Page 109 of The Cost of Silence

It’s not a lot. Just enough to be stark.

Enough to make my breath catch.

In the center of the smooth glass is a rat. Or what’s left of one. Small, gray, limp. Its throat is a ripped, wet line, dark fur matted, paws curled inward. Thick, almost-black droplets have dried on the glass beneath it like a constellation.

There’s a scrap of paper pinned under one of its claws. A jagged, torn edge, like it was ripped from something else.

My vision tunnels.

My body goes cold-hot-cold.

“That wasn’t here before,” I whisper, because my brain is scrambling, because my last memory of this room is Nico’s hands on my hips, his mouth on mine, my laugh as I hung Letty’s lopsided paper star on the tree. No rats. No blood. Just us.

Rossi’s jaw ticks. “It was not,” he says.

“Someone… someone came in here.” My voice shakes. “While we were outside. While the alarms…”

“Yes,” he says simply. “They used the alarm.”

I double over suddenly, hands braced on my knees, nausea punching through me. Not because of the rat itself, that’s gross, sure, but I’ve seen worse, but because of what it means.

This place was supposed to be safe.

This was the bunker.

The fortress.

The nest where I was rebuilding.

Rossi’s hand lands on my back, a steady weight between my shoulder blades. “Breathe,” he says again. “Don’t look at it. Look at me.”

I force myself to straighten, to keep my eyes on his face and not the coffee table. “This is a message,” I say, because my brain, stupid traitor that it is, automatically starts cataloguing, analyzing, connecting. “Rat. Snitch. Someone is talking who shouldn’t. Or someone they think is. Me.”

His eyes are very, very dark. “You’re not wrong.”

“Is this about the article?” I ask.

“We’ll find out.” There’s a thread of steel in his voice now. “Right now, you’re going to the bedroom and you’re going to sit on the bed and you’re not going to move unless I’m with you. Understood?”

“I…”

“Isabella.” It’s not sharp. It’s not loud. It’s just absolute.

Fear kicks something stubborn in me, though. The part of me that refuses to be the girl curled on a bed while men move the pieces of her life around. “I’m not hiding,” I say, voice thin but firm. “Not again. This is my life they keep stepping into. My home.” I swallow. “At least let me call Nico from here.”

Rossi studies me for a long moment. Then he nods once. “Okay,” he says. “Here. But you stand behind me.”

I can live with that.

My fingers tremble as I lift my phone. Nico answers on the first ring.

“Belle?” His voice is already wrong. Too tight. Too alert. “What happened?”

I glance at the coffee table, then away so fast my vision blurs. “There wasn’t a fire,” I say. “But someone pulled the alarm.”

“Okay,” he says, like he’s bracing. “And?”

“And… when we came back up…” I swallow hard. My throat feels raw. “There was a rat on the coffee table. Dead. Bleeding. Itwasn’t here before, obviously, Nico. Someone was in here. While we were outside.”