Part 3:

His eyes moved over her, slow and thorough, reading more than she wanted read. Tell me, what exactly is your work in this house? She made herself swallow the first answer that rose. I see that the staff do their jobs, and the place runs the way it should. He let that stand and walked her on. The corridor opened ahead of them, and that was when she saw the wall.

Bullet holes, a torn line of them across the old stonework, pale wounds in stone that had stood 300 years. Her temper rose before her sense could catch it, and she turned on him. “Was there a fight in here?” The words came out sharp. “Is anyone hurt?” She stopped walking. He stopped with her, her wrist still caught in his hand. The two of them turned face to face in the narrow light.

Who do you think you are? Her spine stayed straight, every inch of it. You bring guns into a house where people live. Something moved behind his eyes when she said the word hurt. There and gone, a crack closing over before she could name it. Then his face was stone again, and he angled his head, studying her the way a man studies a thing that won’t quite add up.

For a maid, your tongue runs long. Her eyes cut upward, sharp with everything she couldn’t say. I am not a maid. A smile touched the corner of Aeros Svino’s mouth. His gaze went to the door beside them. He drew her to it, opened it, and put her inside. He raised one finger. Be a good girl while I’m gone. I’m not finished with you. The door shut in her face.

The lock turned with a heavy solid clunk that said it would not open again, and the heat rushed up her throat before she could think. She hit the wood with the heel of her hand. Where is Miss Ki? Take me to her. Her palm cracked against it again harder. Do you hear me? The footsteps on the other side thinned to nothing.

She pressed her forehead to the door and made herself breathe, the anger settling into something colder and far more useful. He thought a lock would hold her. He had no idea where he’d put her. When she turned, the room caught her by the chest. She knew this smell. Old paper and beeswax, the particular gold of the sealite through these windows, her father’s library, the last room in the world, where she’d been a child instead of a conte.

She had learned every corner of it before she was tall enough to reach its high shelves, and the man who’d locked her in didn’t know a single one of them. The fear went out of her like a tide pulling back. What rose in its place was almost a smile. She crossed to the far bookcase, the floor, finding her feet from memory, and reached for the fourth shelf, the blue spine, third from the end, the one she’d pulled a hundred times as a girl, just to watch the wall move. Her fingers closed on it.

She drew it back. Deep inside the wall, something gave a click, then the slow grind of old stone, and the case swung inward, letting out a draft of cold air. The passage opened in front of her, black and narrow and hers. The way through the house her father had never known she’d found. Somewhere behind these walls, Anita was wearing her name, sitting in the hands of his men.

So she wasn’t running. She was going in after her. Isabella stepped into the dark and looked back once at the locked door, and for the first time since the cliff, the ground felt like her own. A sly smile crossed her face. She set it low, almost to herself. Catch me if you can, Aeros Sorvino.

The bookcase swung shut behind her on its own weight, and the dark swallowed her hole. Cold air, old dust. The library gone, sealed off on the other side of the wall. Her hand found what she wanted on the ledge by the entrance. A battery torch left here years ago because everything useful in this house had a hidden twin. She thumbmed it on.

A thin beam cut the black. She knew these tunnels. She had mapped them as a girl. Every turn and dead end, the narrow stairs that climbed between the walls of rooms her father believed were private. She moved up through them now, quick and quiet, one hand trailing the cold stone until voices reached her through it.

She stopped and listened, her ear close to the hidden seam in the wall. She thumbmed the torch off, swallowing the beam, and let the dark close around her. Then she found the loose block at shoulder height, worked it free a finger’s width, and through the gap came a line of lamplight and the room beyond. Anita sat in the middle of it.

Oros stood over her, two fingers under her jaw, tipping her face up to his. “Your father took something from me that can’t be bought back.” No heat in his voice that made it worse. The money was only the part I could count. His grip stayed on her chin, holding her face to his. “Now I have you.

” He studied her slow and unblinking. So tell me, how far will he go to get his daughter back? Anita didn’t flinch under his hand. My father isn’t as fond of me as you think. I’m not worth much to him. No. Something in his attention sharpened. Then why keep you like a ghost? No face, no age, nothing on record that says where Isabella Ki even lives.

He released her chin and stepped back, looking at her the way a man looks at numbers that won’t add up. I expected someone younger. How old are you? Free of his hold, she raised her chin herself and looked straight at him. You’ve got so many questions about his family. Ask him. One of his men came in behind him.

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