Chapter 9
1559 Words
Clara’s POV
I didn’t sleep.
I lay in that enormous bed with the note on the nightstand and the key inside my shoe, which I’d placed specifically under the bed where I could reach it in three seconds flat, then I stared at the ceiling until the dark turned grey and the grey turned into morning light bleeding through the curtains.
Burn the key.
Whoever wrote it had been close enough to slip paper under my door while I was in the same room. Which meant they’d been in this hallway. Which meant they were either a ghost or someone in this house who had absolutely no business being outside my door at three in the morning.
Neither option was particularly comforting.
I got up, washed my face, put on the least offensive thing from the wardrobe Elena had stocked for me, and went downstairs for breakfast because what was the alternative. Hiding in my room had already proven to be a useless strategy and I was hungry.
The dining room was empty except for the maids arranging plates and the particular silence of a house that was holding its breath.
I sat down, poured my own coffee and told myself this was fine.
It was not fine.
Twenty minutes later Zane came in, dressed like he’d been awake for hours, which he probably had been.
He sat at the head of the table without looking at me and picked up his phone. I picked up my cup. We performed a very convincing scene of two people having breakfast.
The food was good. I hated that the food was always good.
I was halfway through the avocado toast when the front door opened and Bruno’s voice filled the entrance hall like he’d been invited.
He hadn’t been invited.
“Jones would have had someone at that door,” I heard him tell whoever tried to greet him. “I know where the dining room is, thank you.”
He walked in with his arms already open, a man arriving at his own house, kissing the air beside Zane’s face before dropping into the chair across from me like gravity had placed it there specifically for him.
“Clara.” He beamed. “You look rested. Marriage agrees with you.”
I smiled. “Mr. Bruno. What a surprise.”
“Bruno, please. We’re family now.” He reached across and patted my hand and I kept my smile exactly where it was.
Zane had put his phone down. He looked at his uncle with an expression so neutral it was practically invisible. “You should have called ahead.”
“And miss the spontaneity?” Bruno waved at a maid for coffee. “I was passing through. Thought I’d check on my favorite nephew.” He looked between us. “How are you two settling in? Truly.”
“Fine,” Zane said.
“Good,” I said.
Bruno looked at Zane. “Your father called me this morning. He’s stronger. The doctors are encouraged.”
He wrapped his hands around the coffee that appeared before him. “He keeps asking about the house. Whether everything is running smoothly.”
“It is,” Zane replied.
“Good.” Bruno nodded slowly. “Good.” He looked at me. “And you, Clara. Have you had a chance to go through your father’s things? Smith was a man of simple habits but sometimes simple men keep surprising things.”
The question landed too casually. The kind of casual that gets rehearsed.
I tilted my head. “Most of it burned with the house.”
“Of course.” He nodded sympathetically. “Of course it did. Terrible business. But nothing came with you? Nothing he’d given you before he passed?”
My shoe sat on my foot. The key sat in my shoe and picked up my coffee cup nervously.
“Just some clothes,” I said. “He wasn’t a sentimental man.”
Bruno held my gaze for a beat longer than a normal conversation required. Then he smiled warmly and turned to Zane to ask about shipment schedules while I looked hard at my plate.
Across the table, without turning his head, Zane’s eyes moved to mine for exactly one second. I looked back. We looked away. Neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to.
Bruno stayed for forty minutes. He was charming the entire time, funny in the right places, warm with the staff, exactly the picture of a devoted uncle managing a difficult family period with grace.
He hugged me when he left. His eyes dropped to the necklace at my throat for the second time since he’d arrived and this time I felt it like a hand reaching for something.
As soon as the door closed, I excused myself from the table.
I needed to tell Zane about the note. I’d decided that over the sleepless hours of the night. Whatever game we were apparently playing together after that conversation in the study, it required him to know about the piece of paper currently sitting on my nightstand.
I went to his study later that day but it was empty.
I’d decided that I’d go back to my room, get the note, bring it down, and find him.
Once I climbed the stairs, I pushed open my bedroom door.
The room looked the same. That was the thing. At first glance, completely normal. Bed made by Elena. Curtains open. Everything in its place.
But the book on my nightstand was angled differently.
I’d left it spine up. It was face down now.
My stomach dropped.
I didn’t move from the doorway. Something my father used to say came back to me, one of those quiet things he’d drop without explanation that I hadn’t understood until right now. Don’t look at what’s there. Look at what’s different. I’d thought he meant it about people. Standing in my bedroom doorway with my heart climbing my throat, I understood he meant it about everything.
My small pile of journals was on the desk. My father’s warnings, everything I’d been writing down from memory since the night I found the bloodstained bathroom wall. I’d stacked them in order. Smallest on top.
The smallest one was now on the bottom.
Someone had gone through them. Carefully, unhurriedly, the way a professional goes through things. Nothing broken, nothing obvious. Just the quiet rearrangement of someone who knew what they were looking for and had all the time in the world to find it.
I crossed to my desk and went through the journals. All were present.
I went to the window. Sat on the ledge and took a long needed breath.
Then I looked under the bed. I reached for my shoe to check for the key and it was still there.
I held it in my palm and thought about Bruno’s eyes dropping to my necklace twice at breakfast. About the question too casual to be casual. About the note I hadn’t told Zane about yet. About the room that looked right but wasn’t.
Someone had been in here.
Between the time I came downstairs for breakfast and the time I came back up. While Bruno sat at our table asking me about my dead father’s sentimental objects.
While I was downstairs. While we were all downstairs.
My door opened, distracting me from my thoughts.
I spun around. My hand closed around the key.
Zane stood in the frame. He looked at my face, then at my fist, then at my face again.
“You went through my things,” I said before he could speak.
Something crossed his expression. “No.”
“Then someone did.”
His jaw tightened. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
“Show me.”
I showed him the journals. The book. The small specific wrongness of everything. He moved through the room the same way I had, looking at what was wrong. He crouched by the nightstand. Checked behind the mirror. Ran his hand along the windowsill and stopped.
He held something up between two fingers. It looked like a small device.
He looked at it for a long time with an expression I was starting to understand. Not anger. The thing that came before anger. The cold, certain thing that meant someone was going to have a very bad day.
I stared at it. “What is that.”
He said nothing for a moment. Just turned it over once, twice, the way you turn over something you were hoping not to find.
“It means,” he said quietly, “that whatever you’ve said in this room, someone has been listening to.”
The blood left my face.
I thought about every conversation I’d had in here. With Elena. With myself, which I did more than I’d like to admit. The note I’d read out loud at three in the morning because my brain needed to hear it to believe it.
I looked at Zane. He was already looking at me.
“How long has it been there,” I asked.
“That’s the right question.” He pocketed it and straightened. “And I’m going to find out.”
- Writer
