Page 86 of Captive Promise

I realize it on my run, which I’ve now started to do outside the house as the treadmill bores me.

There’s usually one guard at the tree line by the east hedge, a guy named Duncan who nods at me and doesn’t say much.

This morning there are three men where Duncan used to stand alone.

I see it from thirty yards out and my stride falters, one foot catching slightly wrong on the gravel before I correct it.

My pulse, already up from the run, kicks into something sharper.

None of them nod.

One of them turns his whole body to track me as I pass and my mouth dries.

Nobody has ever bothered doing that before.

My skin goes tight down the back of my neck, that heightened awareness I haven’t had since the night I first got in that car outside my brownstone.

Something happened.

I keep running because I don’t want them to realize I’ve noticed the change.

My heart is going harder than the pace should account for by the time I loop back around toward the gate, and I count two more faces I’ve never seen before.

In the three weeks of being here, I’ve memorized every inch of this property. None of these people are familiar.

I know this place.

I know where the cameras are and where the blind spots used to be and how many steps it takes to get from the pool house to the kitchen door.

And overnight, without a word to me, somebody rewrote it all.

I don’t stop running until I’m back at the house, breathing hard, hands braced on my knees at the bottom of the steps, and it isn’t just the run that’s got my heart hammering like this.

Nico’s different too, and it’s not just the guards making me paranoid.

He still comes to find me and Seraphina most evenings.

He still sits through her chaos at the dinner table with more patience than I would have ever guessed a man like him has in him, nodding along while she sings, messes with her food, and stubbornly refuses to eat anything that isn’t macaroni and cheese or chicken nuggets.

But something’s different, and it’s not just the guards.

Normally when he looks at me across that table, I feel it—that slow, deliberate attention, like he’s been waiting all day just to look at me properly.

Two nights ago he pulled me into the pantry off the kitchen mid-dinner because he said he couldn’t wait until Seraphina went down.

I still think about it more than I should, the way his hands felt fisted in my hair, the low sound he made against my throat like I was something he’d been starving for.

My whole body still runs hot remembering it.

That’s not who’s sitting across from me tonight.

Tonight his eyes keep sliding past me instead of landing on me.

His phone’s face-up on the table, which is new.

He used to leave it face-down because nothing on that screen ever beat whatever I was saying.

Now his eyes are always glancing toward it, as if expecting a message at any second.