Mia POV
Three days.
That is what it takes to learn a house. Not the rooms, the rooms are easy. What takes three days is learning the rhythms. The pulse. The way a place breathes differently at six AM than it does at midnight, and the way people move through it when they think no one is paying attention.
I pay attention to everything.
Day one: Elena. She wakes at five thirty. I hear her door down the hall, the specific sound of it, slightly sticky on the hinge. She does the third floor first, then the second, then the ground floor. She checks each room in the same order every morning without variation, which means she is a creature of habit, which means her schedule is a map I can read.
