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A blue blotch hit the lens, obscuring all view of me. If anyone was currently monitoring the feed, they’d know right away that an intruder was in the house, just not who it was. I had to hoof it.
I dashed into the living room. My pulse stuttered at the contrast between the sleek leather surfaces and polished floors now and the carnage that’d been strewn across the space before, but I didn’t let that uneasiness slow me down. I sprinted from table to cabinet, pawing through every nook. All I turned up were a few blank pieces of notepaper. For fuck’s sake!
As I whirled around, my gaze slid across the ceiling instinctively, even though I’d already checked for cameras. My eyes paused on an odd mark I hadn’t noticed carved into the old-fashioned trim in one corner of the room. Between the white paint and the position, it was almost invisible unless you happened to look straight at it from the right angle.
I stepped closer, squinting at it. It looked vaguely spherical, though narrower at the top than the bottom… almost pointed, like a teardrop. A straight line sliced through it on a diagonal. I couldn’t remember ever seeing that symbol before.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. I whipped out my phone and snapped a picture of it, zoomed in as far as I could go.
Then I whirled around and rushed across the hall to the passageway that led to the small study with the secret bookcase entrance to my old rooms.
Somehow, even after seeing the whole house in its current state, coming up on the spot where I’d left Anna’s crumpled body sent a fresh wave of queasiness through me. Even here in this remote corner of the house, whoever had swept the mansion clean had removed all indication that she’d existed too. There was only the desk, the filing cabinet—empty—and the bookshelves, which contained a scattering of not particularly impressive looking volumes.
I glanced over the titles on the spines, flipped open a few to check for inscriptions, and swept several aside to check the back of the bookcase for a way to access the door behind it. There, I came across the symbol from the living room for a second time. A tiny version of it was carved into the topmost portion of the bookcase that covered the secret entrance to my quarters. The etching was no larger than the pad of my thumb, just above the line of the shelf.
I knit my brow at it and took another photo. My heart was thumping faster. I was running out of time. I jabbed my fingers at the carving and then all across the rest of the bookcase, but nothing made it budge.
Right now, who knew how many enemy forces could be racing this way?
Cursing under my breath, I backed up and glared at the bookcase. But then, maybe it was silly to put myself in any more danger to try to get into the rooms where I’d spent years upon years already. The household people had never left anything in there that’d tipped me off to their true agenda before, so why would there be anything useful in that section of the building now?
My desire to see that space one more time was more nostalgia than anything else, and I didn’t have time for foolish emotions in the middle of a mission.
I spun on my feet and hustled to the nearest window. With a leap over the sill and a lope across the lawn, I put the mansion that’d been my home and my prison for far too long—and the ghostly emptiness inside it—far behind.
