Mia POV
The hood smells like gasoline and someone else's fear.
I know that second part because I recognize the smell. It is the same smell that was on my own clothes the morning after my father's funeral, that sharp, sour thing that sweat becomes when the body is running on panic instead of sleep. Someone wore this hood before me. Someone sat in this same dark and breathed this same air.
I think about that person for exactly one second.
Then I start counting.
The car turns left out of wherever we were. Long pause traffic light, maybe eight seconds. Then straight for what feels like two minutes. Then right. Then a sharp left that throws me sideways against the door, and the guard beside me doesn't react, doesn't grab me, doesn't say sorry or watch it or anything at all. He is not a person to me right now. He is an obstacle I am storing information about.
Weight: heavy, the way the seat sags. Height: tall, his shoulder is above mine. Breathing: slow, unbothered. He has done this many times.
I file all of it and keep counting turns.
Right. Straight long stretch, faster speed, probably a highway or an empty road. I count to ninety before we slow again. Then surface changes under the tires from smooth asphalt to something slightly rougher, like a private road or a driveway that doesn't get public maintenance.
Then stop.
Forty-three minutes. That is how long it took. I lock that number away like it is money.
The door opens. Someone takes my arm, not the guard, smaller hands, a different grip, and guides me out of the car. My legs are stiff. I focus on not tripping, on keeping my balance, on the ground under my feet, changing from gravel to something smooth and hard. Inside now. The air conditioning is immediate and aggressive.
The hood comes off.
I blink.
I am standing in the biggest entrance hall I have ever seen outside of a museum. Everything is marble and high ceilings and the kind of quiet that costs money to maintain. Two staircases curve up on either side like arms. The lights are low and deliberately warm, the kind of lighting designed to say wealth without shouting it.
I take all of this in in about four seconds because that is all the time I give it.
Then I count cameras. Three visible ones. Probably more I can't see. Two guards are at the front door behind me. One at the base of each staircase. A hallway branching left and right at the far end.
A woman appears from the left hallway. Gray uniform, dark hair pulled back, face that gives away nothing. She looks at me the way a hotel receptionist looks at a check-in, not unkindly, but not personally either. I am a task she has been given.
She says, "Follow me, please."
Her voice is quiet and her please is real, not performance, which surprises me enough that I follow before I have decided to.
She takes me up the right staircase. Third door on the left. She opens it with a key from her pocket, steps aside to let me in, and I walk through because the alternative is standing in the hallway with nowhere to go.
The room is beautiful.
I hate how beautiful it is. It would be easier if it were a cell with gray walls, a bare floor, and a drain in the corner. Something that matched how I felt. Instead, there is a wide bed with white sheets and a window with curtains that match, and a small table with a lamp that makes warm light, and on the table, I notice, is a glass of water and a folded cloth that turns out to be a damp towel.
For my wrists. Someone knew about my wrists.
Someone planned for this.
The woman, whose name I don't know yet, sets the key on the outside of the door, where I cannot reach it, and says, "There is food in the small refrigerator. The bathroom is through that door. Someone will come in the morning."
I say: "Where am I?"
She says, "Safe."
I say: "That is not what I asked."
She looks at me for a moment. Something moves in her face, not sympathy, exactly, but recognition. Like she sees something in me that she was not expecting. Then she steps back into the hallway and closes the door, and I hear the lock turn.
I stand in the center of the room, and I breathe.
Beautiful cage. Still a cage. The window is large and looks like it opens, but I am on the second floor, and there is a guard visible at the corner of the garden below. I can see his outline through the curtain's edge. The door is solid, the lock is new, and even if I got past both, I am forty-three minutes from anywhere I know, in a direction I only half-mapped, in a city I cannot fully place.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
And I allow myself exactly two minutes.
The tears come fast, which I am grateful for; I don't have time for slow grief right now. I cry for my father, who tried to warn me with a letter I found too late. I cry for Rosa, who is probably calling my phone every three minutes by now, her voice getting higher each time it goes to voicemail. I cry because I am twenty-two and my wrists are bleeding, and I got into this because I wanted the truth about a parking garage and a detective who took a name back.
Two minutes.
I wipe my face with the damp cloth from the table. I drink the water, all of it. I press the cloth gently against my wrists and take a slow breath, and feel the crying leave my body the same way the panic did in the auction room, not gone, just pressed down into a place where it can't get in the way.
Then I start.
I take the small notepad from beside the lamp, and I start drawing not the room, not the house, but the route. Every turn I counted. Every second of straight road. I draw it as a line, marking the turns, marking the time. It is imperfect and partial, but it is mine. Knowledge is the only thing I have right now, and I will build more of it every single day until I have enough to do something with.
I am reaching for the pen when I hear voices in the hallway.
Two men. Speaking low. Moving past my door.
I press myself against the wall beside it, ear close to the wood, and I catch one word clearly over all the others.
One name.
Reyes.
My pen stops moving.
Because the guard said it the way men say the name of someone in the building. Not, he said, or he wants just the name, plain, the way you say the boss is here.
Reyes is not somewhere else.
Reyes is in this house.
I am locked in a room forty feet from the man who had my father killed.