POV:Evie
The lock wasn’t difficult. That’s the first problem. Difficult locks tell you where you stand. They declare intent. Protection. Value. Resistance.
This one yields too cleanly. The mechanism gives with a soft, internal shift, like it’s been opened often enough to remember how.
I don’t move immediately. The corridor behind me is empty. I checked twice. Timed the guard rotation. Counted the seconds between footsteps, the echo pattern against the marble, the way sound bends at the corner before this door.
Everything aligns. Which means nothing does.
I push the door open.
The room is smaller than I expected. Not an office. Not a formal archive. Something in between. Functional, contained. Shelving along one wall. A desk without ornament. Files stacked, not displayed.
Not important enough to guard properly, but important enough to hide.
I close the door behind me without letting it latch fully. Always leave an exit that doesn’t announce itself. The air smells like paper and something older beneath it. Dust disturbed recently. Not abandoned. Not used often. Touched selectively.
Interesting.
I move to the shelves first. Labels. Dates. Codes that mean nothing until they mean everything. Transfer logs. Internal movements. Names reduced to initials, then expanded elsewhere if you know where to look.
I don’t know—yet. But patterns exist even when meaning doesn’t.
I scan, searching for disruption. Dante’s exile wasn’t clean. It couldn’t have been. A removal that abrupt leaves a trail somewhere. Approval, notation, correction. Men like Alessandro don’t remove variables without recording the whole equation.
I find the first reference ten minutes in:
D.V. Contained.
No location listed. Date aligns. My pulse doesn’t change. It wants to. I don’t let it.
Contained. Not punished. Not judged.
Contained.
The word settles like a weight I already knew was there.
I pull the file halfway free… and stop.
What was that?
“You chose the west wing.”
Alessandro’s voice doesn’t rise. Doesn’t carry. It lands exactly where I am.
I slide the file back into place. “Your locks are inconsistent,” I say.
A pause behind me. “You assume inconsistency is an oversight.”
I turn then. He’s in the doorway. Not blocking it completely. He never does anything completely. There’s always space left that looks like choice.
It isn’t.
“You knew,” I say.
“About this room?” He steps inside, closing the distance without hurry. “Yes.”
“About me coming here.”
