Chapter Six
Isolde
By eleven, the storm had become loud enough to change the shape of Northglass.
The wind that had pressed against the windows during dinner now came hard off the Atlantic in sustained bursts, rattling rain against the eastern glass and driving water across the terraces in silver sheets whenever the exterior lights caught it.
From her bedroom, Isolde could barely distinguish the gardens she had spent the day memorizing.
Trees bent toward the house and snapped upright again between gusts, shrubs flattened along the lower paths, and the sea beyond the cliffs had disappeared almost entirely into darkness except when white water broke high against the rocks.
Twice, the lights flickered without failing, followed a few seconds later by the subtle mechanical transition of systems somewhere inside the house adjusting to the disturbance.
Northglass had been designed to endure coastal storms, but even a house built around control had to acknowledge weather eventually.
Isolde stood beside the window fully dressed.
She had changed out of the cream sweater she'd worn since the abduction, not because she had softened toward the clothes someone had purchased for her but because walking several miles through cold rain in damp wool and yesterday's ankle boots would have been an act of spite directed almost exclusively at herself.
She chose dark trousers, the plainest black sweater in the closet, a lightweight waterproof jacket, and the flat leather boots that resembled her own closely enough to remain irritating.
She carried no bag, no jewelry, and nothing that could catch on branches, and the full extent of her preparation amounted to a folded hand towel tucked into one pocket because there had been no sensible way to steal a flashlight without explaining why she needed one.
It was hardly the equipment of an accomplished escape artist, but she wasn't trying to disappear into the wilderness.
She needed a road, another house, a gas station, a person, anything beyond Bellandi control that gave her access to a phone and the ordinary world.
Northglass had been perhaps twenty minutes by car from the outer residential edge of Crownport, although the route had twisted enough that Isolde couldn't translate that cleanly into walking distance.
She didn't need to reach her apartment that night.
She needed only to reach somewhere that wasn't governed by Taddeo's rules.
Once she had a phone, she could call police, Linnea, the museum, anyone whose life had not already been absorbed into the logic of this place.
If she stayed and waited for Taddeo to decide when she was permitted to contact her own life, she would eventually become accustomed to waiting for permission, and that possibility frightened her more than the storm.
She watched from the window until the security vehicle made another circuit along the lower drive, its headlights appearing beyond the rain before moving slowly between the trees and vanishing toward the north side of the property.
She checked the bedside clock, then kept watching until it reappeared nearly eleven minutes later.
The timing had been consistent across four circuits.
She waited through one more pass, then another, using the repetition to calm her breathing and force herself to think beyond the adrenaline already building in her chest.
At eleven thirty-eight, she left the room.
The upper hallway was empty and dim, reduced to lamps along the walls and recessed lighting near the stairs, and the storm filled the quiet spaces with enough sound to cover careful movement.
Wind pushed around the stone corners of the house, rain beat against windows, pipes shifted behind walls, and somewhere below a door settled hard against its frame.
Even with all of that, her own breathing seemed too loud.
She crossed into the eastern corridor rather than taking the main staircase and slipped down the narrow service stairs she had found the first morning.
At the bottom, the passage opened near the kitchen before continuing toward the service wing.
Isolde stopped when a man moved through the room ahead of her.
Nico crossed with a rain jacket hanging open over his shirt, coffee in one hand and his phone in the other, water darkening the hair at his temples and soaking the cuffs of his trousers.
He set the mug near the sink, typed something quickly, then muttered under his breath when the lights flickered again.
Isolde remained in the shadow beside a linen closet until he picked up the coffee and continued toward the main hall.
She counted slowly after his footsteps faded, then moved through the western corridor toward the exterior door she'd been studying all afternoon.
It opened from inside by emergency release even though entry required a code, a detail she'd learned by watching one of the gardeners use it several hours earlier.
She pressed the release bar and barely kept hold of the door when the wind caught it.
Cold rain struck her face immediately. The world outside had become a blur of wet stone, moving branches, reflected security lights, and black ground, and for a moment the difference between planning an escape inside a warm bedroom and standing in the storm itself became painfully clear.
Water streamed from the edge of the overhang, and the wind was strong enough that she had to brace herself before stepping away from the building.
She could still go back. No one knew she had left the bedroom.
She could return upstairs, peel off the borrowed clothes, get into bed, and spend the next day pretending none of this had happened.
Instead, she zipped the jacket to her throat and stepped into the rain.
Within seconds, water ran down the back of her neck and plastered loose strands of hair to her cheek.
She stayed close to the wall until the service path curved behind dense landscaping, then crossed toward the blind spot she'd identified earlier.
The overgrown branches that had partly obscured the exterior camera during daylight whipped violently across its field of view now, and rain refracted the security light into a shifting curtain that made distance difficult to judge.
Isolde crouched beneath the worst of the branches, one hand braced against wet stone, then moved through the compromised angle before the wind shifted again.
She followed the hedge toward the lower garden, cutting north before reaching the open lawn where patrols had the clearest sightlines.
Mud sucked at the soles of her boots, and twice she had to slow because the wind became strong enough to throw off her balance.
She had imagined fear while planning the escape, but she hadn't expected the sharp exhilaration that came with putting distance between herself and the room chosen for her.
Every yard separated her from Taddeo's rules, from his locked estate, from the strange domestic ease of dinner only hours earlier.
She had sat across from him and explained conservation while he poured wine into her glass, and some part of her had responded to the fact that he listened.
None of that erased Mercer Street. Neither did the scars on his forearms, the restraint in his voice, or the moments when he almost seemed like a man she might have wanted to understand under different circumstances.
Wanting to understand someone did not require remaining their prisoner.
She reached the north garden path before the patrol vehicle returned.
Its headlights swept briefly through the trees behind her, and Isolde stepped off the path into the landscaping, forcing herself deeper between wet branches until leaves and darkness covered her from the direction of the drive.
The vehicle passed perhaps forty yards away, tires hissing over the pavement, and she waited until the engine noise receded before moving again.
The manicured gardens gradually gave way to rougher estate land.
Stone paths narrowed into gravel and then mud, decorative lighting disappeared, and the trees grew closer together, mostly pine and oak, their upper branches thrashing while the ground beneath them stayed slightly more protected from the rain.
Isolde had no way to know exactly where the property boundary stood, so she kept moving in the direction that felt consistent with the outer gate and refused to think about how far she might still have to go.
Ten minutes became fifteen. Her trousers were soaked from the knees down, cold water had found its way inside one boot, and the storm muffled everything beyond the immediate woods until she could hear only wind, rain, and the increasingly rough rhythm of her own breathing.
Then lights appeared between two trees ahead of her, yellow and intermittent, and she stopped so abruptly that one hand went against the trunk beside her.
A car passed beyond the trees.
A road.
Not the estate drive.
The sight of it drove a hard pulse of relief through her chest. She didn't know whether the road was a quarter mile away or closer, whether another fence stood between her and it, or whether the land ahead still belonged to Northglass.
None of that mattered yet. Someone had driven there.
Someone existed outside this place. For the first time since Taddeo's men blocked her car on Mercer Street, freedom was not an idea tied to a future decision made by somebody else. It was visible through the trees.
Isolde started toward it.
A light swept across the ground behind her, followed a moment later by the low sound of an engine beneath the storm. She moved faster, pushing through branches that caught against her jacket while the road lights ahead disappeared behind a rise.
“Isolde.”