Chapter 29 The Poison Diary
Brittany's POV
Daisy left the mansion the following morning at seven, driven by one of David's people in a plain car with no Blackwell plates. I watched from the studio window as the car cleared the gate and turned onto the main road, and I held the specific focused stillness of someone who has just set something irreversible in motion and is making peace with that.
Then I turned back to the cutting table and got to work.
The antidote routine began that same evening.
Sophia had given me a small glass dropper bottle, the compound already prepared, with precise instructions written in her neat handwriting on a folded card I memorized and then burned over the studio's small utility sink. Three drops. Evening meal only. Mixed into something with a strong enough base flavor to mask the slight bitterness. Never more than three drops. Never skipped without a documented reason.
Elena personally managed David's meals, had done so for years under the guise of ensuring dietary consistency for his "condition," which gave her a natural, unsuspicious reason to be the last person to handle his food before it reached him. My role was simple. I prepared the dose in the studio each evening. Elena collected it and administered it. The exchange took less than 30 seconds and happened in the kitchen corridor, which sat in the blind spot between the two surveillance networks.
Leo had confirmed the blind spot held.
The first evening I stood in the kitchen corridor with the dropper bottle in my palm and waited for Elena, I felt the full weight of what I was doing settle on me. I was giving a man medicine without his knowledge. I had talked myself through the ethics of it multiple times, had landed in the same place each time, that the alternative was watching him deteriorate and die in his own house while the people responsible walked free. The logic was sound. The necessity was real.
It still felt like a serious thing to do. I wanted to feel that weight. I didn't want it to become routine so quickly that I stopped understanding what it meant.
Elena appeared around the corner, took the dropper from my hand, and said quietly, "Three drops in the broth tonight. He always finishes the broth."
"Good," I said.
She looked at me for a brief moment with those careful eyes. "You're doing the right thing," she said.
"I know," I said. "Thank you for saying it anyway."
I started the diary that same night.
It was Sophia's suggestion, framed as a medical precaution. A documented record of dose dates, observed symptoms, and physical changes would be necessary evidence if the poisoning were ever formally investigated. It needed to exist, to be detailed, and to be somewhere accessible to me and invisible to everyone else.
The hollowed-out book was my solution. A large fashion reference encyclopedia, the kind that looks purely decorative, its spine uncracked, sitting unremarkably among other reference materials on the studio shelf. I had cut the interior pages myself with a craft knife, creating a cavity large enough for a slim notebook. It sat on the shelf between two other large volumes and looked exactly like what it appeared to be.
I wrote in it every night after dinner.
Day one. Three drops administered. No observable change. Expected.
Day two. Three drops. David gripped the back of his chair when he stood from the dinner table. Duration approximately two seconds. Controlled, deliberate, practiced.
Day three. Three drops. Dinner conversation was brief. He asked me about the studio without looking at me directly, a casual question, and I gave a casual answer. We both pretended the conversation was simpler than it was.
Day four. Three drops. The grip on the chair lasted one second tonight instead of two. I noted it and then made myself note it again to be sure I hadn't imagined it.
I hadn't imagined it.
Day five. Three drops. He walked from the dining room to his study without touching anything.
Day six. Three drops. His voice at dinner was slightly less controlled than usual, not worse, looser. The tightness that sat underneath his words like a brace had relaxed by a small but measurable degree.
Day seven. Three drops.
We were at dinner, the two of us at the long table that seated twelve, which we had quietly reduced to using only one end by unspoken mutual agreement. I was telling him something about fabric sourcing, a practical conversation, and he said something in response that caught me off guard, a dry observation about the logistics of international shipping that was genuinely, unexpectedly funny.
I laughed.
He looked at me when I laughed, the way you look at someone when you weren't quite expecting that response, and then something in his face shifted, and he laughed too. A real laugh, not the controlled social sound I had heard from him in formal contexts. Brief and unguarded, surprised out of him, and it changed his whole face for the three seconds it lasted.
I looked back down at my plate immediately.
We finished dinner, talking about something else entirely, and I did not look at his face again for the rest of the meal.
That night in the studio, I opened the diary and wrote the date, the dose, and the observed physical changes in my neat, coded shorthand. The reduced tremor duration. The loosened vocal tension. The improved ease of movement across the day.
Then I wrote, still in shorthand, still in the medical documentation section where it had no business being: "He laughed at dinner tonight. Unguarded. Lasted approximately three seconds. Completely changed his face."
I stopped writing.
I looked at what I had written.
I read it twice.
Then I closed the book hard, the sound of it sharp in the quiet studio, and pushed it back into its hollow inside the reference volume and slid the volume onto the shelf between its neighbors.
I stood with my hand on the shelf for a moment.
Then I turned off the studio light and went to bed.
The next morning, I came back to the studio at five, as I did every morning, to work on the collection before the house woke up. I unlocked the studio door, stepped inside, and reached for the light switch.
The lights came on.
I turned toward the shelves automatically, the first check of every morning, confirming everything was where I had left it the night before.
The reference volume was not on the shelf.
It was sitting in the exact center of the cutting table. Placed deliberately, squared with the table edges, positioned precisely where I could not possibly miss it.
Someone had been in the studio.