Chapter 6 West Village Cage.

POV: Zara Wells

The bag took me four minutes to pack.

Not because I was calm. Because my hands were moving before my brain had caught up with what "pack a bag" actually meant, and somewhere between grabbing my charger and shoving three days of clothes into a duffel, the part of me that had been running on adrenaline since that first DM just switched to something quieter and colder.

He stood in the doorway of my bedroom the whole time. Not watching me exactly. Just present. The way a wall is present.

I didn't ask where we were going. He wouldn't have answered and I wasn't going to hand him the satisfaction of asking something he already knew I wanted to know.

I grabbed my laptop. He didn't stop me.

I grabbed my phone charger, my backup battery, the small notebook I kept in my nightstand drawer. He clocked every item but said nothing. I zipped the bag and stood up and looked at him.

"Okay," I said.

That was it. That was all I had.

The drive was twenty minutes, maybe less. I was in the back seat with him and one of the other men drove and nobody spoke and the city moved past the window like it had no idea anything was happening, which it didn't, because why would it, because to everyone outside that car I was just a woman in a vehicle on a Thursday night in New York.

The townhouse was on a narrow street in the West Village, the kind of block where the buildings lean slightly toward each other and the streetlights are old and everything looks like it was designed to feel like somewhere else. It was beautiful. Three stories, wide stone steps, a front door that looked original but had a lock on it that absolutely was not.

Inside.

Damn.

Marble floors the color of cream. Art on the walls that was not decorative, the kind with small spotlights aimed at it like it mattered. High ceilings. A staircase that curved up and out of sight like something from a different century. Everything quiet, everything still, and three men already in the front room who looked up when we came in and then looked at him and adjusted without a word spoken.

That was the thing I clocked first. The way they moved. Not snapping to attention, not performing anything, just quietly reorganizing themselves around where he was standing. One of them moved away from the window. Another shifted left. Small adjustments, all of them pointing inward like he was the thing the room was built around.

He didn't acknowledge any of it.

He handed his jacket to nobody, just laid it over the back of a chair, and walked through the room checking something on his phone, and the whole house breathed differently when he moved through it.

A woman appeared from somewhere, older, with the face of someone who had learned not to be surprised by anything. She looked at me once, then at him.

"Second floor," he said without looking up.

She nodded and gestured for me to follow.

The stairs. A hallway. Doors on both sides, all closed. She opened the second one on the right and I walked in and it was a real room, not a cell, a bed and furniture and curtains and a window that looked out onto a small garden below. The window had no external latch. I noticed that right away and filed it.

She set a towel on the bed and left.

I put my bag down and walked the room slowly. Not panicking. Just learning it. The door. The window. The vent near the ceiling too small for anything useful. A second door that opened to a bathroom. I stood in the middle and turned a full circle and thought, okay, what are the exits here, and the answer was the one door and that was it.

Back in the main room I sat on the edge of the bed. Listened. The house had sounds. Footsteps somewhere below. A door closing. Voices, very low, too low to make words out of.

His voice once, brief, cutting through the lower murmur and then gone.

Nobody raised their voice in this house. That was a thing I was starting to understand. There was no shouting, no urgency in anyone's tone, and that was somehow more unsettling than if there had been, because it meant everyone already knew exactly what they were supposed to do and saw no reason to question it.

He never raised his voice. He said things once. That was enough.

I heard him on the stairs about twenty minutes later. Not rushing. Just that same even weight on each step. He stopped outside my door and there was a pause and then the sound of a lock.

Click.

I sat very still.

From the outside.

Right. Okay. So that was clear.

I stayed where I was for a while after the footsteps moved away. Then I stood up and walked to the window again and looked at the garden below and thought about twelve hours. The dead man's switch. Eleven hours and change now. I had time. Not much, but some.

I turned to look at the room again from the window's angle and that was when I saw it.

Corner of the ceiling, above the wardrobe. Small. Black. Angled slightly down toward the bed and the door.

A camera.

Watching me right now. Had been watching me since I walked in, through the whole slow circle I had made, through sitting on the bed, through every single thing I had done in this room thinking I was alone.

I looked straight at it for a long moment.

Then I smiled.

Not because anything was funny. Because whoever was on the other end of that camera had just made the same mistake everyone always made with me. They thought watching someone meant you controlled what they did next. But I had built an entire career out of knowing exactly when I was

being filmed and using it.

This room was a cage.

But I had just found the lens.