"Peter," a voice slid across the lobby like silk over steel.
Caro felt the temperature in the room change before she even turned around. Beside her, Peter went very still — not the controlled stillness she'd learned to read as calculation, but something closer to bracing. Near the reception desk, two staff members suddenly found reasons to be elsewhere, the particular kind of vanishing that happened when people recognized a storm before it arrived.
"Isabella," he said. Two syllables, perfectly even, and somehow that evenness was its own kind of warning.
Isabella Voss was beautiful in the deliberate way, every detail considered, from the precise red of her lips to the way she crossed the lobby like she already owned the floor beneath her heels. Her eyes found Caro and held there, assessing the way a jeweler might examine a stone they suspected was a fake.
"You must be Caro," she said, smile widening. "I've heard so much about you."
"Likewise," Caro said pleasantly, though she'd heard nothing — which, she suspected, was rather the point of the comment.
"Oh, I hope the rumors are true." Isabella's gaze flicked briefly to Peter, then back. "It would be terribly disappointing if they weren't."
"Isabella." Peter's voice carried an edge now, thin but unmistakable. "Caro has nothing to do with whatever you're fishing for."
"Fishing." Isabella's smile didn't move. "Such an ugly word for simple curiosity, Peter. We're old friends. Surely I'm allowed to be curious about your... new arrangement."
"We're not friends," Peter said. "We're people who used to work together. Past tense, same as everything else."
Something flickered across Isabella's face — too fast for most people to catch, but Caro had spent two weeks learning to read micro-expressions on someone far better at hiding them than Isabella was. It didn't hurt, exactly. It was closer to recalculation — the look of someone realizing a door they'd assumed was merely closed had actually been bricked over.
"Of course," Isabella said smoothly, recovering. She turned back to Caro, eyes sharper now. "Tell me, Caro — how does one keep secrets in a house like this? I imagine it must be exhausting. All those rooms. All those locked doors." Her gaze didn't waver. "All those things people aren't supposed to find."
Caro's chest tightened. It wasn't subtle, Isabella wasn't being subtle on purpose, Caro realized. She wanted Caro to feel the words land.
"I wouldn't know," Caro said, keeping her voice light. "I've only been here two weeks. I'm still learning where the kitchen is."
"How modest." Isabella's smile turned, just slightly, into something closer to a smirk. "Although, I heard you found your way to the library rather quickly. Impressive, for someone who can't find the kitchen."
The room went very quiet.
Caro didn't let her expression change but inside, something cold settled into place. She knows about the library. Not vaguely. Specifically. Which meant either she'd been told, or—
"Caro doesn't discuss the house," Peter said, stepping slightly forward, his voice dropping into something with steel underneath the calm. "And neither, Isabella, do you. Not anymore. I think you should remember that."
"I always remember everything, Peter." Isabella's eyes lingered on Caro a moment longer, long enough to make sure the message had landed — before she finally looked away. "It's rather my specialty."
She turned, the click of her heels echoing across the marble like a verdict, and was gone before either of them could say anything else.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
"She knows about the library," Caro said quietly, once Isabella's footsteps had faded. "Specifically. Not 'you went somewhere you shouldn't have', she knew exactly which room."
"I heard." Peter's jaw was tight, his eyes fixed on the empty space where Isabella had stood. "Which means either someone told her—"
"—or she has the same access to your private spaces that whoever leaked the Larson story does." Caro finished the thought before he could. "Peter. Is it possible Isabella is the access point? Not someone working with her — her, directly?"
"It's more than possible," Peter said slowly. "It would explain things I haven't wanted to look at too closely." He exhaled, something tired moving through his expression, the same tiredness Caro had seen in the library two days ago, the look of a man who'd been carrying something for so long he'd stopped noticing the weight of it. "Isabella and I worked together for years. Before you. Before, everything. She had access to this house because at one point, I trusted her with almost as much as I trust myself."
"And now?"
"And now," Peter said, "I think it's time I found out exactly how much of that access I never bothered to revoke."
Caro studied him. "You said almost as much as you trust yourself. What didn't she have access to?"
Peter's gaze met hers, and for a moment something passed behind his eyes — old, careful, guarded.
"The library," he said. "She never had access to the library. Which means if she knows what's in it—"
"—someone gave her that information recently," Caro finished. "After I found it. After the gala."
"Which narrows the list considerably." Peter's voice had gone quiet, dangerous. "Because the only people who knew you'd been in that room were myself... and you."
The implication hit Caro like cold water. "You don't think I—"
"No," Peter said, too quickly, then more carefully: "No. I don't." He held her gaze, steady. "But I need you to understand what I'm about to say next, because it matters. If Isabella knows what you found and what you almost asked me, then she's already three steps ahead of a game neither of us has fully started playing yet."
"Then we need to start playing it," Caro said. "Properly. Together."
Something shifted in Peter's expression — not quite warmth, but the closest thing to it she'd seen from him outside that locked room two nights ago.
"Together," he repeated, like he was testing the word, deciding whether he believed in it. "Caro, whatever Isabella is planning, whatever she already knows. It's not really about you. You understand that, don't you? You're new. You're convenient. But the target was never you."
"I know," Caro said quietly. "I'm just standing close enough to it that I'm going to get hit anyway."
Peter didn't argue with that. He couldn't.
"She won't stop," he said instead, watching the empty elevator doors that had swallowed Isabella moments ago. "And neither will whatever she's protecting or whatever she's planning to expose. Both, possibly. Isabella was never the kind of person who chose between two weapons when she could use them both."
"Then we'd better figure out which weapon she's planning to use first," Caro said. "Before she decides to use them on both of us at once."
Peter looked at her for a long moment, really looked, the way he had over the balance sheet, the way he had in the library, except now there was something else underneath it. Something that looked, almost, like he was recalculating not just what she was capable of.
But what she meant to him.
"Tomorrow," he said finally, voice quieter than before. "Isabella's access logs. And Caro—" He paused at the elevator, not quite looking at her. "Whatever we find. I'd rather find it with you than without you. That's... new, for me. I want you to know that."
The elevator doors slid shut behind him, leaving Caro alone in the lobby with the echo of Isabella's smirk, the weight of Peter's words, and a single, unshakeable certainty settling cold in her chest.
Isabella didn't just know about the library.
She knew exactly what Caro had almost asked Peter inside it and that meant somewhere in this house, someone was listening to conversations that were never supposed to leave the room they happened in.