Chapter 5 5

CHAPTER FIVE

I told him that afternoon, in the front hall, before I could talk myself out of it, the words coming out in a rush the moment the door shut behind Marta.

I had spent the walk from the kitchen rehearsing three different ways to bring it up, each more casual than the last, and every single one of them evaporated the moment I actually found him standing there, reviewing something on his phone with the particular stillness he wore like armor.

“I need to tell you something,” I began, “and I need you to not immediately fire me for not mentioning it sooner.”

That got his full attention, phone lowering slowly. “That is an alarming opening.”

“Someone came to my apartment last night. About the messages. About the money I apparently owe someone I don’t remember owing anything to.”

Kazimir went very still, the particular stillness I was starting to recognize as the moment before something in him decided how much control the situation actually required.

“Show me.”

I handed over my phone. He read the message twice, jaw tightening with each pass, and when he handed it back his control looked considerably more effortful than a moment before. His hands, I noticed, holding the phone a beat too carefully, like a man deliberately reminding himself not to grip too hard.

“This is not the same tone as someone who simply wants money,” he stated. “Money is patient. This message wants you frightened.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because I have had three hundred years to learn the difference, and because a man who only wants your money does not stand outside your door reminding you what happens to households that get messy.” Something moved behind his eyes, dark and controlled. “You will tell me the moment anything else happens. I do not care what hour it is.”

“I don’t need you to protect me.”

“I am not offering to protect you.” His voice sharpened, and for the first time I saw real anger in it, aimed past me at whoever had knocked on my door. “I am protecting my daughter, who has already attached herself to you faster than she has attached to anyone since her mother died, which means whatever danger is currently circling you is now, whether either of us likes it, circling this house as well.”

That should have stung. It didn’t, because underneath the sharpness I understood exactly what he meant, and some fierce, unfamiliar part of me that had been building since Zora first grabbed my hand agreed with him completely.

“Good,” I replied. “Because I’m not going anywhere near letting anything happen to her either.”

Something shifted in his expression, surprise first, then something else underneath it, and he stepped closer, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his gaze, close enough that I could feel the sheer, unnatural stillness radiating off him.

“You could just tell me everything,” I offered, quiet. “About the third floor. About what actually scares Marta. I’ve already worked out it isn’t nothing.”

“No,” he countered, “you have not worked out even a fraction of it, and I would like to keep it that way for as long as I possibly can, not because I don’t trust you, but because the more you know, the more dangerous your knowing becomes, and I have already, apparently, let a threat follow you home once this week.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“It is entirely possible that it is.” His jaw was tight. “There are people who would very much like to know exactly what lives in this house, Yara. If whoever is threatening you has any connection at all to that interest, then the blackmail and the third floor may not be two separate problems, and I would like to know that for certain before I decide how much to tell you.”

The idea landed like cold water. “You think they’re connected.”

“I think it would be a remarkable coincidence if they were not, given the timing.” He didn’t step back, and neither did I, and the air between us had gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with fear anymore. “I am assigning someone to walk you home. Every night. This is not a negotiation.”

“You say that like I have the option to argue.”

“You always have the option to argue. You simply will not win this particular one.” Something almost like humor moved behind the sharpness, brief and unwilling. “I have found, in the short time I have known you, that you argue about nearly everything as a matter of principle. I would ask you to save your energy for arguments you might actually win.”

“That’s oddly good advice for a man who spent our first meeting telling me I wasn’t qualified for anything.”

“You were not qualified for anything. You have since demonstrated a stubbornness I did not initially account for, which turns out to be its own kind of qualification in this particular house.” He studied me for a long moment, something unreadable working behind his controlled expression. “Zora does not attach easily. I told you that on your first day, and I meant it as a warning. I did not expect to be revising that warning within two weeks.”

“Are you saying I’m good at this job?”

“I am saying considerably more than that, and I suspect you already know it, which is precisely why I am not going to say it more plainly than I already have.”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Fine. Thank you.” Some of the fight went out of me all at once, exhaustion finally catching up. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re just a difficult employer with a list of rules anymore. I think every one of them is costing you something, exactly like you said, and I’d rather understand what than keep guessing.”

Something in his face went unguarded, briefly, entirely, and he reached out, careful and slow, tucking a strand of hair back from my face with a gentleness that had no business existing next to everything else about him.

“Give me time,” he murmured, low. “I will tell you more than I have told anyone outside this house in a very long time. Not because you have earned it through a week of good behavior. Because you stayed when the smart thing, the safe thing, would have been to run the moment you heard something behind that door.”

“I’m not really the running type. It’s a character flaw. My sister mentions it constantly.”

“I would not call it a flaw.”

“You barely know me.”

“I know that you spent your first night in this house comforting a grieving child instead of packing your bags, and that you spent this morning arguing with me about my own household’s rules rather than simply agreeing to whatever I said out of fear. I know considerably more about you than you seem to think I do, Fraulein Kalinova.” His thumb moved, absent and unconscious, against my jaw, and the gesture felt so much more intimate than its size should have allowed that my breath caught audibly enough that he noticed.

“You’re doing the thing,” I managed.

“What thing.”

“The thing where you say something devastating in that low voice and then just wait for me to fall apart about it.”

Something that was almost, almost a laugh moved through him, low and rough and entirely unfamiliar on him, like a language he hadn’t spoken in years and had nearly forgotten the shape of. “I was not aware I had a thing.”

“You absolutely have a thing. It’s very effective. I’d appreciate a warning next time.”

“I will take that under advisement.” He hadn’t moved his hand, and neither of us had moved to close the remaining distance between us, both of us hovering in a charged, deliberate stillness that felt, for the first time since I’d arrived in this house, less like danger and more like the particular vertigo of standing at the edge of something you very much want to fall into.

It was in that exact moment, closer together than either of us had planned to be, that my phone buzzed again, a message from a second unknown number, and I looked down to find a photograph of Zora’s bedroom window, taken from outside, three words that turned my blood to ice.

She’s so pretty.

I stared at those three words until they stopped making sense as language at all, until they were just shapes on a screen, and felt Kazimir go rigid beside me, reading over my shoulder with an expression that had abandoned every trace of the softness from a moment earlier.

“Give me the phone.”

I handed it over without argument this time. He stared at the image for a long moment, and something in his face, controlled and ancient and suddenly, completely furious, made the temperature in the hallway feel like it had dropped several degrees.

“When was this taken.”

“I don’t know. Recently, I’d guess, the light looks like late afternoon.”

“That is this house.” His voice had gone flat, dangerous. “That is my daughter’s window. Someone stood on my property, close enough to photograph a five year old’s bedroom, and I did not sense them.”

“Is that unusual? Not sensing someone?”

“It is considerably more than unusual. It should not be possible at all.” He was already moving toward the door, phone still in hand, some coiled, barely restrained violence in every line of him that I hadn’t seen from him before, not even in the doorway the day the scream had brought him running. “Stay here. With Zora. Do not let her out of your sight.”

“Where are you going?”

“To walk the grounds, and to discover exactly how someone came close enough to this house to do that without a single ward or a single member of my staff noticing.” He paused at the door, something flickering across his expression that looked, for just a moment, like fear rather than fury. “Yara. Whoever is doing this knows now that threatening you alone was not enough to control you. That is not a comforting development.”

He was gone before I could ask anything else, out into the darkening garden with a speed that left the door swinging gently in his wake, and I stood alone in the hallway with my phone still glowing faintly on the side table where he’d set it down, the photograph of Zora’s window burned into my memory in a way I suspected it was going to stay for a very long time.

I did not wait long before I went and found her myself, curled up in her room with Barnabas exactly where I’d left her that morning, entirely unaware that anything outside her window had changed, and I sat with her until well past her usual bedtime, watching the dark press up against the glass and refusing, absolutely refusing, to let myself look away from it even once.