The morning had brought no sign of Allen Van.
His absence was a heavy, cold vacuum that filled the mansion.
According to the silent staff, he had left before dawn for a series of high-stakes negotiations in the city.
For Eva, his absence was both a relief and a new kind of terror.
Without his shadow looming over her, the mansion felt even larger, a labyrinth of marble and glass that she was now free to wander—within the limits of her "cage."
She spent the afternoon hovering through the halls.
The scale of the place was staggering.
There were sitting rooms she would never sit in, a dining hall that felt like a cathedral,
and an office wing where the air felt thick with the secrets of a hundred broken companies.
Everywhere she went, the guards stood like statues.
They didn't block her path, but their eyes followed her, their silence a constant reminder that she was being monitored.
She found the library—a massive, two-story room filled with leather-bound books and the scent of old paper.
It was the only place that felt remotely human, yet even here, the books were organized with a clinical, military precision.
There were no novels of romance or adventure; there were only biographies of conquerors, technical manuals, and leather-bound law books.
By late afternoon, the sun began to dip behind the jagged mountain peaks, casting long, bruised shadows across the estate.
Eva found herself back on the second floor, near her own wing.
Two doors down from her room, there was a heavy set of double doors made of dark, polished mahogany.
Unlike the other rooms, these doors had no handles on the outside—only a sleek,
silver electronic keypad that glowed with a faint, steady red light.
This was the restricted zone.
The place Mrs. Halloway had warned her about.
The place Allen had forbidden her to enter.
His private study.
Eva stood before the doors, her heart thumping a frantic rhythm against her ribs. In her father's house,
curiosity was punished with a slap or a week of extra labor.
Here, she didn't know what the punishment would be.
But the need to know who Allen Van really was—beyond the expensive suits and the cold commands—was a fire in her blood.
She looked at the keypad.
The red light seemed to pulse like a heartbeat.
She reached out, her fingers trembling, and pressed a random sequence of numbers.
To her shock, the light didn't turn green, but the heavy magnetic lock gave a soft, mechanical thunk.
The door hadn't been fully engaged. Perhaps a servant had been cleaning, or perhaps Allen,
in his haste to leave, had failed to check the seal.
She pushed. The door swung open on silent hinges.
The room was vast and draped in the dying amber light of the evening. It smelled of expensive tobacco, aged Scotch,
and the cold ozone of high-end electronics.
The walls were lined with monitors displaying flickering stock tickers and security feeds from around the world.
In the center of the room sat a desk the size of a small car, carved from a single slab of black stone.
It was a dangerous room.
It felt like the cockpit of a war machine.
Eva walked toward the desk, her footsteps muffled by the thick, charcoal-colored carpet.
She saw stacks of files—some with her father's name on them, others with names she didn't recognize.
She saw a small, silver framed photograph on the corner of the desk. She reached out to turn it, her breath hitching in her throat.
Suddenly, the room went ice-cold.
The heavy doors behind her didn't just close; they slammed shut with a force that shook the floorboards.
The amber light of the sunset was abruptly cut off as the automatic black-out
shades hissed down over the windows,
plunging the room into a terrifying,
artificial twilight.
"I believe I gave you a very specific set of instructions regarding this room."
The voice didn't come from a speaker. It came from the shadows behind the desk.
Allen Van stepped out of the darkness.
He wasn't wearing his suit jacket; his white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, his sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms like corded steel.
He didn't look like a businessman anymore.
He looked like a predator that had just found a thief in his den.
His face was a mask of pure, unadulterated fury.
His eyes were no longer grey; they were a flat, murderous black.
"What are you doing here "
"Did you think the rules were a suggestion, Eva?"
he asked, his voice a low, dangerous growl that made the hair on her arms stand up.
Eva stepped back, her heel catching on the edge of the carpet. "The door... it was open.
I just—"
Allen interrupted, walking around the desk with a slow, deliberate pace. He didn't rush.
He didn't need to.
He had her cornered against the wall of monitors.
He stopped just inches from her.
The heat radiating from his body was a physical weight,
suffocating and intense.
He reached out, his hand slamming against the wall beside her head with a sound like a gunshot.
"This is not your father's house," he hissed,
his face so close to hers she could feel the jagged edge of his breath.
"In this room, I decide who lives and who is erased.
You are not a guest here. You are a debt. And debts do not wander into the master's private chambers."
Eva looked up at him, her eyes wide with terror, but she saw something else in his gaze—a cold, calculated cruelty that went deeper than anything she had ever seen in her father.
"Get out," Allen scream ,
the words sounding like a death sentence. "Go to your room. Eva was scared
Lock the door. And pray that I decide you are still useful enough to see tomorrow's sunrise.
If I ever find you in this wing again, the 'cage' will be the least of your worries."