The silence of the penthouse was different at night. It wasn't just an absence of sound; it was a presence, a thick, watchful thing that pressed against Sydney's eardrums. The faint glow of the city through her window painted the room in monochrome blues and greys, turning familiar shapes into strange silhouettes.
Sleep had been a shallow pool, and she'd surfaced from it parched. The digital clock on the nightstand glowed 2:17 AM. She slipped out of bed, the cool concrete floor a shock against her bare feet, and padded out into the dark hallway.
The main living area was a cavern of shadows, the city lights casting long, geometric shapes across the floor. She moved toward the kitchen island, guided by the soft, green glow of the stove's clock. She found a glass in a cupboard and filled it from the tap on the refrigerator door. The water was icy, shocking her system fully awake.
She was leaning against the island, sipping slowly, when a sound made her freeze. A soft, sliding click from the direction of the west wing.
Her head snapped toward the hallway. A sliver of dim, amber light appeared, widened, and a figure emerged.
Damien stood in the doorway of the forbidden wing, silhouetted by the light from behind him. He wore a dark robe of rich fabric, tied loosely at the waist. His hair was dishevelled, as if he'd been running his hands through it, and the planes of his face were stark in the low light, shadows pooling in the hollows of his cheeks and under his eyes. He looked less like the polished casino owner and more like a man who'd been wrestling with ghosts.
He saw her. He stopped. For a long moment, neither of them moved or spoke. The only sound was the faint hum of the refrigerator.
Sydney felt acutely vulnerable in her thin cotton sleep shorts and tank top, her feet bare, caught in this intimate, nocturnal space. His gaze was a physical weight, travelling from her sleep-tousled hair down to her toes and back up, slower this time. There was no warmth in that look, only a stark, assessing intensity that made her skin prickle. He wasn't looking at Gabriel's little girl. He was looking at a woman in his kitchen in the dead of night.
"Couldn't sleep?" His voice was a low rasp, rough with sleep or something else. It sounded different in the dark, stripped of its daytime formality.
"Thirsty," she managed, her own voice coming out too thin. She clutched the glass tighter. "You're up late."
"I don't sleep much." He stated it as a simple fact, like commenting on the weather. His eyes flicked to the glass in her hand. "The water filter is in the door. It's better."
"I'll remember."
Another stretch of silence. He didn't move to come closer, but he didn't retreat either. He seemed to be studying the space between them, the tension that hummed louder than any appliance. She noticed the corded strength of his forearms where the robe's sleeves fell back, the faint, pale line of a scar that peeked above the collar.
"The city," he said finally, his gaze shifting past her to the wall of windows. "It's loudest when it's quiet. You'll get used to it."
"Will I?"
His eyes snapped back to hers. "You'll have to." He said it not as a threat, but as another immutable fact, like the rule about the west wing. "Go back to bed, Sydney."
It was a dismissal, but it lacked the cold command of his daytime tone. It was quieter, almost… weary.
She nodded, setting the empty glass in the sink with a soft clink. She forced herself to walk, not scamper, back toward the hallway. She could feel his eyes on her back every step of the way. She didn't look back. Only when she was in her room, the door closed softly behind her, did she let out the breath she'd been holding. She leaned against the door, her heart thumping against her ribs.
She hadn't imagined the shift in his look. It had been different. The guardian had been off-duty, and what had looked out from his eyes was something far more complex, and far more dangerous.
---
The next morning, a box appeared just inside her bedroom door. A simple, brown cardboard cube. There was no note.
She opened it. Inside were books. Not valuable first editions, but the well-worn, loved paperbacks from her father's office—a collection of Chandler detective novels, a dog-eared history of Renaissance art, a few beat-up poetry anthologies. Nestled beside them was his favourite jade paperweight, a pair of silver cufflinks shaped like tiny paintbrushes, and an old, expensive fountain pen.
Damien had been to the house. He'd gone through Gabriel's things and chosen these. A wave of grief, sharp and fresh, washed over her as she lifted the paperweight, its cool, smooth surface familiar in her palm. It was a gesture, she supposed. An attempt at connection, or at least at mitigating the sterility of her surroundings.
As she lifted the stack of books to place them on her desk, a photograph, slipped between the pages of a Raymond Chandler, fluttered out and spun to the floor.
She picked it up.
It was a candid shot, not a professional one. Four men, arms slung around each other's shoulders, squinting against a blinding, harsh sun. They were young, probably in their late twenties. Her father, Gabriel, was on the left, grinning widely, looking tanned and vibrant, a decade younger than her last memory of him. Damien stood beside him, his face less lined but his eyes the same intense grey, his smile smaller, more contained. He looked… relaxed. Happy, even.
It was the other two men who gave her pause. They were unfamiliar. One was blond and broad-shouldered with a fighter's nose, laughing at something off-camera. The other was darker, leaner, with a watchful, unsmiling expression. They all wore dusty, casual clothes, and behind them was not a city or a beach, but a flat, rocky expanse stretching to a hazy horizon, dotted with low, scrubby vegetation. A desert. Somewhere arid and foreign.
She turned the photo over. On the back, in her father's flowing script, was a location and a date: "Outside Al Jafr, '08." 2008. She would have been twelve years old.
Al Jafr. She'd never heard of it. A quick, furtive search on her phone while sitting on her bedroom floor told her it was in Jordan.
What had her father, an art philanthropist, been doing in the Jordanian desert with Damien and two other men who looked more like soldiers than academics? '08. Damien would have been… twenty-eight. Her father a few years older. What kind of business?
She stared at the younger Damien's face. The connection between him and her father in the photo was palpable, a bond of shared experience that went deeper than casual friendship. This was the man her father had trusted with her life. This was also the man who had a private wing he sealed off at 8 PM, who didn't sleep, and who had looked at her in the dark with an expression that had nothing to do with guardianship.
She tucked the photograph back into the Chandler novel, a secret now nestled between pages of hard-boiled fiction. She placed the book on her shelf, the spine outward. A piece of a puzzle she didn't yet know she was supposed to be solving.