Chapter 201: Direct Me To Someone Who Gets me

LOUISE’S POV

The silence inside this hotel room feels different now. It is no longer just cold air and heavy wood. It has settled into something thick and heavy, like dust hovering on a ledge that’s never cleaned.

Over my head, the air conditioner hums its steady, mechanical tune, blowing a thin breeze across the carpet that makes the hem of my dress flutter just a little.

The mercenaries did not get to me. They shot up the old lake house, burned the wooden porch to cinders, and exchanged fire with Orion’s guard, but they never made it to this hotel. They do not even know this room exists.

I have not been moved, transferred, or rescued. This hotel remains my cage, and the men in dark suits still walk up and down the carpeted hallway outside my deadbolted door.

Every so often, I hear the faint scuff of a shoe against the carpet. A pause. The soft rustle of fabric. Then the footsteps resume, moving farther down the hallway before returning a few minutes later.

They are careful not to make too much noise.

Perhaps they think I am sleeping. Perhaps they believe that a woman sitting quietly in a locked room is a woman who has accepted her circumstances.

There is something almost amusing about that assumption.

I have spent years learning how to sit still while my mind tears a room apart, how to smile while calculating the distance between myself and the nearest exit.

Quietness has never meant obedience.

I shift my right hand slightly, allowing my fingers to brush against the fabric covering my thigh. Beneath the lining of my vest, the little metal pocketknife rests against my ribs.

I can feel its presence even through the layers of clothing, a small, hard reminder that there is still something in this room that belongs to me.

They took my coat. They searched my pockets. They examined the seams of my clothes with the thoroughness of men who have been paid to suspect everything.

They missed the knife. I wonder how they would react if they knew.

Would they take it away immediately? Would one of them come into the room with a carefully rehearsed apology and an explanation about security? Would Orion hear about it and decide that I had become too troublesome to leave alone?

The thought almost makes me smile. Almost.

Hearing about the shootout through the door earlier brought me no comfort. It brought no relief, no surge of hope, and no sudden fear.

It was just news.

It was simply proof that the fire I started is still burning out there in the world, spreading from room to room, touching people who thought they were safe behind their money and their names.

One of the guards had stopped outside my door after the first burst of gunfire was reported.

I remember sitting exactly where I am now, listening to the murmur of his voice through the door.

"Is she still in there?" another man had asked.

"Yes."

"Has she asked for anything?"

"No."

There had been a pause.

"Keep it that way. We don’t need complications tonight."

Then the footsteps had moved away.

I had stared at the door for a long time afterward, wondering whether they understood how absurd their conversation sounded.

As if my silence were a favor they could count on. As if I were a troublesome guest who might request fresh towels at an inconvenient hour rather than a prisoner whose family had turned the world into a battlefield.

The people holding me here treat me like a dangerous person of interest. They think if they lock the doors, check the locks, and keep the curtains drawn, they might be able to keep me away from any violence.

They are foolish.

Violence does not care about locked doors. It follows you into the quiet. It sits in the corner of the room and waits for you to turn off the lights.

I stare at the cream wall across from me. The afternoon light outside is fading, turning the narrow gap between the velvet curtains from a bright yellow into a soft, dull grey.

There is a small painting above the desk. I have been looking at it for hours without really seeing it. It depicts a stretch of blue water beneath a pale sky, with a white house tucked between two trees.

The house is so small that its windows are little more than dark strokes against the walls.

I wonder who chose it.

Someone must have decided that this was the sort of picture a hotel guest ought to find comforting. Water, trees, an empty house. The promise of somewhere peaceful, somewhere removed from the noise of the city.

I almost laugh at the thought.

The painter has made the water look perfectly still. Not a single ripple disturbs its surface. The trees lean toward the house, their branches curved gently over its roof.

Nothing is happening in that painting. Nothing ever will.

I look away before the thought can settle too deeply.

As the shadows lengthen, my mind begins to drift.

I try to hold onto my anger. I try to focus on Alice, on her cowardly retreat, on her clever calculations, and on the small metal pocketknife tucked safely inside the lining of my dress.

I want to feel that sharp, icy rage that usually keeps my spine straight. I want to remember every lie she told me, every lesson she delivered with that soft, patient voice of hers, every time she made cruelty sound like a necessary part of growing up.

But the quiet in this room is too heavy. It pulls at the edges of my thoughts, softening the sharp corners of my mind until old memories begin to float up from the bottom.

I begin remembering Adrien.

It does not come back all at once. It returns in small, disjointed fragments, like pieces of broken glass catching the light under a bed.

First, I remember his hands.

Long fingers, dirt beneath the nails, a faint scratch across one knuckle. Then the rolled sleeves of his white shirt. The dark smudge he had accidentally left on his cheek.

The way he had leaned over a pot of dying ferns as if their survival depended entirely on his attention.

It is strange, the things the mind chooses to preserve.

I cannot remember what I ate for dinner that evening. I cannot recall the exact color of the skirt I wore or whether I had tied my hair back before entering the glass house. I cannot even remember what Alice said when I returned to the manor.

But I remember the dirt beneath Adrien’s fingernails.

I remember the way he looked at me when he asked what I wanted to do with my life.

I remember how easily he smiled when he had forgotten to be afraid of me.

The memory grows clearer, pushing aside the soft hum of the hotel air conditioner until I can almost smell the old polish on the wooden floors of the manor’s sunroom.

I remember a time before everything turned rotten.

I remember a time before I dragged our name through news headlines, before leaked hotel videos, before Orion Vassilis put a ring on Adrien’s finger, and before my mother squeezed my shoulder and taught me how to ruin a person with a polite smile.

We were sixteen years old. It was roughly a year before the incident that shattered our house, long before Adrien packed a small bag in the middle of the night and ran away.

Back then, the air in the Dubois manor was already sour, but we had not completely drowned in it yet. We were still living under the same roof, breathing the same terse air, moving around each other like two stray cats forced to share a small yard.

There were rules in that house, although no one had bothered to write most of them down.