Chapter 49 Chapter 49

Chapter 49 Chapter 49
~ Elena's POV
Damian put a man outside my door. Not obviously, of course, nothing Damian did was ever obvious when he wanted it to look like something else. He called it "extra coverage during a sensitive period," said it with a perfectly straight face over coffee, as if I hadn't noticed the new shadow parked outside my study every time I so much as reached for a doorknob.
"His name is Theo," Damian said, like that settled the matter. "He'll keep his distance."
"He followed me to the bathroom yesterday."
"He waited outside the bathroom."
"That is following me to the bathroom, Damian."
He had the audacity to look amused, which only made it worse. I decided, somewhere between my second cup of coffee and the moment Theo cleared his throat awkwardly from the hallway, that if Damian intended to treat me like something precious and breakable that needed guarding at all times, I was going to find quieter ways around him than arguing about it at the breakfast table.

~ In The Kitchen
For the past few days, Lucia and Adrian moved into our place, courtesy of Damian, once again.
Lucia was elbow-deep in bread dough when I found her, flour dusted up both forearms, humming something under her breath that I didn't recognize. She glanced up when I dropped into the chair across the counter from her, took one look at my face, and reached for the kettle without being asked.
"Bad morning?"
"Damian assigned me a babysitter."
"Theo," she said immediately, not even glancing up. "He's sweet. Terrified of you, though. Told Marisol, the housekeeper, that you glared at him so hard yesterday he thought about quitting."
"Good," I said, and Lucia laughed, the real kind, the kind that made the whole kitchen feel warmer than it had any right to on a morning like this one.
I liked Lucia in a way I hadn't expected to like anyone in this house, back when I'd first arrived furious and grieving and certain I would hate every stone of these walls forever. She'd been the first person to talk to me like I was a person and not a problem to be managed, the first to slip me an extra pastry when Damian was in one of his moods, the first to tell me, gently but without softening the truth, when I was being unreasonable.
"You didn't come down here for tea," she said, sliding a cup across the counter to me anyway.
"No," I admitted. "I came down here because I wanted to ask you something, and I didn't want it written down anywhere, or said in a room with cameras in it."
Her hands slowed on the dough. She didn't look alarmed, exactly… more like a woman recalculating how much of this conversation she was willing to be part of.
"Ask," she said.
"Has anyone new been hired in the last few months? Kitchen staff, groundskeepers, anyone who has access to the house but isn't exactly family?"
Lucia was quiet for a moment, working the dough with more focus than it strictly required. "You think it's someone on staff."
"I think," I said carefully, "that whoever's feeding information out of this house doesn't need to be in every meeting to hear things. They just need to be somewhere no one thinks to watch."
"You mean someone like me."
"I mean someone nobody suspects because everyone's too busy being polite to them to actually look."
She considered that, then wiped her hands on her apron and reached for a small notebook tucked beside the spice rack, the kind that could be used for grocery lists and staff schedules, mundane and utterly beneath anyone's suspicion, which was, I realized, exactly why it was the smartest place in this entire house to actually keep a record of something.
"Two new groundskeepers in the last four months," she said, flipping pages. "One left after three weeks, didn't work out. The other's still here… quiet boy, keeps to himself, good with the roses. And a new driver, started around the same time Liz first showed up at the gate that first week, if I remember right."
I sat up straighter. "The same week?"
"Give or take a few days." Lucia's eyes lifted to mine, sharper now, the humor gone out of them entirely. "You think that's connected?"
"I don't know yet," I admitted. "But I'd like to find out quietly, before I hand Damian a name and watch him do something irreversible to the wrong person."

~ Later That Afternoon
I spent the rest of the day doing something I hadn't done since before my father died… small, ordinary things that had nothing to do with mafia routes or shipment logs or the particular way Marco's face had gone rigid in that war room. I walked the gardens. I let Theo trail ten feet behind me, pretending not to notice him, until eventually he relaxed enough to actually answer when I asked him how long he'd worked for the family.
"Eight months," he said. "Started right after your wedding, if you don't mind me saying, ma'am."
"I don't mind. Do you like it here?"
He looked startled that I'd asked, like the question itself was a kind of trap he wasn't sure how to disarm. "It's… good work," he said carefully. "Pays well. Mr. Moretti's fair, as long as you don't cross him."
"And the new driver? Do you know him?"
"Not really. Keeps odd hours. Doesn't talk much." A pause, and then, quieter, like he wasn't sure he should be offering it, "He asks a lot of questions, though. About the house. Who lives where…? Who's close to who…?"
I filed that away carefully, the way I'd learned to file away everything useful in this house, quietly, without reaction, without letting my face give away how much a single sentence could matter.
"Thank you, Theo."
"For what, ma'am?"
"For not following me into the bathroom today."
He turned faintly red and said nothing at all, which I decided to count as a personal victory.

~ That Evening
Damian found me on the terrace as the sun went down, dropping into the chair beside mine with the particular exhaustion of a man who'd spent his entire day chasing shadows that refused to hold still long enough to be caught.
"Productive day?" he asked.
"Quiet one," I said, which wasn't quite a lie. "I talked to Lucia. I let your terrifying bathroom guard walk me around the garden."
"He's not terrifying."
"He apologized to a rosebush today for standing too close to it."
Damian huffed something that might, on a more generous day, have been called a laugh. He reached over and took my hand, turning it over in his, tracing an absent line across my knuckles the way he did when his mind was still half a mile away even as his body sat beside me.
"I don't like where all of this is going," he admitted, quieter now, the exhaustion bleeding honestly into his voice for once instead of being buried under command. "It makes me feel like I'm guarding a house with no walls."
I thought about the new driver. About Lucia's notebook, about the small, patient threads I'd started pulling on my own, ones I wasn't ready to hand him yet, not until I understood exactly what they were attached to.
"You're not the only one guarding it," I said instead, and meant it more than he probably realized.
He looked at me for a long moment, something soft and searching in his expression, like he was trying to work out exactly how much I wasn't telling him and deciding, for tonight at least, not to push for it.
"No," he said finally, pulling my hand up to press a kiss against my knuckles. "I suppose I'm not."