Chapter 4

The villa was quiet when they entered, the way large houses sometimes are—full of space and light and the particular resonance of rooms that have been empty for a while. The staff moved through it like ghosts, appearing at edges to take coats, to offer refreshment, to open doors. They didn't look at Selene. They didn't look at Rais. They looked at points in the middle distance, and Selene wondered if this was the same blindness that had descended on the attendants in the cabin, the particular etiquette required by a household where the master's moods were a form of weather.

Rais led her through the entrance hall, past the marble floors and the high ceilings and the enormous painting of the desert that dominated the far wall. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The house seemed to anticipate his movements, doors opening ahead of him, the corridor lighting flickering to a softer dim as they passed.

They came to a set of double doors at the end of the hall. He pushed them open, and Selene stepped into a room she'd never been allowed to enter before.

It was a study. Not the formal one that she'd seen in the photographs, all polished mahogany and leather-bound books and the polite fiction of a man who read for pleasure. This was a smaller, more private room, with a desk that was actually messy, papers stacked in uneven piles, a laptop open to a screen of spreadsheets, and, in the corner, a low leather chair beside a window that overlooked the gardens.

And on the wall above the desk, in a simple black frame, there was a photograph.

Selene walked toward it without meaning to. It was a picture of the store where she'd worked—the small, chain-lighting outlet in the mid-size city that had felt so ordinary before she'd met him. The glass front, the sign, the racks of bulbs and lamps visible through the window.

"What—" She turned to look at him. "Why do you have this?"

Rais was standing in the doorway, his hands at his sides, his face unreadable. "Because it's where I found you."

"But it's—" She couldn't process it. The frame was polished—it had been kept, cared for. This wasn't a forgotten artifact. This was a memorial. "You took a photograph of the store."

"Yes."

"And put it in your study."