Mia POV
Elena knocks at seven in the morning like she was built by a clock.
Three quiet taps. Then the door opens, she has a key on the outside, I already knew this, and she steps in carrying a small tray with coffee and toast and the kind of calm that belongs to someone who has learned not to react to anything.
I am already awake. I have been awake since five. I spent the early hours going over everything I memorized on the drive turns, timing, road surfaces, and then when the light started coming through the curtain edge, I moved to the window and watched the guard rotation in the garden below. Shift change at six fifteen. A four-minute gap between the old guard leaving and the new one arriving.
I filed that too.
Elena sets the tray on the table and looks at me with the same expression she had last night, not warm, not cold. Measured. Like she is deciding something.
She says, "Mr. Reyes has asked me to show you the house."
I say: "Why?"
She says, "So you understand where you may go."
And where I may not. She doesn't say that part. She doesn't need to.
I drink the coffee, it is very good coffee, which is somehow irritating, and I follow her out.
The tour takes forty minutes.
I spend zero of those minutes looking at the things Elena wants me to look at, the high ceilings, the art on the walls, the kitchen where a man named Hector is already making something that smells like garlic and olive oil at seven in the morning. I spend all forty minutes looking at the things Elena doesn't mention.
Camera in the upper corner of the main hallway. Angled to cover the staircase and the front door. I walk under it slowly, tracking its range.
Door at the end of the east hallway. Elena steers me away from it before we get close, smoothly, like redirecting a child from a hot stove. "The east wing is Mr. Reyes's private offices. It's not part of the tour." I note the keypad on the wall beside it has four digits, backlit buttons, the kind that makes a small sound when pressed.
Basement door off the kitchen. Elena walks past it without stopping and says nothing, and that is exactly why I notice it.
She shows me the library on the second floor. Three walls of books, two chairs, a window that overlooks the front drive. She shows me the garden through the glass doors at the back of the ground floor. She tells me both the library and the garden are available to me during daylight hours.
"And after dark?" I ask.
"Your room," she says. Simply, without apology.
I nod like this is reasonable. I file the word daylight and start calculating hours.
She leaves me in the garden at eight thirty.
The moment she goes inside, I start moving. Not running, walking, naturally, like someone taking a morning stroll. I go left along the garden wall first. The ground is uneven near the east side, slightly softer, which means there is irrigation running underneath pipes that connect to something. The east wall is old stone and dense with climbing plants that have been there for years.
I find the blind spot fourteen minutes in.
It is a corner where the east wall meets the back wall at an angle that the cameras can't reach. I tested both angles, walking into their sightlines and back out, watching the small red lights on the camera housings to track their rotation. The blind spot is about two meters wide. Not enough to climb the wall undetected. Enough to stand in without being watched.
I stand in it for a moment.
I look up at the house. Third floor, east side, one window with its curtain always drawn. I have not seen that window open. I have not seen a light behind it change.
I file it.
I go inside.
The library is the best room in the house, and I resent how much I like it.
The books are real, not decorator books bought by the box for their spines, but actual read books, some with cracked spines and folded pages. Someone in this house reads. I run my fingers along a shelf and pull out a history of organized crime in the twentieth century, annotated in black pen in the margins. The handwriting is tight and slanted and does not waste space.
I put it back and keep moving.
There is a wooden rack near the second chair with newspapers and magazines in it. I flip through three days of the city paper, a financial weekly, and two international papers I don't recognize. I am about to put them back when the front page of the city paper from three months ago stops me.
Not the front page. I have to go through several editions to find it.
Page twelve.
Small column. Bottom half of the page, below a story about a burst water main and above an advertisement for a car dealership.
LOCAL MAN KILLED IN APPARENT ROBBERY ATTEMPT.
Victor Cole, 51, was found outside the Harmon parking garage. No suspects. Police are asking anyone with information to call, and then a number I called fourteen times that went to a voicemail that was never returned.
Apparent robbery attempt.
I read those two words four times.
Apparent. As if they are not sure. As if there is another explanation they are politely not mentioning. The whole article is twelve sentences, and it is careful in the way things are careful when someone has told the writer exactly how careful to be.
My father died and made page twelve.
Below the water main.
I think about his voice. The way he said my name always had both syllables, never just Mia, always Mia-girl when I was little, and just Mia when he was being serious. I think about the last time I heard it, three weeks before the parking garage, a Sunday phone call, and he said at the end: I'm trying to fix something, sweetheart. I need a little more time.
I didn't ask what he meant. I thought he meant money. I thought he was talking about the lease on his office space.
I fold the newspaper in half along the crease. Then I fold it again. Then I tear it straight down the middle, and the sound it makes, clean, sharp, final, fills the quiet library completely.
I drop both halves in the bin beside the chair.
I sit down.
I breathe.
Then I reach under the chair cushion and pull out the small notepad I slipped under there on my way through the room twenty minutes ago because I was already planning, already moving pieces, already turning this beautiful cage into something I could use.
At the top of the first page, I write one sentence.
He had twelve sentences. My father deserved more.
Below it, I write: Find out what he was trying to fix.
And below that, because I have been in this house for less than twelve hours and I have already found a blind spot and a locked wing and a basement no one mentioned: This house has more secrets than cameras.
I click the pen.
Good. So do I.