THE BODYGUARD

Sienna My father had been lying to me for years. I did not know the full shape of it yet. I only knew the edges, the things that didn't quite add up, the conversations that stopped when I walked into rooms, the phone calls he took in his study with the door locked. I had been filing these things away for months the way you file things you are not ready to look at directly. Then he sat me down on a Tuesday morning and told me he was hiring a bodyguard. "Why?" I asked. "Precautionary," he said, in the tone he used when the real answer was something else entirely. "Precautionary against what?" "The world is unpredictable, Sienna. I have assets. That makes you a target." I looked at my father across his desk, at this man I had trusted completely for twenty-two years, and felt the specific cold of someone understanding that the ground beneath them is less solid than they believed. "How long?" I asked. "Until I'm satisfied the situation is handled." "What situation?" "Precautionary," he said again, and closed the conversation the way he always closed things he did not want me to pursue, with a smile and a redirect and the practiced ease of a man who had been managing information his whole life. The bodyguard arrived that afternoon. I was in the living room when I heard the door, and I heard my father's voice, lower than usual, and then footsteps, and then the door to the living room opened and my father stepped in with a man behind him who made the room feel immediately smaller. He was tall. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the kind of face that had been through things and come out the other side with no softness left in it. He was dressed simply, nothing that announced itself, but he moved with the controlled economy of someone who was always aware of exactly where he was in a space. His eyes found me immediately. They were a dark grey, almost black in the afternoon light, and they assessed me with the specific attention of someone cataloguing a variable they had not fully accounted for. "Sienna," my father said, "this is Rafe. He'll be staying in the east wing." "Staying," I repeated. "Live-in protection. Standard for situations like this." I looked at Rafe. He looked back at me with an expression that gave nothing away and everything away simultaneously, the expression of a man who knew more than he was saying and was comfortable with that. "Nice to meet you," I said, because that was what you said. "Miss Cross," he said. His voice was low and even and entirely unimpressed, which for reasons I did not immediately examine was the most interesting thing about him. My father excused himself. Rafe stayed in the doorway for a moment, looking at the room with those grey eyes, taking inventory. "You don't have to stand there," I said. "Come in or don't." He looked at me. Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite amusement. "I'll do a sweep of the house," he said. "Standard procedure." "Standard procedure," I said. "Right. And what exactly are you protecting me from?" He looked at me for one long moment. "Your father will explain the details," he said, and left. I stood in the living room after he had gone and thought about the way he had looked at me when he first walked in. Not the way bodyguards looked at clients. Not assessing threats. Assessing me. Something about that felt important in a way I could not name yet. I went to find my father. His study was locked.