For One Hundred Seven Nights, He Stopped Outside Her Door and Said Nothing

"Raphael Orsini came through the secondary-kitchen door hard enough to split the old latch from the frame.

The door struck the plaster wall. A copper pan jumped on its hook. Elena Marlowe had time to see wet black wool, a white shirt buttoned wrong, and blood shining on a man’s lower lip before he slammed two objects onto the scarred oak table: a black smartphone and the gold ring he never removed in public.

A glass vial slipped from his coat, rolled between them, and stopped against Elena’s open nursing textbook.

The phone screen lit his gray face from below.

FIND HIM BEFORE DAWN.

“Don’t call security,” Raphael said. His voice was loud enough to carry over the thunder, but there was discipline inside it, a man gripping the words with both hands. “The man who poisoned me commands them.”

His knees folded.

Elena reached him before his head struck the table.

She was barefoot, her faded lavender robe loose over a cream nightgown, and the kitchen tile was cold enough that she felt it through the panic. Raphael was heavier than he looked from across a dining room. His shoulder drove into her chest. She caught the back of his shirt, smelled rain and whiskey and something medicinal beneath both, and lowered him badly rather than letting him fall well.

The phone vibrated against the oak.

Once.

Twice.

Again.

Outside the kitchen, a flashlight beam cut beneath the door and crossed the floor in a clean white blade.

Elena pressed two fingers against Raphael’s neck. His pulse was fast, then strangely uneven. His pupils were not the same size. His skin was cool from the rain, but sweat had gathered at his temples.

“How long before they find you?” she whispered.

His eyes opened. For a moment they did not seem to know where to settle. Then they found hers.

“They already have.”

A shadow blocked the light under the door.

Elena’s fear became practical. Fear was less useful when there were tasks.

She hooked Raphael’s arm over her shoulders, pulled him upright, and dragged him toward the narrow servants’ stair door beside the dry-goods cabinet. It had been painted the same gray as the wall sometime before she was born. Most guests mistook it for paneling. Elena knew the warped lower corner, the brass latch hidden behind an apron hook, and the cramped triangular compartment beneath the first flight of steps where generations of maids had stored coal buckets, broken chairs, and things owners did not want seen.

Raphael tried to help. His legs did not agree.

“Quiet,” she breathed.

“I am being quiet.”

“You’re arguing.”

“I argue quietly.”

Even half-conscious, he sounded offended by the distinction.

She got the door open and guided him inside. His wet coat caught on a nail. Elena pulled it from his shoulders, shoved him against the stone foundation, then dropped to her knees and wiped the shining trail of rainwater from the tile with the hem of a dish towel.

The footsteps outside slowed.

She snatched up the vial and closed it in her palm. The gold ring remained beside the phone. She nearly left it there, then swept it into the pocket of her robe and placed the half-full water glass over the damp circle where it had lain.

The kitchen door opened.

Samuel Pike entered with his right hand near the pistol under his black suit jacket. He was in his early forties, narrow through the face, with close-cropped hair and a pale mark where his wedding band had once been. An earpiece curved behind his right ear. Black leather gloves made his hands look detached from the rest of him.

His flashlight moved across the counters, the copper kettle, the open textbook, and Elena.

She stood beside the stove and turned the burner off beneath a kettle that had not yet boiled.

Pike looked at the broken latch.

“Have you seen Mr. Orsini?”

“Not since dinner.”

Her voice sounded ordinary. That frightened her more than if it had shaken.

Pike’s light dropped to her bare feet, then traveled to the servants’ stair door. Elena felt the vial pressing into the soft center of her palm. Beneath the stairs, Raphael’s breathing had gone shallow.

Pike looked at the water glass. He looked at the wet dish towel she had kicked beneath the table. His expression did not change, but his flashlight lingered on the nail where a thread of black wool had caught.

Through his earpiece came a low male voice.

“Kitchen clear?”

Pike held Elena’s gaze.

“Secondary kitchen clear,” he said.

The voice answered, “Check the lower stairs.”

Pike’s jaw tightened once.

He crossed the room.

Elena could hear Raphael trying not to breathe.

Pike stopped in front of the servants’ door. He reached past Elena, took the copper kettle from the cold burner, and poured the unheated water into the sink.

“You’ll scorch the bottom if you forget it empty,” he said.

Then he walked out.

The broken door swung almost closed behind him. Heavy footsteps moved away along the corridor.

Elena waited until she could no longer hear them. Even then, she counted to ten because instructors at the nursing college were always telling students that panic shortened time. A person believed thirty seconds had passed when it had been eight. A person made a bad decision and called it urgency.

She opened the hidden door.

Raphael sat with his back against stone, one knee raised because there was not enough room for his legs. His shirt had fallen open at the throat, exposing dark tattoos above his chest. He appeared less like the man whose name stopped conversations in Lake Forest restaurants and more like someone who had been left outside too long.

“You need an emergency room,” Elena said.