Page 11

Somewhere in the middle of all that, if the timing lines up right, there’s a window where nobody’s paying close enough attention to notice where I’ve wandered off to.

Eleven days in, I’ve finally learned to read that window the way I used to read a client’s schedule before deciding which room to clean first.

Today it opens right after lunch, Nadia’s radio still going, the guard’s chair creaking once and then settling, and I slip out of my room before I let myself think too hard about whether I should.

Artem’s been gone since morning, some meeting he didn’t explain before he left, and his absence makes the whole house feel looser somehow, like the walls themselves relax a little when he’s not walking through them. Even the staff move differently when he’s out, less clipped, less watchful, and I’ve learned to use that too.

I’ve mapped most of this house by now, every hallway, every exit that isn’t actually an exit, every guard rotation timed down to the minute.

The one stretch I haven’t covered is the east wing, tucked past a staircase nobody uses, the kind of forgotten corner that always seems to hold the thing nobody wants found.

I climb the back stairs two at a time, one hand trailing the banister, counting doors the way I count everything else in this house now, an old habit that hasn’t once stopped paying off since the first night I woke up here restrained.

It’s strange, the way a place can start to feel almost familiar even while it’s holding you against your will, the way I’ve started to know which stair creaks and which one doesn’t, which hallway gets sun in the afternoon and which one stays dim all day.

The rooms up here don’t give me much. A guest room thick with dust, a fingerprint left behind on the frame the second I touch it, sheets still on the bed like someone made it up years ago and never came back to use it.

A storage room stacked with boxes and a rolled-up rug leaned against the wall, nothing worth a second look, though I check the boxes anyway, lifting flaps just far enough to confirm nothing but old linens and a stack of picture frames turned face down.

A window at the far end overlooks a stretch of the property I’ve never seen from this angle, and I press my palm to the cold glass and count off the distance to the tree line out of pure reflex, filing the number away with the rest of the exits that might matter someday, even if today isn’t that day.

Most of the doors along this row stop dead at a half turn of the handle, and I try each one anyway, palm flat, wrist twisting, the same motion over and over until my hand’s almost gone numb to the disappointment of it, a habit I can’t seem to break no matter how many times it leads nowhere.

The last door in the hall gives.

I freeze the second it swings open, my hand still wrapped around the handle, too surprised to do anything but stare.

The light in here is low and warm instead of overhead, and it takes my eyes a second to adjust to what it’s showing me.

Dark wood shelving runs along two walls, everything on it arranged in rows too neat to be accidental.

A bench sits low and padded in the center of the room, angled in a way that answers its own question before I think to ask it, and a mirror stretches the length of the far wall, tall enough to catch the whole room from wherever someone might be sitting.

There’s a low cabinet against the near wall too, drawers shut tight, and a length of rope coiled neatly on a hook that I look at once and decide firmly not to look at again.

Nothing about the room announces itself the way I expect a room like this to. It’s still, orderly, almost clinical in how neatly every piece has its place, and somehow that makes it more unsettling than if it had looked chaotic.

I should close the door right now, walk away, file this under the growing list of things I’ve decided not to think about since I got here.

My hand doesn’t move toward the handle. It stays flat against the wood instead, caught somewhere between the hallway and the room, like some part of me already made a decision the rest of me hasn’t caught up to yet.

I step inside before I let myself argue about it any further, and the latch clicks shut under my thumb without me even looking at what I’m doing, automatic, faster than thought.

My eyes go straight to the shelves, cataloging out of the same reflex that’s mapped every exit in this house for eleven days running, except this time my pulse climbs instead of settling into its usual rhythm.

My palm slides along the edge of a shelf, the wood cool under my fingers, and stops on something my hand seems to recognize before my eyes fully catch up to what it is.

My fingers close around it on their own, no permission asked from the rest of me, no real decision made that I can point to as the moment I chose this.

Somewhere behind me the door sits latched, and the hallway stays as still as it was two minutes ago, and both of those facts settle something in my chest that’s been wound tight since the very first night I woke up in this house, restrained, a stranger’s questions circling me with no answers I could give that would end it any faster.

I turn it over once in my palm, then again, the weight of it strange and unfamiliar, my thumb tracing an edge I’ve never felt before in my life.

My reflection catches in the mirror across the room, a girl in cleaning company sweats standing in a room built for something entirely different, hair still pulled back the same way it was this morning, nothing about her looking like someone who belongs here.

I look away from it fast, unwilling to watch myself make whatever choice I’m already halfway into making.

I sit down on the edge of the bench instead, the padding giving softer beneath me than I expect, and I flinch a little at how easily my body settles into a shape it’s never taken before, like it already knew what to do with this even if the rest of me is still catching up.