The adrenaline from the dinner with Marcus didn't fade; it soured, turning into a cold, restless energy that hummed in Ava's veins.
After Julian had dismissed her with that cryptic warning, she had retreated to the East Wing. The silk gown felt like a second skin now—tight, suffocating, and entirely too expensive for a girl who still had wood glue under her fingernails.
She stood in the center of her bedroom, the fire in the limestone hearth now nothing but glowing embers. She knew she was being watched. The tiny pinhole camera in the gilded mirror frame was a silent, unblinking eye.
If I'm an investment, she thought, he's checking the security of his vault.
But Ava wasn't a piece of gold. She was a restorer. She knew that every structure, no matter how grand, had a flaw. Every blueprint had a shadow.
She began to move around the room, not with the grace of the "fiancée" Marcus had seen, but with the calculated precision of a woman measuring a job site. She watched the angle of the mirror. She mapped the line of sight from the door.
There.
Behind a heavy velvet curtain near the window sat an alcove with a small, built-in writing desk. Because of the way the wardrobe jutted out from the wall, the camera in the mirror couldn't see into the corner of that desk. It was a sliver of privacy, no wider than three feet, but in this house, it was an ocean.
Ava slipped into the alcove, pulling the curtain just enough to shield herself.
She reached into the hidden pocket she had sewn into her slip earlier that day. Her fingers curled around a small, jagged piece of stone. It was a fragment she had pocketed from the library wall when she found the diary—a piece of the very foundation of the Thorne Estate.
She felt the texture of the stone, her eyes closing. Secrets in the stone.
Suddenly, the floor beneath her feet shifted.
It wasn't a structural failure. It was a mechanical hum, so low it was more of a vibration than a sound. Ava froze, her breath catching. She looked down at the baseboard of the writing desk. A small, wooden slat had slid open, revealing a pneumatic tube system—the kind old banks used to send canisters between floors.
Inside the tube sat a small, brass cylinder.
Ava's heart hammered against her ribs. She reached out, her fingers trembling, and unscrewed the cap. Inside wasn't a message from Julian. It was a photograph, old and yellowed at the edges.
It showed a man standing in front of the very mansion she was currently trapped in. He looked exactly like Julian—the same sharp jaw, the same predatory eyes—but he was standing next to a woman whose face had been violently scratched out with a pen.
On the back, a single line was written in a hand that wasn't Julian's. It was shakier, older.
> The debt isn't just money, Julian. It's blood. Don't let the restorer find the cellar.
>
A cold chill washed over her. The "restorer."
The house didn't just have a diary. It had a memory of her. Or someone like her.
"Finding what you're looking for, Ava?"
The voice didn't come from the door. It came from the shadows of the alcove itself.
Ava whirled around, the photograph clutched to her chest. Julian was standing just outside the curtain, his silhouette tall and terrifying against the dim light of the bedroom. He hadn't made a sound.
"You're in my blind spot," he said, his voice a velvet growl. He stepped into the small space, forcing her back against the desk. The proximity was overwhelming. He smelled of rain and cold iron. "I didn't think you'd find it so quickly."
"You knew about this?" She held up the brass cylinder. "You knew someone was sending messages through the walls?"
Julian's gaze fell to the photograph in her hand. For the first time, she saw a flicker of something that looked like genuine pain in his eyes before the ice returned.
"I didn't think they'd start targeting you yet," he whispered. He reached out, his hand hovering near her neck, his thumb tracing the line of the emerald serpent. "There are people in this house who want that diary more than I do, Ava. And they will use you to get it."
"Then let me go," she pleaded, her voice a ragged whisper.
Julian leaned in, his lips inches from hers. "I can't. You're the only shield I have left. And from now on, you don't sleep in this wing."
"What?"
"You're moving into my suite," he commanded, his eyes locking onto hers with a ferocity that made her knees weak. "If you're going to be a target, you're going to be one I can see."