Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Nine — The Room With the Lock

The room they gave her was on the second floor, at the corner, with two windows that looked out over the front lawns and one that looked out at the black face of the mountain.

It had a bed with four posts and a quilt the color of oatmeal, a fireplace with a fire already lit and crackling, a small desk, a chair, and a bathroom through a door to the left. It had a rug that was genuinely old, and a mirror on the wall, and a lock on the door — a good one, brass, solid, with a key on a ring sitting on the nightstand.

The room was, Maren thought, quite possibly the nicest place she had ever been alone in. And that was — she realized, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her satchel in her lap and her wet dress pooling cold around her knees — a genuinely disturbing thing to realize at twenty-four years old.

She had grown up in a house worth nine million dollars. She had grown up with a library. But she had never once been given a room that somebody had chosen for her, with a fire laid and a key on the nightstand, in a house where the door locked.

Prisoners don’t get keys, she thought. That’s either very good or it’s the kind of thing a clever man does to make a girl think the door isn’t locked.

She decided, after a while, that it didn’t matter. She got up. She went into the bathroom, and ran a bath so hot it turned her skin pink, and she sat in it for a long time with her knees up and her hands around them, watching the steam climb and thinking about eleven minutes in a hallway with the door open three inches.

Then she got out, and dressed in the clean clothes somebody had left folded on the bathroom chair — she had not heard anyone come in, which was its own piece of information — plain trousers and a soft gray sweater that fit. She did not look at the mirror. She had a rule about that, and the rule was that she was allowed to look at mirrors in the morning when she was putting her hair back, and not at night, because at night the left side of her face looked worse and she could not afford to be a person who was sad about her face. Not tonight.

She went down to the east room, where there was a table set for two.

Dinner was a simple thing — roast chicken, bread, a salad with vinegar sharp enough to make her eyes water, and a pitcher of cold water. Lucian Vescari ate without ceremony, asked her three questions about accounting, listened to the answers, and then, near the end, put his fork down and said:

“Your father’s firewall. How long did it take you?”

“Nine days.”

“And the encryption rotation?”

“I designed it when I was nineteen. I had to. He kept losing files.” Maren turned her water glass a quarter turn. “The recursion pattern was the hard part. It’s not really about security, if you want to know the truth. It’s about ambiguity. A lock that hides an entry makes people assume there’s nothing there. A lock that makes the entry look like an error makes people assume the system’s broken, and they stop looking.”

Lucian looked at her for a long moment.

“You built a lock whose only purpose was to teach the person opening it that they were wasting their time,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s why it took five weeks.” He sat back and something moved at the corner of his mouth that on another man might have been a smile. “My tech team is now professionally embarrassed. I would like you to understand that this is a gift I will be enjoying for some time.”

Maren surprised herself by laughing — a single, short, startled sound, out of a body that had forgotten how.

It was, she realized later, the first time she had laughed in that house. Which was a strange way to think about it, because she had only been there three hours.

She did not sleep well. Two in the morning found her at the window, the oats-colored quilt around her shoulders, looking down at the fountain running in the dark. She had not locked the door. She had stood at it for a full minute with the key in her hand and had decided, deliberately, not to — and had noticed, in deciding, that this was the first decision she had made for herself in a very long time that did not have a price attached to it. No one was watching. No one was keeping score. Whatever happened at eight in the morning, tonight there was a fire, and a key on the nightstand, and a plate of chicken with vinegar on the salad, and no one had looked at the left side of her face once at dinner.

At four she finally slept, and dreamt of a windshield.

At seven the door opened — a soft knock first, then a woman’s voice — and Maren woke with the dream still in her mouth, and found a tray on the dresser and a dark-haired woman in a gray uniform standing at the foot of the bed with her hands folded, looking apologetic.

“The master asked me to say the car leaves at seven-forty,” the woman said. “And to ask if you’d like anything pressed. He said to tell you it doesn’t have to be the green thing.”

Maren sat up, squinting without her glasses, and made out the woman’s face — middle-aged, tired around the eyes, decent.

“Who are you?”

“Ines. I run the house.” She hesitated. “I’ve run this house for eleven years.”

“Then you know him,” Maren said. “Better than I do.”

Ines’s face did something careful and closed.

“Miss,” she said, “I know he paid for my daughter’s surgery and did not make a speech about it and has never once mentioned it. That’s what I know.” She picked up a pair of shoes from beside the door and set them down inside it. “Coffee’s on the tray. There’s a suit in the closet; he had somebody measure it off your— off your things. I’d wear it if I were you.”

“Off my things?” Maren said. “My things are a toothbrush and an old satchel.”

“Ines,” said Ines, “that’s exactly what I told him. And he said, then she’s a size four and she’s got shoulders like a dancer and I need it by morning.” She shrugged. “So there’s a suit in the closet.”

And she went out and closed the door.

Maren sat in the bed with the quilt up to her chin and looked at the closet door, and then at the tray, and then at the windows, where the mountain was coming gray-green out of the fog, and thought — with a clarity that startled her — the man read my shoulder width off a dress he described as the worst thing he’s ever seen, and then ordered a suit before dawn, and he was right.

She got up. She showered. She braided her hair back, hard, so the left side of her face was fully exposed — the way she never wore it, the way it would be at eight a.m. in a boardroom full of men who had been told what to expect.

Then she opened the closet.