Chapter 36: WHAT VANESSA SAW

Vanessa did not move from the garage doorway when they didn't answer. She just stood there, rolling her eyes slowly between Kira and Rex, taking in the closeness and the angle of their bodies under the hood. Then she smiled, warm and easy, like a woman who had simply wandered in looking for someone.

"Have either of you seen Victor?" she asked. "I checked the sitting room but he wasn't there."

Rex straightened up from the engine. "Why don't you try his study."

"Of course." Vanessa's eyes moved to Kira one more time, and they carried a smug look. "Thank you, Rex."

Then she turned and walked back down the corridor. Neither Kira nor Rex spoke until the fading sound of her footsteps were completely gone.

Rex was the first one to break the silence. "Vanessa never asks questions she doesn't already know the answer to."

Kira was still looking at the corridor entrance. She had felt the heat of Vanessa's gaze like a hand pressing down on her shoulder and she did not like what it meant. "She saw us standing here together. That's all she saw."

"That was probably enough to start one of her schemes," Rex said.

Kira turned back to the engine even though she had no real reason to be looking at it. She needed something to do with her hands and her eyes while she thought. The situation had been complicated before, but now it was more complicated and she could feel the difference.

"We need to be more careful," she said.

Rex looked at her across the open hood. He did not say anything for a moment and his silence made her look up at him. He was watching her with his arms folded and his jaw set, and something about his expression tod her he wasn't in agreement.

"Rex."

"I heard you," he said.

"Then say something."

"I'm just thinking about whether being careful is actually going to help us at this point or whether it's just going to make us more tense without changing anything."

Kira put down the cloth she had picked up from the workbench. "Vanessa is in this house and she is watching everything and she might be feeding whatever she sees directly back to your father. That is the situation we are in. So yes, being careful really matters."

"I know what the situation is," Rex said. "I've been living inside it longer than you have."

"Then act like it."

The words sounded a little harsher than she intended, and Rex stared at her for a moment before he looked back down at the engine. The silence between them after that was different from the one before Vanessa arrived.

"I'm going inside," she said finally when he didn't seem like he was going to say anything.

Rex did not try to stop her. He just nodded without looking up and she walked out of the garage and into the corridor and kept walking until she reached the east staircase.

She went up to her room and closed the door and stood in the middle of the floor for a moment. She was not angry exactly… She was just unsettled because it seemed that something she had been managing carefully had just developed a crack without warning. Vanessa had walked into that garage…and in thirty seconds without saying a single direct word, she had managed to make Kira feel exposed in a way that Victor's most brutal possessiveness had not even achieved.

That was a problem, and it was one that troubled her.

She went to the window and looked out at the grounds below. The garden was still and grey in the afternoon light, but she could not see the garage from here even though she could see the east path that ran along the hedge and the stone wall at the far end of it. She thought about all the carefully coded conversations she and Rex had been having there lately, the low voices and folded notes and the loose stone he had suggested.

Vanessa had not been watching them at the garden wall. Not yet. But if she had seen enough in the garage to note with that careful smile, it was only a matter of time before she started watching other places too.

Kira turned away from the window. She thought about what Rex said, that being careful might not be enough to change anything, and she hated the fact that she could not immediately argue with it. He was not entirely wrong… Vanessa was already inside the house and clearly aligned with Victor. Being careful with their proximity in the garage was not going to undo what she had already seen.

What it would do was buy time, and time was still the thing they needed most.

There was a knock at her door a few minutes later, and opened it expecting Maria or possibly Victor. It was Rex, still in the clothes he had been wearing in the garage, leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets.

"I shouldn't have said that," he said. "About being careful not mattering. That was me being frustrated and taking it out on the wrong thing."

Kira looked at him for a moment. "You weren't entirely wrong though."

"I know. But you weren't wrong either." He straightened up. "She's likely going to go straight to my father with whatever version of what she saw that best serves her and we both know that. So yes, we need to be more careful. I just also think we need to be smarter than careful."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning we need to know what she's actually after. What she wants from being in this house, what she wants from my father, and what she plans to do with anything she collects." He looked down the corridor in both directions before he spoke again. "Because right now she has the advantage of us not knowing her full play."

Kira stepped back from the door. "Come in then."

Rex came inside and she closed the door quietly behind him and they stood in her room and talked properly for the first time since the morning after the kitchen, without the engine between them or the open garage or the risk of being seen through a window. The conversation was slow and careful, and by the time Rex left forty minutes later, all they had managed to do was stop moving in opposite directions, which felt like the most important thing they could have managed in the circumstances.

After he was gone Kira sat on her bed and thought about Vanessa's eyes in the garage doorway and the smile that had carried absolutely nothing innocent in it. She knew for certain that whatever was coming next was going to come faster than either of them was ready for.