Chapter 30 The Watcher Watched
Brittany's POV
I crossed the studio in six steps.
My hands were not steady when I reached for the book, but I kept my movements deliberate, picking it up carefully from the center of the cutting table and holding it as you do when you don't yet know if it is safe. The cover was exactly as I had left it, no marks, no damage, no sign that anyone had forced it open. I stood at the table and opened it.
The hollow interior was intact.
The notebook was inside, exactly where I had placed it, the small coded pages undisturbed, my pen still clipped to the cover at the same angle I always left it. I turned to the last entry. Day seven. The dose notation. The physical observations. The three sentences at the end that I had written and immediately regretted.
All of it was there. All of it was untouched.
I exhaled and had to sit down on the stool because my legs decided all at once that they had been working very hard and deserved a rest.
I sat there for a moment with the book in my lap, and my hand pressed flat against my sternum, feeling my heart slow from something close to panic back toward something manageable. The studio was quiet around me—the fabric wall. The machines are under their dust sheets. My mother's sketches and my own new drawings cover the mood board in two generations of the same urgent handwriting.
Someone had been in this room.
Someone had picked up the book, confirmed what it contained, put it back, and left it where I would find it immediately.
And they had not taken it or destroyed it. Had not used it as leverage.
I looked down at the book in my hands and noticed for the first time that there was something underneath it, a small folded piece of paper that had been placed beneath the book on the table surface. I picked it up and opened it.
The handwriting was precise, elegant, and immediately familiar.
"I know what you're doing. And I am not going to stop you. S."
I read it twice.
Then I put my face in my hands and breathed for a long moment.
Sophia. Of course, it was Sophia. The woman who had installed Elena as her intelligence source fifteen years ago, who had spent two years developing an antidote in secret, who had adjusted the dress form to my measurements before I knew the studio existed. A woman who moved through this house like water, finding every crack, present in every room in some form, even when she wasn't physically there.
She had found my diary.
She had read enough to know what it contained.
And she had put it back and left me a note that said she was not going to stop me, which meant she had read those last three sentences, the ones about the laugh, the ones that had no business being in a medical record, and had chosen to say nothing about them at all.
I folded the note and tucked it into my robe pocket. I would burn it later.
I was still sitting on the stool, collecting myself, when the wall panel behind the wardrobe moved.
Leo came through without his usual grin. He was moving fast, his bag already open, his laptop out before he had fully cleared the panel. He sealed the wall behind him, crossed to the cutting table, and turned the laptop toward me without sitting down.
"Daisy missed her check-in window," he said.
I stood up immediately. "When?"
"Last night. Ten o'clock was her scheduled contact. Nothing came through. I waited until midnight and then started running traces." He pulled up a monitoring screen showing a signal log with a flat line where Daisy's check-in should have been. "This is the first missed window since she went in."
"How long has she been inside the house?"
"Four days," Leo said. "She checked in on time every previous window, twice daily, no issues. Then last night, nothing."
I looked at the flat signal line—four days of clean check-ins and then silence. The back of my neck went cold.
"Have you tried the burner?" I asked.
"Three times. No response. The phone is either off or destroyed." Leo's jaw was tight. He reached for the laptop and pulled up a second window. "I started pulling street camera footage from around Adam's property this morning. I found something."
He turned the laptop around again.
On the screen was a still image pulled from a street camera, with its slightly grainy quality typical of municipal surveillance footage. It showed the exterior of a large house in River Oaks, the new property Adam had moved into after signing the fraudulent fashion contract. The driveway was visible—the front entrance. And standing at the edge of the driveway, facing toward a car that had just pulled up, was a woman.
Bianca.
She was dressed in a silk blouse and tailored trousers, her hair perfect, her posture the relaxed confidence of someone standing in front of a house they owned. She was facing the camera, so her face was fully visible. She was looking directly at something, her expression sharp and focused and very still in the way Bianca's expression went still when she was calculating.
She was looking at a woman getting out of the car.
The second woman's face was partially turned, caught mid-movement, her body angled away from the camera. But the profile was there. The jawline. The particular way she held her shoulders.
It was Daisy.
I stared at the image.
"Bianca is looking right at her," I said.
"Yes," Leo said. "Not a glance. A look. The kind where you recognize something."
"Can you tell from the image whether Daisy knew she had been recognized?"
"Her body language looks normal," Leo said carefully. "She's not running. She's not rigid. But that could mean she hadn't registered Bianca's expression yet."
I looked at the timestamp in the bottom corner of the photograph.
Eight forty-three in the evening.
I looked at the signal log in the other window.
Daisy's last successful check-in had been at six thirty. The next window was ten o'clock.
I calculated the gap.
"This photograph is from two hours before her missed check-in," I said.
"Yes," Leo said quietly.
The studio was completely silent.
I looked at Daisy's partial profile on the screen, caught in that two-second window between getting out of the car and walking toward the house, completely unaware that a street camera was recording her and that Bianca was already watching with that flat, calculating expression.
Two hours between that moment and silence.
"We need to find her," I said.