Chapter 7

Chloe's POV

Marco left without looking back.

The door clicked shut. I sat there for a moment, her last words still in the air. Vincent Romano. Said carefully, like a name that required thought before it left your mouth.

I turned it over in my head. Romano. The syllables were familiar in a way that took me a second to place — not from a news article, not from anything recent. From a funding disclosure form in my mother's lab files. Romano Biotech Ventures, listed three consecutive years, contributions large enough to register but not large enough for me to stop and ask questions about.

I was reclassifying now.

Romano funded the lab. And the men who'd come through that motel door — the second wave, the ones with the coordinated entry and the clean operation — were his. The man who'd put his hand around my throat was his. That much tracked.

The first wave was the question.

The straightforward read was enemy action — someone who knew about the research, knew about the funding chain, and moved before Romano could lock it down. A competitor. A rival with good intelligence and no patience for waiting.

That version had a certain structural logic to it. But I didn't have enough to close out the other possibility. Organizations like this one didn't run clean. There were internal factions, competing interests, someone three levels down who'd decided to run a side operation and keep the upside for themselves.

Family businesses had a particular talent for that kind of fracture. I didn't know enough about what went on above the line items in my mother's grant paperwork to rule it out.

I kept both versions open and moved on.

The necklace.

My fingers found my throat on reflex and found nothing — just bare skin, the slight rawness where the chain used to sit. I pressed two fingertips against the spot and held them there for a second.

My mother had clasped it around my neck two hours before Route 66. There was something in it. Had to be.

I needed that necklace back — because it was the one thing that might actually tell me what my mother had been trying to do. Everything else — the layout of this building, the guard rotations, Romano's full name on a funding form — all of it was secondary to that one fact.

I lay back on top of the covers without getting under them, still in the gray tracksuit, and stared at the ceiling. Somewhere around the third item, the edges of my thinking started to soften.

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the smell of coffee.

I didn't move right away. I lay there with my eyes open, looking at the ceiling. The duvet had been pulled up over me at some point. I hadn't done that.

So. Someone had been in here while I was out.

The tray was on the nightstand — coffee, toast, a small dish of butter. Next to it, a clear plastic bag. Everything they'd taken last night, folded and stacked in neat layers. My phone on top, screen facing down.

I sat up and looked at the closed door for a second. I had always been particular about my space — who came into it, when, under what terms. Not a preference. A rule. One I'd kept consistent long before any of this. The fact that I'd known it wouldn't apply here didn't make waking up to the evidence of it any easier to swallow.

I reached for the bag.

Phone. Wallet. Earrings.

Then the necklace.

The obsidian rose sat quiet at the bottom of the bag, chain coiled into a small circle, the facets of the pendant catching the morning light. I lifted it out and set it in my palm, running my thumb along the micro-engraved lines of the petals.

Intact. No signs of being pried open. No marks.

I put it back on. The weight of the chain settled below my collarbone, and something in that patch of skin went back to feeling right.

Then I picked up the coffee.

Still hot. Fine grind, clean bitterness, no char. I drank it without putting it down. Whoever ran this place understood that keeping me functional was in their interest. The coffee was good and I was going to drink it, because I had work to do and I needed to think straight.

I finished the toast too. Thin layer of butter. When I was done I pushed the tray aside, stood up, walked to the door, and tried the handle.

Unlocked.

I held still for a second. Then I pushed it open.

The hallway was empty.

To the left was the direction the housekeeper had brought me up from last night, staircase at the far end. To the right was a corridor I hadn't walked yet — same cold white light, doors spaced every few feet, all of them shut.

I went right.

My steps were quiet without trying. The sweatpants were loose, made no sound on the floor. I counted the doors, counted the distances between them, counted the cameras at the corners of the hall — one mounted high on the left, angled back toward where I'd come from, covering roughly two-thirds of the corridor. The blind spot at the corner was about two steps wide.

I stopped inside it for a moment and fixed the position in my head.

At the end of the hall there was a larger door, slightly ajar. I pushed it open an inch and looked inside — a storage room. Shelves stocked with cleaning supplies and folded linens. No window. I pulled the door back to where it had been and turned around.

Downstairs.

Marble steps, iron railing. Twenty-two to the landing, fourteen more to the ground floor. The first-floor hallway was wider than the one above, better lit. Somewhere down one of the side corridors I could hear low voices and the clink of metal on metal. Kitchen.

I didn't go that way.

Directly across from the staircase was a set of glass double doors. Through them I could see a terrace, and beyond that, cliff edge and ocean. I walked over and pushed them open.

The sea air came in hard — salt and damp and cold. The terrace was wide, stone underfoot, low railing along the outer edge. Past the railing there was nothing but the drop: rock face straight down, surf breaking on the boulders below. No slope. No steps. Nothing to grab onto.

To the left the terrace opened onto a stretch of lawn. Two black SUVs were parked along the far edge of the grass. Beyond them, a metal fence. From the other side came a sound — low, heavy, too slow to be a dog. Something breathing. I looked in that direction and kept walking.

To the right, a gravel path curved around the side of the main building and disappeared behind the corner.

I stood at the railing for a while. Logged the camera positions, the entry points, the angles the SUVs were parked at. Then I turned around, went back inside, and let the glass doors close behind me.

When I came back into the first-floor hallway, there was a man standing in it.

The same one who'd been at Vincent's side last night — blond, blue-eyed, built wide through the shoulders, leaning against the wall beside one of the side doors with a mug in his hand. He saw me come in from the terrace. His eyes moved over me once. He didn't move.

I walked toward him and stopped two feet away.

He lowered the mug slightly and waited.

"What's your name?" I asked.