1
LUCIA
The metal of the USB drive bites into my palm, a jagged little shard of hope in a house built on lies.
I jam it into the port on Dominic’s laptop, the mahogany desk humming beneath it with a low, mechanical throatiness. My heart is a frantic bird trapped in a cage of ribs, hammering against my lungs.
Outside the heavy oak door, the rhythmicthud-thud-thudof Enrique’s boots vibrates through the marble floorboards of the corridor. Ten seconds. Maybe twelve. He’s my brother’s most loyal hound, a man who smells like cheap whiskey and cheaper loyalty. He’d kill me for even breathing on this computer, let alone stripping its secrets.
The progress bar on the screen crawls with agonizing indifference. Ten percent. Twenty.
This drive is everything. Five years of playing the “quiet sister,” the “mafia princess” who stays in her wing and asks for nothing. Five years of tracking shell companies, offshore routing numbers, and the digital paper trail of the millions Dominicstole from my inheritance. It’s my escape. It’s Tyra’s future. Without it, we’re just pretty ornaments in a tomb of gold leaf and blood.
What Dominic never calculated: the sidelined sister has twelve years of invisible classroom hours behind her. Every IT contractor who passed through this compound, I watched. Every network configuration meeting I was excluded from, I listened through walls. I learned encryption from a manual I ordered under a shell account, delivered inside a shipment of Tyra’s art supplies. I built the extraction script in forty-minute windows between Dominic’s scheduled check-ins, on a burner laptop I sourced through three separate grocery delivery accounts over eight months. He gave me margins and silence and the assumption that quiet means contained. He gave me exactly what I needed.
Sixty percent.
The footsteps stop. The brass handle jiggles. I go bone-still, my breath hitching in the back of my throat. I can almost feel Enrique’s stare through the wood, that predatory instinct he has for weakness.
“Lucia?” His voice is a gravelly rasp. “Your brother is looking for you.”
“I’m looking for a book, Enrique,” I call out, my voice a cool ribbon of bored silk. I don’t let the tremor in my knees reach my throat. “Unless Dominic wants me to read him a bedtime story, he can wait five minutes.”
A pause. A heartbeat where the world stands still.
Click.
Transfer complete. I yank the drive, shoving it deep into the lace of my bra where the metal stings my skin, a cold brand against my breast. I grab a random leather-bound ledger from the shelf just as the door groans open.
My phone buzzes against my thigh. A text from three hours ago, finally punched through the compound’s VPN blocker.
STEPH:
r u serious about tonight
I type back with one thumb while my pulse is still hammering.
LUCIA:
Already done. Don’t wait up.
I silence the phone. Enrique stands there, his shadow long and suffocating across the Persian rug. He scans the room, his eyes lingering on the laptop screen I just dimmed.
“Get to your room,” he grunts. “He’s in a mood.”
“When is he not?” I brush past him, the scent of him making my stomach turn.
I move through the foyer, past the statues and the priceless art that feels like headstones. I usually retreat to my apartment in the East Wing, but the adrenaline is a live wire in my veins. I duck into my formal suite—the gilded cage Dominic keeps me in when he wants me close—and throw the deadbolt.
The compound smells like marble cleaner and forced silence. It always has.
Enrique runs the cleaning crew on a schedule tight enough to make the floors echo—every surface stripped of evidence that people live here, breathe here, break apart here. Sound carriessix rooms in every direction. Privacy is architectural fiction. I learned early that the safest conversations happen inside my own head, in the half-second windows between footfall and arrival, in the space between the click of a door and the turn of a handle.
The compound does not feel like a home. It feels like a museum where the exhibits are not allowed to move.
My skin is humming, vibrating with a frantic energy I have nowhere to put. It’s a familiar, hollow ache. The kind that comes from years of being a bird in a cage, watching the world through gold bars.
I need to come down. I need to feel something that isn’t fear.