A Voice in the Hall

The voice came through the half-open door and my body recognised it before my brain did.

*"Tell Marco the shipment clears Rotterdam on Thursday. No exceptions."*

Low. Measured. That particular gravel that had once said *I want to hear your voice, not just read it* at two in the morning while I lay in the dark of a flat that smelled of cheap candles and reheated noodles.

My hand tightened on the banister. Sophia was still talking behind me on the stairs — something about the tennis courts, something about brunch — and I couldn't hear a word of it over the roaring in my ears.

*Dante.*

Except he wasn't Dante. Dante had been a name he'd typed into a chat box, the same way Luna had been a name I'd typed into one. And the man behind the door, the one whose study I had no business being near, was William Duca. Sophia's brother. The Dawn of the Loco family. The most dangerous man in London, according to three separate newspaper profiles I'd skimmed in a cab last night with my heart in my throat.

The same man I'd told to his face, in a café in Bloomsbury, that I couldn't do this, and then blocked from every platform I owned.

"Nikki?" Sophia's voice sharpened. "You've gone the colour of a boiled beet. Are you listening?"

I turned. Smiled. The smile was a skill I'd honed the way other people honed a backhand. "Sorry. Jet lag. What were you saying about the east wing?"

"Stay out of it." She said it lightly, but her eyes flicked to the door at the end of the corridor. "William works in there. He doesn't like being disturbed. And he *really* doesn't like women wandering in to have a look at him, so if you value your fingers, don't."

We moved down the corridor, past oil paintings of men with the same grey eyes, and I counted my breaths like a woman counting down from a plane crash.

Here is what I knew, arranged in the order it had arrived: I had spent six months talking to a man I'd never seen. I had let him fall in love with a girl made of stock photographs and borrowed light. When he'd asked to meet, I'd panicked and cut him off clean. And then, three weeks later, my best friend had invited me to her family's house for spring break, and I'd said yes, because I had nowhere else to go and because I'd assumed the Ducas were Ducas the way the Windsors were Windsors — famous, distant, not *mine*.

Nobody had told me Sophia's brother was called William. She'd always called him Will. She'd always rolled her eyes and said he was a bore who worked too much and never came to anything.

"What's his actual name?" I'd asked her in the car, casual, fiddling with the seatbelt.

"William. William Duca. He hates being called Will by anyone who isn't family, so don't." She'd laughed. "He's been a nightmare since February. Some girl he met online dumped him and he's been unbearable about it. He's got Marco running traces on IP addresses like a detective."

"Traces?"

"Every address she ever logged in from." Sophia had shaken her head, fond and exasperated. "He found nothing. She used a VPN, apparently, or a dozen of them. He knows her name was fake and her photos were fake and that's it. Honestly, it's the most interesting thing that's ever happened to him."

I had stared out of the window at the wet M4 and thought: *the VPN was mine, the name was mine, the photos were a stranger's, and the girl he's mourning has been sitting in your passenger seat for three years.*

Now I stood in the doorway of the guest room Sophia had given me, and my legs were shaking so hard I had to sit on the edge of the bed.

He'd said my voice.

At the café, when I'd ended it — I'd kept my voice low and flat and unrecognisable, a stranger's voice, a woman reading a bus timetable. He'd never heard me properly. He'd only ever heard Luna's typing, and Luna's voice notes, which I'd recorded in a bathroom with a towel over my head because I was too frightened to sound like myself.

But a voice is a stubborn thing. It slips through towels. It slips through doorways.

And Sophia had introduced me at lunch with a laugh — *this is Nikki, my flatmate, the one I keep telling you about* — and William had looked at me for a long moment with those grey eyes, and said, *Have we met?*

I'd said no.

I'd said no, and he'd nodded, and I'd spent the rest of the meal with my fork trembling against the plate while Isabella piled more potatoes onto it and told me I was too thin.

*Too thin.* God. If she'd known.

I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars, exactly the way I had on the night I'd closed the laptop, and I made myself think it through properly, because panic is a luxury and I couldn't afford it.

Option one: walk downstairs, find him, and say it. *I'm Luna. I lied to you for six months and then I ran. I'm sorry.* He'd have every right to throw me out of his house. He'd have every right to do worse — the newspaper profiles had been coy, but they hadn't been *that* coy. And Sophia would lose her brother's trust in me, or her friendship, or both, and I would deserve it.

Option two: say nothing. Survive the week. Go home. Let Luna stay dead.

It should have been an easy choice. It was the choice I'd already made once, and I'd slept fine afterwards — well. I'd slept.

But this was his house. His corridors. His voice threading through the walls at odd hours. His mother asking me to pass the salt. His sister, who loved me, sleeping two doors down. There was no version of the next seven days where I didn't hear him say something in that gravel and feel my ribs cave in.

I got up. I crossed to the window. Below, in the courtyard, a man in a dark coat was getting out of a car and walking towards the house, and even from three floors up I knew the shape of his shoulders.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

I looked. A message from an unknown number, and the preview alone stopped my breath.

*I know you're in the city. Let me hear your voice.*

I turned the phone face down and stood very still in a house that wasn't mine, in a lie that was, and I understood — properly, for the first time — that I hadn't dumped a stranger on the internet.

I'd dumped the Dawn of the Loco family. And now I was living under his roof.