The room is small enough that secrets have nowhere elegant to stand.
So, the shower. That’s where I go when the house becomes too loud. Not loud in sound. The Vitale estate rarely wastes sound. But loud in its architecture. Doors that know things. Corridors that change their minds halfway through. Guards who arrive one minute too late and one second too early, like they’re correcting for something I can’t see.
Teresa, not helping.
Luca, not stopping.
Alessandro…
I stop there. No. Not yet.
The house has become a conversation conducted entirely in locks. And I am answering it constantly. Every step. Every pause. Every turn measured against what the house will do in response. It’s exhausting.
And that’s the problem.
Tired is dangerous. It makes bad ideas feel merciful. It softens the edges of things that should remain sharp. It makes stillness look like safety and surrender sound reasonable.
I turn the water on, too hot, not by accident. And step under it before the steam finishes rising. The heat hits the back of my neck hard enough to feel like punishment.
My body reacts first. It always does. My shoulders drop. My breath loosens. My hands unclench from fists I didn’t realize I’d made.
Rude.
A woman should be consulted before deciding to relax.
I press both palms against the tile and lower my head. Water runs over my hair, down my face, into my mouth. It tastes faintly metallic. Or maybe that’s memory, insisting on dramatics.
Two weeks. No. More now. Time has shifted into something less precise. It doesn’t measure itself in days anymore, but inadjustments. In moments where something changed and didn’t change back.
Long enough for my father’s death to become something people discuss in lowered voices instead of immediate ones. Long enough for black dresses to stop feeling like costumes and start feeling like uniforms. Long enough for the house to learn the sound of my steps. Long enough for me to refuse a way out.
That last one settles differently. I close my eyes.
Immediately… the street. Wet stone, slick with rain. Blue police lights staining everything the wrong color. The air sharp with something metallic and wrong.
My father’s hand beneath the sheet.
Not his face. His hand. That’s what I remember. The ring still on his finger, worn smooth along one edge where he tapped it against tables when he was thinking. The small scar across his knuckle from when I bit him as a child because I didn’t yet understand the difference between play and pain.
Dante’s name missing from every official mouth.
Alessandro’s face controlled. Empty in the way that suggests too much, not too little.
I open my eyes. Tile. Steam. Water.
No street. Good.
I breathe once. Then again.
Then I count.
Door. Window. Vent. Drain.
No. I stop. That’s ridiculous.
There are no exits here. Not real ones. The door, yes. Locked from my side. A lock that would hold against politeness and fail instantly against intent.
The window is decorative. The vent is decorative. The drain leads nowhere but down, which is thematically appropriate and otherwise useless.
