Dark promises

Chapter 6

Three weeks into the job, Elena had almost stopped flinching at the size of the house.

She'd learned it's rhythm the way she'd once learned Trevor's - except this time she made herself notice, made herself catalogue rather than simply absorb. The way Dario's suspicion sharpened when she and Rafeal were in the same room for more than a few minutes.

The way security rotated through the property under a schedule so precise it had to be delibrate, men in plain clothes who moved like they were still armed even though she couldn't see the weapon on them. The way Alfonso sometimes looked at her with something close to worry, as if he knew a version of this house she hadn't been shown yet.

She didn't ask.

She learned in three weeks that questions in these house were rarely asked directly, and the surest way to be shut out of a room was to seem too curious about what was in it.

Matteo at least, hid nothing. He narrated the household with the guileless authority of a child who assumed everyone already knew what he knew.

That's Dario, he doesn't like anyone.

That's the east gate, Papa doesn't let cars through after dark.

That's Nero's favorite spot, don't move him from it, he bites.

It was Matteo who told her offhand, over a half-finished puzzle, that men had come to the gate the week before she arrived.

"Papa was very angry", Alfonso wouldn't tell me why.

He never tells me anything important."

"Do you know who they were?"

"No.But Nero didn't like them.

He looked up at her, serious in a way only small children managed to be about over things they don't really understand.

"Nero's a good judge of character. Papa says so".

She thought about that longer than she was meant to, that night, lying awake in a room too fine for her old life and too quite for the questions crowding into it. She thought about the plain-clothed men on their rotations, and Dario's suspicion, and the particular tension that moved through the staff whenever a car came up the drive unannounced.

She was living, she understood slowly, inside the walls of something far more dangerous than a job posting had implied - and she had said yes to it anyway, because the alternative had been a laundromat chair and an empty stomach.

She told herself, as she had every night since the sidewalk, that she'd manage.

She was good at managing, she'd been managing her whole life.