DANTE POV
The guard's report takes eleven seconds to deliver.
"She was in the library, sir. Four hours. Reading."
Dante says nothing. He sets down his pen. He looks at the camera feed from the library the one already pulled up on his screen, the one he told himself he opened for routine review and not for any other reason.
She is gone now. Back in her room. But the timestamp is there. Four hours, twelve minutes.
He rewinds.
He watches her sit. Watches her pick up a book. Watches her move her chair casually, toward the window, better light, nothing unusual and then he watches her eyes.
He has looked at a lot of people in his life. He has looked at men trying to lie to him across tables, at lawyers constructing careful non-answers, at his own brother rearranging his face to hide things. He knows what a person looks like when they are thinking about something they don't want you to know they're thinking about.
Mia Cole is not reading that book.
