Chapter 3 - THE WARDROBE AND THE INTERROGATION
Clare remained glued to the door, her wrist throbbing where his wet fingers had held her. She watched him move across the living room with smooth, predatory economy. Despite the massive scars running through his core, he walked without a limp, his posture straight, his head tilted slightly to monitor the ambient sounds of the hallway outside.
He disappeared through the bathroom door, leaving it open just wide enough to keep her within his peripheral vision.
Inside, the sound of fabric rustling was brief and sharp. Clare’s eyes darted toward the dropped tablet on the floor four feet away. The screen had cracked across the corner, displaying an error code in bright white letters: CONNECTION LOST – RETRYING PROTOCOL. If she lunged for the lock now, could she turn the deadbolt and clear the frame before he reached her?
She looked at the distance. She looked at his speed when he had caught her wrist. She stayed where she was.
Ten seconds later, Nicholas stepped back out into the amber light of the suite.
He was no longer just a towel-clad ghost. He had pulled on a pair of tailored black trousers, cut slim and secured with a dark leather belt, though his feet remained bare against the hardwood. Over his broad shoulders hung a crisp, high-thread-count white dress shirt, completely unbuttoned and untucked. The open white fabric billowed around his torso as he walked, exposing the central surgical scar and the lower edges of the bullet wounds along his ribs. In his right hand, held loosely along his thigh with the muzzle pointed safely toward the floor, was the black semi-automatic pistol.
He did not raise the weapon. He did not point it at her chest. He simply carried it with the unthinking, casual familiarity of a craftsman holding a hammer.
He stopped six feet away, his cold gaze sweeping over her red uniform, the plastic name tag pinned to her apron, and the scuffed toes of her work flats.
"You’re new," Nicholas observed, his voice calm, measuring each syllable.
Clare swallowed hard, forcing her vocal cords to work. "Three months. I... I started in August. On the lower floors. They only moved me to the executive suites last Tuesday."
Nicholas’s eyes narrowed slightly, cataloging the details. Her accent carried the slight, flat vowels of downstate Illinois, not the hard-edged cadence of Chicago’s west side. Her hands were rough from industrial detergents, her fingernails cut short and unpainted.
"What’s your name?" he asked.
"Clare," she said, her voice shaking despite her best effort to stabilize her chin. "Clare Bennett."
Nicholas’s jaw set slightly. He looked down at the tablet resting on the floorboards between them, then back up at her face.
"What room were you assigned to clean, Clare Bennett?"
Clare’s fingers twitched against her apron. "Forty-two seventeen. The corner executive suite at the end of the north wing. It was marked for check-out turndown at five o'clock."
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Nicholas tilted his head toward the door behind her, where the brass numbers were mounted on the exterior mahogany.
"This is forty-two twenty-seven," Nicholas said flatly. "The private residence wing. These rooms don't appear on the digital housekeeping roster. They haven't for four years."
