POV: Ava
The air inside the mill tasted of rust and something older and harder to name the particular flavor of a place where bad things had happened many times and the walls had absorbed every one of them. It sat on the back of my tongue like a coin, metallic and cold, and no amount of swallowing made it go away.
Vitelli stood in the center of the work light's circle with the ease of a man who had arranged the room exactly to his preferences and found the result satisfactory. His shadow stretched behind him across the oil-stained floor in a long, dark shape that reached almost to the wall. He looked from me to Leo and back again with the unhurried, theatrical patience of a man who owned every remaining second of the night and knew it, who had nowhere else to be and no other outcome to consider and was, in some deep and terrible way, enjoying himself.
