CHAPTER 10: THE FIRST TEST
1444 Words
Valentina
The cameras were gone by morning.
Probably.
I checked anyway.
The smoke detector was new. I stood on the bed and poked it with a hairbrush until Luna hissed at me from the floor, apparently embarrassed by my technique.
No lens.
The clock was just a clock. The mirror stayed suspicious.
Mrs. Brennan had left clothes outside the door. Black trousers. White shirt. Flat boots. No lace. A peace offering from the woman helping organize my captivity.
I put them on because making a point naked would have created the wrong kind of household discussion.
The door opened from the inside.
No guard waited in the corridor.
That felt less like freedom and more like arrogance.
I went downstairs.
Breakfast sat in an empty room overlooking the grounds. Eggs, toast, fruit, coffee strong enough to remove paint.
I drank it anyway.
Organized crime had terrible coffee. Finally, a weakness.
The French doors opened onto the terrace.
No alarm.
Three guards saw me step outside. One touched his radio. Nobody stopped me.
Fine.
I finished the toast while standing. It was cold and buttered badly. Whoever ran this house could coordinate armed men across Chicago but apparently feared the edges of bread.
A folded map sat beneath the fruit bowl.
Not a real map. A polite little drawing of the estate with the main house, garden, clinic, and chapel marked in careful ink. The outer wall was missing, along with every gate except the front one.
Cute.
I folded it into my pocket. A bad map was still paper, and paper could hold notes.
We were all pretending.
The estate looked different in daylight. Less haunted mansion, more private military base with landscaping. Cameras tracked the walls. Men stood where they could see doors without appearing to watch them. A low grey building sat behind the trees, too ugly to be decorative.
Clinic, maybe.
Or torture room.
With this family, it could be both.
I walked toward the garden and counted everything.
Four cameras along the east wall. Two guards near the garages. Motion sensors fixed to the trees on the west side. The north garden had old stone, heavy ivy, and a service gate that looked older than Mrs. Brennan's cardigan.
There.
The lock was mechanical.
I pulled a hairpin from behind my ear and pushed it into the keyway. The first pin moved. The second did not.
My father had taught me locks during what he called a family safety lesson and Mateo called Dad losing his mind again. I had complained through the entire afternoon.
Now I silently apologized to a dead man while picking a mafia gate with a stolen hairpin.
Life had a terrible sense of humour.
I crouched beside a bed of rosemary and pretended to care about herbs while checking the bottom hinge.
"There's a plate under the ivy."
I stopped moving.
Cillian stood beneath the arch in dark trousers and a charcoal shirt, looking annoyingly upright for a man I'd stitched together a few hours earlier.
I pulled the hairpin out of the lock.
"How long have you been there?"
He ignored the question and pointed to a narrow strip of stone near my boot.
"Step on that and the gate locks."
I looked down.
The line was almost invisible.
"And then?"
"Four men come from the east side."
I glanced toward the trees. Nothing moved.
That did not mean no one was there.
"You watched me walk over here."
"Yes."
I waited.
He gave me nothing else.
"Why didn't you stop me?"
"I wanted to see which gate you chose."
"So this was a test."
"For both of us."
I didn't know what that meant and refused to ask.
He held out his hand.
"Give me the pin."
"No."
My answer came too quickly.
His eyes dropped to my fist.
"You've bent it."
"It's mine."
He took a key from his pocket and reached past me. I backed away before his arm crossed my chest.
He noticed.
Of course he did.
The gate opened three inches, then stopped against a steel bolt hidden in the ground.
"Two locks," he said.
I stared at the bolt.
My father had never mentioned hidden steel bolts. Very inconsiderate of him.
"I would have found it."
Cillian looked at the scratched keyway.
"Eventually."
I shoved the ruined pin back into my hair.
When I stood, pain went through my ankle and my hand caught the stone wall.
Cillian moved.
I flinched before he touched me.
He stopped with one hand halfway out.
For a second, we both looked at it.
Then he let it fall.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You aren't."
"I can walk."
"Badly."
I started toward the arch.
He stood in the middle of it.
I stopped a few feet away.
"Can you move?"
He looked past me at the gate.
"Are you going back to the house?"
"I'm trying to."
He shifted, but not enough.
My shoulder would still have to brush him.
Maybe that was deliberate. Maybe I was too tired and angry to know anymore.
I stepped closer.
My ankle rolled slightly on the gravel. My palm landed against his chest before I could catch myself.
Warm. Solid. His heart struck once beneath my hand, harder than I expected.
I snatched it back.
"Sorry."
The word slipped out and irritated me immediately.
Cillian's fingers flexed at his side.
I felt the flex of muscle under my palm and the heat of his body through the shirt. For a second I remembered the outline of his c**k in the medical suite, thick and leaking against black cotton, and my own cunt pulsed in answer.
I hated him for that reaction more than I hated him for the cameras.
"Your ankle needs wrapping."
"It needs you to stop talking about it."
I turned sideways and squeezed past him.
My hip caught his thigh. His breath changed, just slightly.
The hard line of him pressed against my hip for half a second. He was hard again. Or still. I didn't know which was worse.
Neither of us mentioned it.
That was better.
A young guard stood near the stable. Sandy hair, open face, nervous eyes.
"Morning, Miss Romano."
I looked at him. "Morning."
His gaze dropped to the torn skin above my boot, then came back to my face.
"You need someone to show you around?"
Before I could answer, Cillian stopped beside me.
The guard's posture changed.
"Report to the southern warehouse," Cillian said.
The young man's face emptied. "Sir?"
"Before noon."
"I thought I was on the house rotation."
"You're not now."
The guard looked at me, then immediately looked away.
"Yes, sir."
He left without another word.
I waited until he was halfway across the yard.
"Why did you do that?"
Cillian watched him go.
"He was distracted."
"He spoke to me."
"He was supposed to be watching the west fence."
I looked toward the fence.
Maybe that was true.
Maybe it wasn't.
"You could have warned him."
"I did."
"No, you sent him away."
Cillian turned toward the house.
I followed because I wanted an answer and because standing alone in the open suddenly felt stupid.
"Does this happen every time someone looks at me?"
He did not answer.
"Cillian."
His jaw tightened.
"He wasn't looking at the fence."
That was all he gave me.
It should not have sent heat crawling up my neck.
It did.
Because the way he said it made it clear the real problem wasn't the fence. It was that another man had looked at me at all. That another man had seen the skin above my boot and thought he could speak to me like I was free to answer.
I blamed the cold.
Ahead of us, the gardener lifted his head as Mrs. Brennan crossed the terrace with a basket. His whole face softened.
I looked away before Cillian caught me noticing.
He started toward the low grey building.
"Where are you going?"
"Clinic."
"Is that what the ugly building is?"
"Yes."
I hesitated. "And you're taking me there?"
He glanced back.
"You wanted to know why you're here."
Before I could ask anything else, a bell rang from the direction of the clinic. One sharp note, then two.
Every guard in sight changed posture.
Cillian's expression went still.
"Go inside."
"What happened?"
Two men ran from the garages carrying a stretcher.
There was blood on one of their shirts.
The nurse in me moved before the frightened woman could argue.
I followed Cillian.
He looked back once to make sure I was there.
I hated that I noticed.
I hated more that I sped up.
- Writer
