Eclipsed Hearts

Chapter 13: The Collision

It was there, wedged behind the grate, nearly invisible against the metal duct, a small dark cylinder no bigger than a fingertip, a thin wire trailing from it toward what had to be a power source somewhere inside the wall.

Beside it, angled to catch the whole room, a pinhole lens caught the light and threw back a tiny, malevolent glint.

"Oh my God," Elena breathed.

Rosa's hand shot out and gripped her wrist. "Don't be loud," she whispered. "If they're watching right now, all they should see is two bored girls poking at a vent."

Elena swallowed and forced her face into something neutral, though her heart was slamming so loud she was half certain the device could pick that up too. She let Rosa guide the cover back into place, both of them moving with the exaggerated casualness of people who'd suddenly become aware of being performed at.

They didn't speak again until they were in the bathroom, water running in the sink to cover their voices.

"There's no way that's just for security," Elena whispered. "Security cameras don't hide, they don't need a microphone wired into a vent."

Rosa agreed quietly. "They don't."

"We have to ask someone. Faye, or—"

"No." Rosa's voice was suddenly hard, urgent in a way Elena hadn't heard from her before. "Listen to me, if we report it, two things might happen. Either they deny it exists and now we're the paranoid girls making trouble or they admit it, and tomorrow it's moved somewhere we can't find. At least right now we know where it is. We know what not to say out loud in this room." She squeezed Elena's hand. "We keep this between us, nobody else should know. Promise me."

Elena hesitated, the request settling strangely in her chest, too quick and certain for someone who had supposedly just discovered the same thing she had but fear made its own logic, and Rosa's was the only hand reaching for hers in this place.

"Okay," Elena said.

Word of Matteo Romano's visit moved through the facility before she ever saw him, a current under the surface of the morning, nurses straightening collars, the dining hall scrubbed to a shine it hadn't had the day before.

Mr. Romano likes to check in on his mother facility somedays, he think of her as a heroine who helps couple have their own kids.

Elena spotted him from the room window first crossing the courtyard with the kind of walk that didn't ask permission to take up space. Even at a distance she understood why the room had gone quiet around her. He was dressed simply, dark slacks, a white shirt with the sleeves folded back over forearms that suggested he didn't spend all his time behind a desk, and he moved like every surface belonged to him, which, she supposed, it did.

He was beautiful in the unfair way that money and good bone structure conspire to produce, dark hair, a jaw cut sharp enough to measure against, the kind of face she might have admired in a magazine and forgotten by the next page except his eyes wouldn't let her forget. Even from here she could see them moving, restless and cataloguing.

She told herself she was only watching because everyone was watching. She told herself that for the better part of twenty minutes, as he toured the courtyard with Faye trailing a respectful step behind, pausing here and there to ask something low and clipped that made the coordinator nod too quickly.

Then, for no reason Elena could name, his head turned, and his gaze swept up to her room window and found hers.

It lasted a second and a half, maybe two. Long enough for her stomach to drop in a way that had nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with the unsettling sensation of being seen, in a place that otherwise treated her like inventory. He didn't smile but didn't look away first either. He simply held her eyes with an expression she couldn't read assessing maybe or just mildly curious about an asset that had dared to look back. She thought.

Then Faye said something and he turned, and the moment broke, and Elena stepped back from the glass with her pulse going embarrassingly fast.

It's nothing, she told herself. He looks at everyone like that. She tried to convince herself.

She almost believed it.

She didn't expect to see him again that day, but the facility was smaller than it seems to be that very day.

She was hurrying back from the other room, her mind still circling the hidden device behind the vent, when she rounded the corner too fast and collided with something that did not move.

The air left her lungs in a startled rush. She felt herself tipping, the floor tilting unhelpfully toward her, and then a hand closed around her upper arm, it wasn't gentle or rough, just absolutely certain like he'd known the exact instant she would lose her balance and had already decided to be there for it.

She looked up.

Matteo Romano was close enough now that the magazine-perfect distance had collapsed into something far more overwhelming, the cedar and scent of him, the faint shadow of stubble along a jaw that looked defined.

"Careful," he said. His voice was low, unhurried, and entirely without warmth. It wasn't unkind exactly, just utterly indifferent to the fact that he was holding a stranger upright. "You should watch where you're walking."

There was something almost arrogant in the way he said it, as though her near-fall were a minor inefficiency he'd been obligated to correct.

"I—" Elena's voice came out thinner than she intended. "I'm fine, thank you."

His grip didn't loosen right away. For one suspended second his gaze held hers and Elena had the distinct, dizzying impression that he was deciding something about her, filing her away under a heading she couldn't see.

Then he let go.

"Watch yourself," he said again, already stepping past her, "next time."

And he was gone down the corridor, leaving Elena standing frozen against the wall, her arm still warm where his hand had been, and the unsettling certainty that whatever had just happened was not, in fact, nothing at all.