Chapter 2
Theo slept for fourteen hours.
No one woke him.
I sat beside his bed for the first two.
Then Rafe made me leave because a boss hovering over a sleeping toddler accomplishes nothing except making everyone else nervous.
Fair.
Leah waited in my study.
Hands shaking.
Sabine remained in another room under guard.
No phone.
No staff access.
No bell.
I asked Leah when it began.
“Three nights ago.”
Theo woke after midnight and went looking for water.
Leah was downstairs warming milk for him.
When she returned, his bed was empty.
She found him ten minutes later near the service stairs.
He was barefoot.
Standing beside the red door.
“Who was there?”
Leah swallowed.
“Sabine.”
Not enough.
“And?”
“A man.”
Name.
She hesitated.
“Julian Holt.”
Sabine’s older brother.
Forty-one.
A man who had supposedly left for Chicago two days before our mountain retreat.
He had not.
“Why was he using the lower floor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Theo hear anything?”
Leah nodded.
He heard Sabine say:
“Damian never checks the old room anymore.”
Then Julian:
“After the wedding, we won’t need permission.”
My jaw tightened.
Marriage.
Access.
Again.
Sabine discovered Theo behind them.
She did not shout.
Did not panic.
She walked him upstairs.
Then told Leah the boy had been sleepwalking.
After that came the first night without sleep.
Bell.
Cold cloth.
Lights.
Standing him up whenever he drifted.
Leah tried to stop it.
Sabine threatened to fire her.
Not enough to explain why Leah stayed silent.
“What else?”
Tears appeared.
“She said you’d think I was negligent because he wandered.”
There.
Fear.
Sabine made Leah believe telling me the truth would cost her position and perhaps access to Theo.
A nanny who loved the child enough to be manipulated through that love.
“Why didn’t you come to me anyway?”
Leah whispered:
“I should have.”
“Yes.”
No comfort.
But no cruelty either.
“You failed to tell me.”
She nodded.
“Sabine abused that failure.”
Another nod.
Both truths.
Then Leah remembered one more thing.
Theo had been holding something when she found him at the red door.
A small brass hotel tag.
Stamped with one number.
May you like
I knew exactly what Room 17 used to be.
My father’s private archive.
