Chapter 2

The blinking red light was steady, patient, indifferent. It had been there the whole time, a small mechanical eye tucked into the corner where the wall met the ceiling, positioned to see everything and judge nothing. Clara had noticed it when she first entered the suite — a detail she had filed away with the armchair's upholstery and the folded silk runner on the table and the bathroom's faint cyan glow leaking through the cracked door. It had meant nothing to her then. It had meant nothing at all.

Now it meant everything.

"Julian." Clara kept her voice low, controlled. She did not look away from the camera. "Call security."

"What?" Julian's head snapped toward her. "Clara, you need a doctor. Your head is bleeding. We need—"

"Call security." She said it again, harder this time, and she heard the change in her own voice, the steel that had been buried under shock and pain surfacing like something that had been waiting to be found. "Ask them to pull the feed from this room."

The words landed. Vivienne's tears stopped.

It was subtle — a hitch in the rhythm of her sobbing, a freeze in the practiced tremble of her shoulders. The blonde woman's gaze flicked upward, following Clara's, and for one terrible moment the two women looked at the same small mechanical eye.

The red light blinked.

Vivienne's face went through a series of changes that Clara catalogued with a strange detachment: first confusion, then calculation, then the first thin crack of something that might have been fear. She recovered quickly — Clara would give her that. The practice showed in how fast the performance snapped back into place.

"I don't think that's necessary." Vivienne's voice was iced over now, the tears receding like a tide pulled back by a stronger force. "This is a private matter between us. Julian, surely you understand—"

"Understand what?" Julian's voice had sharpened. He had seen the flicker, the pause, the wrongness of a woman who had been sobbing a moment ago and was now speaking in the clipped tones of a boardroom negotiation. "You just told me she attacked you. If that's what happened, then the camera will show it."