I don't know what it means, but something in my gut, the same old instinct that's kept me listening at the bars instead of screaming at them, tells me this one matters.
The guy who replaced Vinny puts down his phone, which he never does, and dashes from the room.
I sit very still on the mattress with my knees pulled to my chest and I listen to the whole villa hold its breath around me, and for the first time since the van, since the cloth over my mouth, since I woke up on cold stone not knowing which country I was in, I feel something under the fear that isn't quite hope, but is standing very close to it.
Something is happening.
I don't know if it's danger or rescue. I only know that whatever it is, I'm not going to meet it as the woman who got dragged into that van, clawing and screaming and helpless.
I'm going to meet it head on.
I stand from the mattress and press my back against the cold stone wall, pull in one slow, steady breath, and wait.
Yakob
Three-oh-six in the morning, and the east wall goes quiet the way I knew it would.
I've watched this villa breathe for two nights. In. Out. Guards changing, dogs settling, cigarettes burning down to nothing in the dark. I know it’s rhythms better than the men who live inside it, and right now, in this narrow window between the three-a.m. check and the four-fifteen rotation, the villa is exhaling.
I move.
The vineyard rows swallow me the second I cross the tree line, low and fast, my boots finding the soft earth between the vines without sound. I’m careful on every uneven patch of ground, every place a foot could catch and send me sprawling into noise I can't take back. I don't make that mistake. I've never made that mistake.
The gap in the camera coverage opens up exactly where I marked it, a six-foot seam of blindness along the east wall where the vines grow too thick for the lens to see through. I slip into it and I'm inside the perimeter before the villa even knows I exist.
The first guard is smoking against the wall near the servants' passage, exactly on schedule, exactly where three nights of watching told me he'd be. I close the distance in four silent steps and my hand is over his mouth before the cigarette hits the ground. The knife does the rest, slicing through his neck deepenough to cut off his vocal cords. He goes down without a sound beyond the soft exhale of a man who never gets to make another one.
I drag him into the shadow of the vines and keep moving.
The second guard is twenty feet away, at the base of the steps that lead into the building. He's younger, restless, the kind of bored that makes a man careless. He never sees me. He's dead before his knees understand they're not holding him up anymore.
I take the stairs two at a time, weapon low, breathing controlled, every sense pulled tight and forward. This is the part of the job I've never needed anyone to explain to me. The part where the plan stops being a plan and becomes a body doing what it's trained to do while the mind runs cold and clear above it, calculating angles, exits, threats.
Except my mind isn't cold tonight. It hasn't been cold since a photograph of a laughing woman crossed a desk in a study that smelled like whiskey and fear.
I push the thought down and keep moving.
A third man rounds the corner at the top of the steps, gun already rising, and I don't give him the chance to use it. The suppressed pistol coughs once and he folds against the wall, sliding down it in a slow smear of red that I step around without looking at.
The first cries go up. Startled and short.
Straniero.
Foreigner.
Someone found the first guard. I keep moving forward.
The hallway beyond is exactly as I imagined it. A dark stairwell leads down to the wine cellars and I press forward. As I reach the bottom, a man darts from the chair beyond the open door andruns straight into my knife, which I drive up and back through the soft skin above his Adam's apple.
I enter the room where the only light is coming from an oil lamp on a small, scarred table, and turn to face her.
She's pressed against the far wall, palms flat against it, and for one full second neither of us moves. She's thinner than the photograph. Paler. There's a bruise blooming along one cheekbone that wasn't in any picture I studied on the flight over, and her hair is matted with what might be dirt or might be dried blood. None of that matters, because her eyes come up and find mine and they're green, the same impossible green as her mother's, and they're not empty. They're not broken. They're furious and terrified and entirely, unmistakably alive.
The keys are off the table and in my hand before I’ve even had a chance to tell my body to move.
The door squeaks as it opens. Voices shout, all too close.
“Iris Orlova.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Come with me. Now.”
