Chapter Four :The Footsteps
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That night the house went quiet early.
The staff disappeared one by one , soft footsteps fading down corridors, distant doors closing, lights going out in the parts of the estate she could see from her window. The grounds outside turned silver under the night sky, still and perfectly arranged even in the dark.
Sienna lay in the enormous white bed with her arms at her sides and her eyes wide open.
She had told herself she would sleep.
She had been telling herself that for two hours.
The bed was the most comfortable thing she had ever lain on. The linen was soft, the room was the perfect temperature, the pillows were exactly right. Everything in this house was exactly right.
And yet sleep felt like something happening in another world entirely.
She stared at the ceiling.
Her phone screen lit up on the bedside table.
Nora: Are you still alive? I need proof of life. I have been staring at my wall since you left and I cannot stop thinking about you in that house with that man.
Sienna smiled in the dark.
She picked up the phone and typed back.
Sienna: I'm alive. The bed is enormous. I feel like I'm sleeping in a car park.
Three seconds.
Nora: I hate everything about this. Are you okay? Actually okay? Not Sienna-okay where you say you're fine and you're actually holding the whole world together with your bare hands.
Sienna looked at that message for a long time.
Then she typed:
Sienna: I'm Sienna-okay. But I'm okay.
Nora: I'm coming to get you.
Sienna: You are not.
Nora: I have a car and absolutely nothing to lose.
Sienna: Nora.
Nora: Fine. But I'm not sleeping tonight. I'll be right here if you need me. All night. I mean it.
Sienna set the phone down.
She looked back at the ceiling.
Nora Walsh, she thought. What would I do without you.
The warmth of it ;that small, steady, faithful warmth — sat in her chest alongside everything else. The cold house. The long table. The grey eyes that moved away a half second too late.
She pressed her lips together.
Don't, she reminded herself. Don't start thinking about him.
She closed her eyes.
She didn't know how much time had passed when she heard it.
Footsteps.
Heavy. Measured. Unhurried.
Moving down the corridor outside her door.
Her eyes opened.
She lay completely still, her hands flat against the mattress, her breathing suddenly very deliberate. The house had been so quiet that the sound was impossible to miss ,each step clear and even, coming closer down the corridor toward her room.
She watched the ceiling.
The footsteps slowed.
Right outside her door —
They stopped.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing she had ever heard.
She didn't move. Didn't breathe more than she had to. The whole room felt suspended — like the house itself was holding its breath alongside her.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Fifteen.
She found herself looking at the door handle. Watching it in the dark. Waiting for it to move.
It didn't move.
Twenty seconds.
Then the footsteps continued — past her door, slow and unhurried, fading down the corridor, growing quieter, until they were gone completely.
Sienna let out a breath so slowly it barely made a sound.
She turned her head toward the door and stared at it in the dark.
Her heart was doing something she absolutely refused to name.
He stopped, she thought. He stopped right outside my door.
Why did he stop?
She lay there in the enormous cold bed in the enormous cold house and she stared at that door and she thought about grey eyes that looked away too late, and a hand that held hers like something neither precious nor careless, and a voice that said because I'm asking you not to — like asking was something he didn't do often.
Like asking cost him something.
Why did he stop?
She had no answer.
But somewhere down the east corridor, at the end of the third floor she had been told not to visit — a light was on.
She could see it.
A thin line of gold beneath a door she couldn't see from here but knew was there.
Burning quietly in the dark.
Like a secret that didn't know it was being watched.
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