her eyes pleasantly elsewhere and made no move to acknowledge him beyond the ordinary social courtesies of passing the toast and answering when he was directly addressed.

Vanessa was in a mood of her own too, picking at fruit and scrolling on her phone, apparently too occupied with her own concerns to pay much attention to the rest of the table. Victor spoke briefly about his morning schedule, mentioned a call with his lawyers, and excused himself before the meal was finished.

When the room had cleared, Kira sat for a while longer with her coffee, and then she stood up and took her cup to the kitchen herself, a small domestic gesture that nobody would think twice about, and as she passed through the door she observed from memory every room in the estate where she had behaved as if she was unwatched.

The list was longer than she would have liked, and there was only one person she could talk to at the moment about it who might know something or be even willing to help her... Rex.

She later found Rex in the garage just before eleven. He was leaning over the open hood of his car that she had seen him working on twice before, doing something to the engine with a cloth in one hand and an expression of genuine concentration on his face, which was exactly the kind of ordinary activity she needed as cover. She walked in without hurrying, glancing around the space with mild curiosity before crossing to where he stood and positioned herself beside him, looking down into the engine with convincing interest even though she understood none of it.

"Tell me what you're doing," she said, in a light and conversational tone, and then she leaned slightly closer under the hood and lowered her voice until it was barely above the sound of the wind outside the garage doors. "My room has a camera in it, Rex, in the smoke detector above the wardrobe."

She half expected him to ignore her given the way she had been avoiding him recently, but to her uttermost surprise, Rex's hands went still on the engine component he was holding, a single moment of absolute stillness, and then he picked up the cloth and began wiping his fingers with unhurried calmness.

"Mine too," he said, his voice equally low, his eyes on the engine. "Above the desk. I found it about four months ago when the casing cracked and the light hit it differently."

"You disabled it?"

"Covered the lens with a residue from one of the cleaning products under the bathroom sink. It looks like dust buildup from the outside, and it doesn't trigger any monitoring alert because the unit itself still reads as functional." He set the cloth down and reached for a different tool, his movements completely natural to anyone watching from the garage entrance. "I didn't say anything to my father because telling him would have told him I found it."

Kira absorbed this while pretending to study a component near the radiator that she had no name for, resting one hand on the edge of the hood to make her posture look casual. "How many rooms?" she asked.

"At least four that I know of, but it could possibly be more than that." He leaned slightly forward to reach something deeper in the engine, which brought his shoulder close enough to hers that she could feel the warmth through her cardigan. "The library is clean, and so is the garage. He never put them in spaces where business associates might notice and take issue." He paused, and she could hear the dry quality underneath his voice when he added, "He reserves that particular courtesy for family."

She kept her eyes on the engine and thought about the memo pressed between the pages of a book that had been handled by someone who was not her, in a room that had been watched for God knows how long, and the full shape of where she was standing became very clear and very cold.

"The note you gave me," she said, barely moving her lips.

"I know," he said, which meant he had already thought of it.

"Someone went through my things last night. I need to move it."

He adjusted something near the front of the engine that produced a small soft click, and under the cover of the sound he said, "There's a loose stone in the east garden wall, third from the post on the left side. It's wide enough for a folded paper."

She nodded, carefully keeping the movement small.

They stayed like that for another minute, close together in the dim light under the raised hood, speaking in the careful low voices of people who had independently learned how to communicate in rooms that were not safe, and the proximity that had always been a problem between them was a problem now in a different way, not just the physical awareness of him but the particular intimacy of being the only two people in a house full of watchers who were watching together.

She was conscious of his shoulder against hers and the way his hands moved with sure confidence over the engine components and the fact that he had found the camera four months ago and said nothing, carrying it alone, and she thought about what that kind of solitary vigilance cost a person over time.

"Rex," she said, very quietly.

He turned his head slightly toward her, just enough to show he was listening.

She didn't say anything else because there wasn't anything else that could be said safely in this space, but something passed between them in the silence that both of them understood and neither of them addressed because addressing it was a luxury the situation did not currently allow.

Then a sound reached them from the garage entrance, the particular sound of heels, and they both noticed it in the same instant without any visible change in their positions, because they had both been trained by different circumstances to absorb information without showing it.

Vanessa stood in the open garage doorway with one shoulder against the frame and her arms loosely crossed, wearing an expression that had started as something soft and amused but was in the process of becoming something considerably more attentive. Her eyes moved between them slowly, taking in the angle of their bodies, the closeness, and the quality of the silence she had walked into. Kira watched the amusement finish its transformation into something colder and dangerous.

"Am I interrupting something?" Vanessa asked.