Mia POV
He is already at the table when I come down.
No warning. No explanation. Just Dante Reyes sitting in the chair across from where I have been sitting every morning for four days, coffee in front of him, a folded document open beside his plate like he relocated his entire office to the breakfast table and found nothing unusual about it.
I stop in the doorway.
He does not look up.
I have two options. I can go back upstairs and wait him out, skip breakfast, avoid the confrontation, let him have the room. Or I can walk in and sit down and eat my toast and refuse to be moved out of the one routine I have managed to build in this house that feels like mine.
I walk in. I sit down.
Elena appears from the kitchen with coffee and a second plate, and she does not react to the situation at all, which tells me she knew he was going to be here and did not warn me, which I file away under Elena's loyalties and do not forget this.
I pour my coffee.
He reads his document.
The kitchen smells like toast and something herby that Hector has going on the stove. Outside the garden window, the morning is gray and quiet. Everything is completely normal except for the most dangerous man I have ever met, sitting close enough that I could reach across the table and touch him if I lost my mind entirely.
I eat my toast.
He drinks his coffee.
The silence is not comfortable. It is not uncomfortable either, exactly. It is more like a test, the kind where neither person has been told the rules, but both of them know that whoever speaks first loses something. I do not know what I lose. I do not plan to find out.
I count the seconds.
One minute. Two. I finish my toast and start on the small bowl of fruit Elena put on the table, and I look out the window, and I think about the panel in the library and the guard rotation gap and the voice behind the east wall last night, and I let those thoughts run quietly underneath the surface where they belong.
Three minutes. Four.
Dante turns a page.
Five minutes. I get up, pour myself more coffee, and sit back down. He does not acknowledge this. I do not acknowledge that he did not acknowledge it.
Six minutes. Seven.
I am actually comfortable now, which surprises me. The silence has lasted long enough that it stopped being a competition and became just a thing. Two people in a kitchen in the morning. Except one of them is keeping the other here against her will and is responsible for the reason she has no family to go home to, so.
Not just a thing.
Eight minutes in, he speaks.
He does not look up from his document.
"What did you do before?"
The question is so plain and so unexpected that I answer it before I have decided to. "Worked at a flower shop."
He turns another page.
That is apparently all he wanted because another full minute passes and he says nothing and reads his document, and I sit there thinking: that was it? That was the question that ended eight minutes of silence? Not what do you know, or what were you looking for, or why did you say what you said the first night? Just what did you do before?
Then, without looking up: "Did you like it?"
I look at the side of his face. The sharp line of his jaw. The way he holds himself straight, contained, like his posture is a door that stays closed even when everything else opens.
I say: "Yes."
He nods. Once. Small. Like I confirmed something he had already calculated.
Then he folds his document, picks up his coffee cup, and leaves.
No goodbye. No, see you later. He simply picks up his things and walks out the way a person walks out of a room they were alone in, as if my presence was noted but did not fundamentally change the nature of the space.
I sit with my coffee and stare at the doorway he just walked through.
Elena is in the kitchen doorway. I can see her from the corner of my eye. She is holding a dish towel, and she is looking at the empty doorway with an expression I have not seen on her face before, something between surprise and something softer, something almost careful, like she is watching a thing that does not usually happen and is deciding what to do with that information.
I say, without looking at her: "Does he do that often?"
She says: "No."
Just that. No elaboration. She goes back into the kitchen, and the sound of her work resumes, and I sit with the single word and think about what it means.
He does not eat with people. He does not ask people what they did before. He does not ask them if they liked it. I think about the annotations in the margins of the library books that tight, slanted handwriting that does not waste space, and I think about the way he stood in the garden yesterday on the phone, alone in the middle of all that space, and I think about Elena's face just now.
This is the most personal conversation Dante Reyes has with anyone.
The idea lands strangely. Not soft, nothing about this situation is soft, but strange. That a man with this much power, this much money, this many people moving around him in careful orbits, sits down to breakfast alone every morning and asks no one anything.
Until today.
I do not know what to do with that.
I pick up my coffee cup, and I am about to stand when I see it.
His phone.
It is on the table. Right side, near where his document was. He left it when he picked up the document and the coffee cup, a small miscalculation, the kind that only happens when a person is slightly less focused than usual.
The screen is lit.
Unlocked.
I look at the kitchen doorway. Elena is inside, not visible. I look at the empty hall. The camera in this room covers the table, but the angle catches my back, not my hands, not the screen.
I look at the phone.
Thirty seconds. That is what I have before the screen locks itself. I clocked it yesterday when Elena left hers on the counter, the same model, same settings. Thirty seconds from last touch.
I have maybe used five of them already.
My heart is doing the thing it does, the fast, loud, focused thing that happens when everything narrows down to one decision and the decision has to be made right now.
Rosa.
If I can get one message to Rosa. One sentence. Just enough for her to know I am alive and where to look. Just enough that someone outside these walls is looking in the right direction.
Twenty seconds.
I reach for the phone.