— MIA —
I heard him come in at two in the morning.
I was not asleep. I had been trying for an hour, lying in the dark with the Dostoevsky open on my chest and my mind doing that thing it does when the house is quiet and there is nothing to distract it from itself. Going in circles. Ryan. The contact. Danny Reyes, whoever he was. Viktor's words in the garden. Elena's words at the kitchen table.
Hard men have reasons.
I heard the front door, then footsteps on the stairs, then nothing. His room was at the other end of the corridor. I counted the seconds without meaning to, the way you do when you are pretending not to be listening.
The footsteps stopped outside the library.
A long pause.
Then they continued.
I stared at the ceiling and told myself that meant nothing.
He looked terrible in the morning.
I mean that in the most technical sense — not that he looked bad, because Damien Voss didn't look bad, it seemed structurally impossible for him to look bad. But he looked like someone who had not slept, which on him translated into a particular sharpness around the eyes and a tension in his jaw that had not been there before.
He was at the kitchen table when I came down, laptop open, coffee untouched, reading something with the focused stillness of a man who had been reading it for hours.
He did not look up when I came in.
I didn't say good morning.
We had established, without discussing it, that mornings did not require performance.
I made coffee. Elena was not in yet — it was early, barely six, the light outside still the pale grey of a day that had not decided what it wanted to be. I moved around the kitchen quietly, found the good cups on the second shelf, found the coffee where it always was.
I poured one for myself.
I stood at the counter and looked at his untouched cup.
I looked at him.
He had been here all night doing something, or he had been somewhere all night doing something, and either way it was connected to Ryan and to the person on the phone and to the name Danny Reyes and to a question I had asked in the library that he still had not fully answered.
I picked up his cold cup, poured it out, and made him a fresh one.
I put it next to his laptop without saying anything.
He went still.
Not the usual stillness — not the controlled, deliberate quiet he carried everywhere like a coat. Something different. The stillness of a person who has been caught off guard and is taking a moment to process it.
I was already turning back to the counter when he said it.
"Thank you."
Two words. Quiet. No inflection that I could read.
I stopped.
In the time I had been in this house I had heard Damien speak in many registers. Flat. Cold. Precise. Occasionally something that approached dry humor. Once, in the library, something that was almost human.
I had not heard that before.
I turned around.
He was looking at me. Not the way he usually looked at me, assessing, measuring, reading. Just — looking. Like he had forgotten for a second to do it the other way.
"You look awful," I said.
Something shifted in his expression.
"Good morning to you too."
"I mean it practically, not as an insult. When did you last sleep?"
He looked back at the laptop. Which was answer enough.
"Damien."
"I'm fine."
"You have been awake for at least..."
"I'm fine, Mia."
The way he said my name stopped me. Not sharp. Not dismissive. Just — tired. The kind of tired that has been carried for a long time and is not about one night.
I sat down across from him.
He looked up.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Sitting."
"I can see that."
"Then why did you ask?"
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he closed the laptop, which surprised me enough that I didn't say anything.
"How are you sleeping?" he asked.
I blinked. Of all the things I had expected him to say.
"Fine," I said. "Better than you apparently."
"The room is comfortable?"
"It is a very nice room."
"But..."
I looked at him.
"But it's not my room," I said. "There is a difference between comfortable and yours. I do not think I have to explain that to you."
He held my gaze. Something moved through his expression that I was beginning to recognize — not quite guilt, not quite acknowledgment, something in between that he never let stay long enough to name.
"No," he said. "You don't."
✦✦✦
We sat in silence for a while after that.
It was strange — not uncomfortable exactly, but strange. Two people who had no reason to be sitting quietly in a kitchen together at six in the morning, doing exactly that. The light outside shifted from grey to something pale gold. Elena arrived at half past six and stopped in the doorway when she saw us and said nothing, which told me that whatever she was reading in the scene was something she was choosing not to comment on.
Smart woman.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"You can ask."
I turned my cup in my hands.
"Viktor told me you lost someone. Before Ryan."
The quality of the silence changed.
Damien didn't move. Didn't look away. But something behind his eyes went very careful, the way a door goes careful when someone puts their hand on the handle from the other side.
"Viktor talks too much," he said.
"He said almost nothing. That is how I know it matters."
A pause.
"Her name was Sophie," he said finally. Flat. Like reading from a document. "She was someone I cared about. She died because of who I am and what I do. That is all I will say about it."
I did not push.
I wanted to. The part of me that needed to understand everything, that could not leave a question sitting unanswered, wanted to push.
But there was something in those two sentences that said very clearly: this is the edge. Do not step past it.
So I didn't.
"Is that why you distanced yourself from Ryan?" I asked instead. "Because of her. Because you were afraid the same thing would happen."
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer.
"Partly," he said. "And partly because I thought distance would push him toward a better life. That if I was not there, he would find different people. Make different choices."
"It didn't work."
"No," he said. "It didn't work."
I looked at him across the table. At the shadows under his eyes and the untouched coffee I had made him, now being held in both hands like he had forgotten it was there.
I thought about what it must be like to carry that. To have made a choice meant to protect someone and watch it fail. To spend a year afterward trying to find out why, who, how.
Alone, without telling anyone.
I did not say any of that.
But I think he saw it anyway, because he looked at me differently for just a second before he looked away.
"Get some sleep," I said. "Whatever you are looking for will still be there in four hours."
"You sound like Elena."
"Elena is a very wise woman."
He almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved exactly enough that I could not be certain I had not imagined it.
He stood. Picked up the coffee.
Stopped at the doorway.
"Mia."
"Mm."
"The forbidden wing." He said it without turning around. "Don't go there. I mean that. Not as a rule. As a warning."
I said nothing.
He left.
I sat at the kitchen table while Elena made breakfast and the morning came in through the window and thought about the difference between a rule and a warning.
A rule was something he expected me to follow.
A warning was something he was afraid of.
That was the most interesting thing he had ever said to me.
✦