Chapter Forty-One
Leona
“Hello?”
My voice comes out steady, which feels like a lie my body is telling for me.
The surveillance room hums around me, screens washing the walls in shifting light.
Tree line. Driveway. Outer fence. Thermal overlays.
Dead angles that apparently aren’t dead at all.
The whole house has a nervous system, and I’m standing in its center with my phone pressed to my ear while Marius stands a few feet away, still as stone, and Willem watches the monitors like he can force them to confess if he stares hard enough.
“Hi, Leona.”
Nora’s voice slides through the line warm and familiar, and the familiarity is what makes it feel obscene.
I don’t answer right away. I let the silence stretch, my fingers tightening around the phone as I listen, not only to what she says, but to what sits under it now that I know enough to hear the difference.
“Hi,” I say finally.
“You sound better.”
It isn’t concern.
It is assessment.
I lean back against the edge of the console behind me, grounding myself in something solid while my pulse ticks higher.
“Do I.”
A quiet hum comes through the line.
“Yeah. You do. Stronger too.”
The way she says it makes my skin tighten. Not like a friend checking in. Like someone comparing a subject to the last set of notes.
“I was wondering when that would happen,” she adds.
My brow pulls faintly.
“When what would happen.”
“Recovery,” Nora says simply. “You’ve always been quick about that.”
Something in my chest tightens.
Not because of the words.
Because of the confidence in them.
The screens keep flickering around me. Gravel drive.
Lower hall. Rear service corridor. The far greenhouse camera.
Everything watched, everything fed back into this room in neat little rectangles of false control.
Marius hasn’t moved. Willem hasn’t either.
But I can feel both of them listening now, fully, the air in the room drawn thinner around my end of the call.
“Why are you calling me, Nora.”
A pause follows.
Measured.
“I think you’re finally starting to understand what you’re in,” she says.
My stomach turns.
“I don’t think I am.”
“I think you do,” she replies softly. “You just haven’t said it out loud yet.”
My grip tightens around the phone.
“Said what.”
“That none of this was random.”
The words land clean.
I flick my eyes up, only once, to Marius. He is watching me now, not the screens, not Willem, not anything except my face. Then I look away again.
“If you have something to say, say it.”
Another pause.
Then—
“The shipment.”
I go still.
“What about it.”
“I moved it through your land.”
No apology.
No buildup.
Just fact.
My breath catches sharp enough that I hear it in the phone. My fingers tighten painfully.
“Why.”
“Because it would get noticed,” Nora says. “And because if the right man noticed it, the line would bend exactly where I needed it to.”
My chest tightens.
“You knew he would come.”
“Yes.”
The word comes easily. Like it had always been true. Like she has never once considered pretending otherwise.
I look at Marius again, longer this time. Not because I want to. Because I have to. He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t move. But something in him has gone so still it feels dangerous.
“So you put me in his path.”
“I put the path under your feet,” Nora says. “He still had to choose to follow it.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“Not exactly.”
My jaw tightens hard enough to ache.
I can hear Willem moving now, not much, just enough to know his hands are on the console, fingers shifting over keys while he listens. A few screens blink and repopulate. Camera IDs. Route maps. Timestamp boxes. The whole room feels like it’s listening with us.
“You want to know why you,” Nora says, and there is something almost thoughtful in her voice now, as if she has decided I’ve earned the answer.
I say nothing.
She takes my silence as permission.
“You were close enough to the route to make it believable. Alone enough that no one would ask the right questions fast enough. Stubborn enough to survive the first push. And you were exactly the sort of woman he’d notice once he stepped onto your land.”
My stomach drops.
I don’t breathe.
“You weren’t random, Leona,” she says. “You were useful.”
Something in the room seems to pull tighter around me.
Marius shifts then, almost imperceptibly, but enough that I feel it. Not toward me. Toward the call itself. Toward Nora, even though she is nowhere in the room and somehow everywhere in it now.
“You profiled me,” I say.
“Of course I did.”
The answer comes so cleanly it makes my throat close.
“You built this around me.”
“No,” Nora says. “Around him. You were the only way to make him step where he wasn’t supposed to.”
The words hit harder than I expect.
Not because I didn’t already know some version of them.
Because she makes it sound so deliberate. So patient. So old.
“And once he did,” she continues, “everything else became possible.”
The room feels smaller. The screens brighter. My pulse is too loud in my ears now.
“What does that mean.”
“It means you stopped being incidental the second he chose not to walk away.”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
The tree line feed flickers on the far wall. Another camera rolls to a different angle on its own. Willem’s head lifts, just slightly. He sees it too.
Nora keeps speaking.
“It means the shipment wasn’t just bait. It was the opening move. It means your farm wasn’t the point. It was the hinge. It means the second he came back, you became part of the structure.”
“I didn’t choose that.”
“No,” she says. “You didn’t.”
A beat.
“But whether you choose something has never mattered as much as what you can be used for.”
My free hand curls against the edge of the console until my knuckles ache.
The screens keep shifting around us. One of the perimeter feeds skips for half a second and comes back under a different overlay. Willem goes still in a way that is worse than movement. Marius notices. I see it out of the corner of my eye. He notices everything.
My gaze drifts, unwillingly, to the far door. To where Daan stood. To the stubble on his jaw. To the way my body recoiled before my mind had words for it.
“And Daan?” I ask.
My voice is quieter now.
That seems to please her more than anything else so far.
There is a pause.
Longer this time.
Then Nora says,
“You noticed him.”
My stomach drops so hard it feels like falling.
My grip tightens.
“What.”
“The way you went still,” she says. “The way your breathing changed. The way you couldn’t look away, and then couldn’t make yourself keep looking either.”
A rush of cold moves through me so fast my vision blurs for a second.
I haven’t said anything.
I haven’t told her any of that.
“How would you know that.”
Nora lets out a soft breath that is almost amused.
“Because you’re not the only one being watched.”
The words hit like ice water.
My head lifts slowly. Not to the door this time. To the screens.
Every angle.
Every hall.
Every room.
Every camera I thought belonged to them.
Willem is already moving now, faster, pulling up system windows, cycling channels, tracing something across the console with a speed that says he has stopped pretending this is only a call. Marius hasn’t moved at all. He is all focus now, the kind that feels lethal because it is too still.
“You’re in the system,” I say.
It isn’t a question.
Nora doesn’t answer it directly, which is answer enough.
“You really thought walls and cameras and armed men meant control?” she asks. “I’ve been inside this house longer than you have.”
One of the feeds changes.
No warning.
No command from Willem.
The rear service corridor vanishes and is replaced by a static-laced black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper corner.
Willem goes colder.
“She’s in the system.”
Nora continues as if she can hear him.
Maybe she can.
“You didn’t see Daan’s face before,” she says. “But your body recognized enough.”
My breath breaks.
Sharp.
My fingers shake around the phone.
Then she says it.
“He’s the one who took you.”
Everything in me locks.
Not confusion.
Not even fear at first.
Just absolute stillness, like my body stops in place because there is nowhere for that truth to go.
“No,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
Simple.
Unmoved.
“That wasn’t supposed to go as far as it did,” she adds.
Something hot and sick rises in me so fast I nearly choke on it.
That doesn’t help.
It doesn’t soften anything.
It doesn’t change what happened.
My free hand grips the edge of the console hard enough to hurt.
“You let him,” I say, and my voice breaks on the shape of it.
“No,” Nora says. “He went further than he was supposed to.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
Silence slams through the room.
Heavy.
Unforgiving.
Marius hasn’t said a word.
That frightens me more than if he had.
“But it told us what we needed to know,” Nora says.
My stomach drops again.
“What.”
“That he would come back for you.”
My gaze snaps to Marius.
“That he wouldn’t hesitate.”
My chest tightens so painfully I can barely breathe.
“That he’d choose you.”
The words echo.
Not in the room.
In me.
“And he did,” Nora says.
I can’t feel my fingers anymore.
“And now,” she continues, her voice colder now, stripped of everything familiar, “you matter more than you were ever supposed to.”
The static-laced screen on the wall clears for half a second.
A new feed appears.
Not the tree line.
Not the drive.
The surveillance room.
Us.
Live.
From an angle that should not exist.
I see my own back on the monitor. Marius a few feet away. Willem at the console. The phone at my ear. The whole room caught from high in the corner as if the house itself has grown another eye without telling anyone.
My breath stops.
Willem swears under his breath and moves faster. Windows snap open. Diagnostics. Route maps. Hidden channels. But the feed stays there.
Watching us.
“You were the first domino,” Nora says, as if nothing on the screen has changed anything for her. “The point where his world started to bend. And now you’re the center of it.”
Movement sounds on her end of the line.
A shift.
Fabric.
Then another voice.
Low.
Male.
Unmistakable.
“Time.”
Daan.
The sound of him on her end of the line empties something inside me.
Not because it surprises me.
Because it confirms exactly how large this has always been.
Nora exhales softly.
“I’ll talk to you again soon,” she says.
The line goes dead.
I don’t move.
I don’t lower the phone right away.
The room hums around me, all those screens, all those feeds, and none of them feel like protection anymore. Only exposure. Only proof. My hand trembles once before I force it still.
No one speaks.
They don’t need to.
Willem is already inside the system as far as he can get, tracing the breach, isolating feeds, trying to find where she is buried in it.
Marius remains motionless, and I know without looking that whatever is on his face now is worse than anger.
Worse than shock. It is the kind of silence that comes right before something turns irreversible.
I lower the phone slowly and look up at the impossible feed again.
At us.
At the room we are standing in.
At the fact that Nora did not just watch this house. She got inside the thing that made it feel safe in the first place.
And that means the walls never held.
Not really.
The feed crackles.
Then changes.
The surveillance room vanishes.
My farm appears in its place.
The barn.
The side drive.
The kitchen window.
Then another image.
The patch of ground where Marius first stepped onto my land.
Then another.
The narrow place where I was taken.
Then another.
My bedroom at home.
Empty.
Waiting.
The images cycle one after another, too fast and too deliberate to be random, as if the system itself is spelling something out in pieces my body understands faster than my mind does.
This was always built around me.
Or around what I could be used to make happen.
Willem’s hands stop moving for half a second.
“That’s not archive footage,” he says quietly.
I turn toward him.
Marius does too.
Willem’s face has gone hard in a way I have never seen before.
“That’s live.”
The room goes dead still.
I stare at the feed showing my bedroom window, curtains half drawn, morning light sliding over the sill.
Live.
My house.
Now.
A shape moves across the edge of the frame.
Not enough to identify.
Enough to prove presence.
Enough to prove someone is there.
A second later, all the screens in the room blink black at once.
Then one line of white text appears across the center monitor.
COME HOME, LEONA.
Nobody in the room breathes.
And for the first time since this started, I understand the truth in its full, terrible shape. Nora did not just set the path between me and Marius. She built a game around whether he would keep me. And now she wants to see what I will do if I am made to choose who gets to.