Salvar stared at the spot where Silas had been standing like the universe owed him an explanation and was taking its time delivering one.
Then a hand landed on his shoulder.
"What the fuck were you doing?"
Skyler's voice had lost approximately forty percent of its professional composure.
The remaining sixty percent was doing its best.
Salvar turned around.
He placed Milo from his arms to Skyler's arms in one smooth motion and looked at a point somewhere past Skyler's left ear with the expression of someone rapidly constructing a building while the ground moved underneath them.
"I apologize, young master," he said while slightly bowing his head towards Skyler.
His voice was steady. Remarkably steady considering his weird expression. "Playing with Milo got me carried away. It will not happen again."
Skyler stared at him.
Milo stared at him.
Young Master? Why was he calling Skyler 'young master'?
Skyler opened his mouth and closed again.
Both Milo and he wore an identical expression of people who had just watched someone say words that were technically a sentence but felt fundamentally wrong in ways that were difficult to articulate.
Salvar blinked.
Once. Twice.
The blink of someone whose eyes were working very hard to communicate innocence to a face that was not cooperating.
Skyler looked at him for a long moment and something moved behind his eyes.
He glanced at Silas in the back and moved his eyes back to Salvar.
Realizing that the person he was supposed to protect was significantly more complicated assignment than the briefing suggested.
He straightened.
"Be careful in the future," Skyler said, with the measured authority of someone who had decided to play along for now while reserving the right to revisit this conversation later. "There are many people waiting for the position you hold. It would be unfortunate to lose it over carelessness."
Salvar bowed his head.
The man from the elevator was already moving across the figures, unhurried. His dark coat shifting slightly with each step.
He glanced at his watch with the energy of someone for whom time was a resource other people wasted. He did not look back.
He did not need to.
Salvar watched him walk away and felt absolutely nothing he was prepared to name.
They kept their distance until he was gone.
The elevator door closed and Salvar's back met the mirror with a heavy expression.
The breath he released had been waiting since the collision. It left his body slowly, like something that had been held under pressure for too long finally finding a crack.
What the actual fuck!?
He had come to Thornvale with a plan. With a list. With the quiet controlled energy of someone who had died once and decided to do things differently this time.
He had negotiated contracts and manipulated bar fights and walked out of police stations with fraud documentation. Everything was going smoothly.
And then the elevator doors had opened.
Out of every building. Out of every district. Out of every floor in every structure in this entire city.
WHY WAS HE HERE.
"Is he a threat?"
Salvar looked at Skyler.
Skyler was watching him with the careful attention of a person who had clocked something significant and was waiting to understand what it meant.
Salvar shook his head.
He did not say anything else.
The elevator reached their floor.
They went to the playground.
Milo had claimed the swing as his personal property within thirty seconds of arrival and was conducting a thorough investigation of how high it could go before the laws of physics became relevant.
Salvar sat on the bench beside the sandpit and watched him with an expression that had not fully decided what it was yet.
"Skyler."
Skyler stood two meters away doing the professional bodyguard thing where you exist in a space without appearing to take up room in it. He turned his head.
"Pretend you are Milo's uncle," Salvar said. "While I am the household butler."
Skyler blinked. "Sorry?"
"You heard me."
"I did hear you. I am trying to understand why."
"Client matters do not concern you."
Skyler turned to face him more fully now. "They do concern me if your safety is affected."
"You are here for Milo. Not me."
"My assignment covers both of you."
"Milo is the priority."
"Sorry, I can't decide my priority."
"Skyler." Salvar looked at him directly for the first time since the elevator. His voice was not unkind. It was simply the voice of someone who had already made a decision and was informing the room rather than requesting feedback. "I need you to work for me. Not for my parents."
Silence.
"They hired me," Skyler said slowly.
"I am well aware of that fact."
"So you do know that I can't break the code of conduct."
"Yes."
"So you understand what you are asking is impossible from my part."
Salvar looked away.
He watched Milo swing and did the thing he did when he was calculating something. The slight stillness. The eyes that were looking at a distance that had nothing to do with the playground in front of him.
Skyler followed his gaze and found nothing there.
He sighed.
It was a very specific sigh. The sigh of a man who had taken a job expecting it to be straightforward and was now on day one in Thornvale having already pretended his employer's son was a butler, witnessed a collision with an unidentified person that had clearly been more significant than a collision, and been asked to switch his professional allegiance.
He said nothing else.
Salvar accepted his silence as provisional agreement and filed it accordingly.
The day passed without further incident.
Which should have felt like a good thing.
It did not feel like a good thing.
Milo ate dinner and had a bath and discovered that the fairy light tent was even better at night and was asleep by eight thirty with the peaceful unconsciousness of someone whose biggest concern was whether the playground would still be there tomorrow.
Salvar sat in his room on the upper floor.
The lights were off.
His phone screen lit his face in the dark, casting the specific pale glow of someone doing research they did not want to be doing.
His thumbnail was between his teeth. He had been biting it since nine o'clock and it was now past midnight and he had not noticed.
The name on his screen was Silas.
Results came back clean on the surface. They always did for men like him.
Business profiles, charity appearances, industry mentions, the careful public architecture of someone who understood that visibility was a tool and had used it accordingly.
Salvar put his phone face down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.
God forbid he had come here to plan a revenge that would take years of careful patience and surgical precision.
God forbid he had negotiated contracts and said goodbye to his family at an airport and watched the city disappear beneath a plane and told himself that this time would be different.
He picked the phone back up.
Same floor.
He was living on the same floor as his murderer and additionally the person he killed.
Both of them breathing Thornvale air.
Salvar put the phone down again.
He closed his eyes.
Somewhere down the hall Milo was asleep in a room full of sunlight and rainbows with fairy lights on and a strawberry bean bag and absolutely no idea what was living to their adjacent house.
That was the only thing that mattered.
Salvar exhaled.
The ceiling offered no opinions.
But he stared at it anyway while biting his thumbnail.