Chapter 10
1599 Words
Zane’s POV
The device was Bruno’s work. I knew it before I even had it tested.
It was the same model his men had used twice before, years ago, during a territorial dispute that my father had handled by burning three buildings to the ground and never discussing it again. Bruno had a supplier he’d been loyal to for fifteen years because Bruno was loyal to anything that served him and nothing that didn’t.
I sat in my study and turned it over in my palm and thought about how long it had been in that room. How long someone had been sitting somewhere listening to whatever happened in there. Elena’s morning check ins. Clara talking to herself, which she did constantly and seemed completely unaware of. Whatever else.
I picked up my phone and called someone.
It rang twice before they picked.
“I’m already in the car,” the voice on the other end said.
“I didn’t tell you why I’m calling.”
“You only call at this hour when something needs sweeping. I’m twenty minutes out. Make coffee, not for me, I don’t drink yours, but the gesture would be nice.”
Then he hung up.
I put my phone down and looked at the device again.
***
Twenty two minutes later, which was irritating, Dominic Reyes walked through my front door with a bag over his shoulder and the expression of a man arriving at a job he found beneath him and would do better than anyone else regardless.
He was built like a question nobody wanted to answer, tall, broad, with the kind of stillness that made rooms smaller just by entering them. He’d worked for me for four years. In that time he’d swept eleven properties, identified twenty three planted devices, broken four men’s trust and one man’s jaw, and complained about every single assignment with a consistency I had come to find almost comforting.
He dropped his bag on my desk without asking.
“Where?” He raised a brow.
“East bedroom wing. Start there and work out.”
He looked around the study. “Here too.”
“Obviously here too.”
“I’m just saying it because you have a face that suggests you’ve been sitting in a compromised room having thoughts you wouldn’t want recorded.
He picked up his bag. “Where’s the girl?”
“My wife you mean,” I corrected without realizing, “she’s in her room.”
He looked at me. “Right. Where’s your wife?”
“Her room. East wing. Tell her you’re coming before you open the door.”
He paused and turned back. “Does she know who I am?”
“She will in about two minutes.”
He considered this. “Should I be warm or professional?”
“Be yourself Dom.”
“Those two things are mutually exclusive for me and you know that.” He left the study and I heard his footsteps cross the entrance hall and take the stairs.
I sat back, staring at the ceiling.
Bruno had been in my house for forty minutes this morning. Charming, warm, completely at ease, asking Clara about her dead father’s belongings with the casual precision of a man who already knew the answer and was checking whether she did too.
I had sat across from him and eaten breakfast, saying nothing because nothing was the right move and I knew it.
Knowing the right move and being comfortable with it were different things.
My phone buzzed. An off-books contact, a man whose name existed nowhere connected to me, sent a single line.
It read;
Bruno made two calls after leaving your estate. Both to unregistered numbers. I’m working on traces.
I typed back.
How long?
A few hours. Another text came in.
I set the phone down.
Dominic came back into the study with Clara two steps behind him. She had her arms crossed and the expression of someone who had just been introduced to a large loud unexpected thing and was still deciding how to categorize it.
“Found three more,” Dominic announced, dropping four devices on my desk in a line like a man presenting his homework. “Bedroom, bathroom, hallway outside bedroom, and one in the east corridor that’s been there longer than the others based on the dust pattern around it.” He looked at me. “Someone’s been thorough.”
Clara stared at the devices. “The bathroom?”
“Yes.” Dom responded.
“I’ve been using that bathroom for—” She stopped.
Something moved across her face that she shut down quickly. “How long has it been there?”
“The corridor one, weeks at minimum. The others, recent. Last few days.” He looked at me. “Whoever planted the recent ones knew the layout. Not a first visit.”
I looked at Clara. She was looking at the four small black rectangles on my desk like they’d personally wronged her, which they had.
“The corridor one,” she said quietly. “That’s been there for weeks.” She looked up at me. “Since before I arrived.”
“Yes.”
“So they were preparing. Before the wedding. Before any of this.” She uncrossed her arms. “They knew I was coming here.”
Dominic looked at her with something that wasn’t quite surprise. “Smart,” he said.
She ignored the observation. “Can you find out who placed them.”
“I can find out a lot of things,” Dominic said. “Whether you’ll like what I find is a separate question.”
“I don’t need to like it. I need to know it.”
He looked at me. I said nothing. He looked back at her. Something shifted in his assessment of her, small but visible, the particular recalibration of a man who had expected less.
“I’ll run them,” he responded. He swept the devices off the desk into a cloth pouch. “Anything else compromised? Phones, laptops, anything that left the property and came back?”
“My phone hasn’t left,” Clara said. Then she looked at me.
“What?” I raised a brow.
She looked at me carefully. Like she was deciding something. “My phone was in my room. When someone went through my things this morning.” She paused. “While we were all at breakfast.”
I looked at Dominic.
He was already reaching for his bag. “Give me the phone.”
She pulled it from her cardigan pocket and held it out.
He took it without touching the screen, dropped it into a separate pouch, and sealed it.
“Anything else you haven’t told him?” Dominic asked Clara, not unkindly but not gently either.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she reached into the same cardigan pocket and produced a folded piece of paper. She set it on the desk in front of me.
I picked it up. Unfolded it and there were three words in block letters.
Burn the key.
The study was very quiet.
“When?” I asked.
“Last night. It was slipped under my door.” Her voice was steady. “I was going to tell you this morning and then Bruno arrived and then I found the room and—”
She stopped. “I’m telling you now.”
I looked at the note again. “Is there anything else?”
A pause came that lasted one second too long.
“No,” she said.
Dominic made a sound that was not quite a cough.
I folded the note, put it in my desk drawer and stood up.
“Dominic. Run everything. I want answers before tonight.”
I looked at Clara. “You’re not going back to that room until it’s been fully cleared. Elena will move your things.”
She nodded. No argument, which told me the bathroom detail had shaken her more than she was showing.
Dominic picked up his bag to leave but paused at the door, looking back at Clara. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “most people who find a note like that under their door don’t come downstairs for breakfast the next morning and perform normally for forty minutes while the man who probably sent it sits across the table from them.”
He tilted his head. “Just an observation.” Then he left.
Clara looked at the empty doorway. Then at me.
“He’s interesting,” she said.
“He’s the most useful person I know,” I replied. “Which is a different thing entirely.”
She almost smiled. Almost.
My phone buzzed again. It was the same contact from earlier.
It read;
First trace came back. One of Bruno’s calls went to a number we’ve flagged before. It isn’t local. I’ll have the full picture by tonight.
I stared at that last line for a moment longer than I needed to.
Not local.
Bruno hadn’t just been making house calls and planting devices. He was reaching outside Neon Hill entirely, which meant whatever he was building around Clara was bigger than one man’s agenda.
I put the phone face down.
I looked at Clara standing in my study in her cardigan, holding herself together with both hands, in the middle of a war she still didn’t have the full map for.
Not yet.
- Writer
