Chapter 2 - Behind the Wainscoting
The hallway leading to the children’s wing was lined with acoustic paneling, but the silence behind it was wrong. It wasn’t the quiet of sleeping children; it was the quiet of a pressure cooker before the seam split.
Naomi led him past the double doors of the master suite—where Camille was presumably sleeping beneath silk sheets bought with Roman’s corporate dividends—and toward the library alcove. The heavy mahogany doors were ajar by three inches. A single floor lamp cast a long, jaundiced yellow trapezoid across the Persian rug.
Roman’s boots made no sound on the wool, but his breath was trapped in his throat like a dry bone.
Inside, five-year-old Rosie stood barefoot on the pattern, her toes curled inward. Her small pink nightgown, printed with faded rabbits, was too short at the wrists. Two feet away stood Jack, eight years old, his arms straight at his sides, fingers hooked into the seams of his flannel trousers with such force that his knuckles were the color of skim milk.
And sitting in the high-backed leather wingback chair was Camille Sloane.
She wore a robe of heavy white satin that looked like a shroud. In her lap, she held Rosie’s stuffed rabbit—Mr. Hop, the one Isabella had stitched together from an old cashmere sweater during her second round of chemotherapy. One of its ears had been ripped off, the white stuffing spilling out like cotton guts.
“What do you say when you make this household difficult, Rosaline?” Camille asked. Her voice was like honey poured over razor blades—sweet, slow, and entirely devoid of human temperature.
Rosie didn't look up. Her lower lip was swollen where she’d been chewing it. “I... I make everything hard.”
“Louder,” Camille murmured, stroking the torn ear of the rabbit with a manicured nail painted the color of dried pomegranate. “Your father works very hard to keep us safe from the scum outside these glass walls. When you leave your shoes in the foyer, or when you cry because your porridge is cold, you are inviting the scum inside. What are you?”
“A liability,” Rosie whispered.
“Again.”
“A liability.”
Roman’s hand went to the wall, his fingernails biting into the Venetian plaster until the lime scraped off under his touch. Every instinct screaming in his blood—the training from alleys in Marseille and boardrooms in Zurich—told him to kick the door off its hinges, drag Camille out by her hair, and throw her over the balcony into the dark water forty floors below.
He took half a step forward.
Naomi’s hand landed flat against his chest, right over his heart. Her palm was dry and heavy. She didn't push; she simply anchored him.
“Look at her hands, Roman,” Naomi whispered against his ear. “Look at the ring on her thumb.”
Roman forced his eyes past the terror on his daughter's face to Camille’s left hand. The heavy platinum band with the three-carat diamond solitaire wasn’t the only ring she wore. On her thumb was a narrow gold band with an inset camera lens—a custom digital recorder disguised as antique jewelry. She wasn't just breaking his children; she was filming the calibration.
“Jack,” Camille said, turning her narrow, perfect face toward the boy. “Tell your sister what happens to things that don’t fit the family ledger.”
May you like
Jack’s voice was thin, mechanical, like a record played at the wrong speed. “If Dad sees weakness, he sends it away. If he sends us away, we belong to the river.”
“Good boy,” Camille said, tossing Mr. Hop onto the floor between Rosie’s bare feet. “Go to your room. And if I hear either of you breathing before seven o’clock, I’ll let Arthur Velez rewrite the trust while your father is signing the marriage certificate.”
