Jace POV
On my first morning reporting to the house instead of the center, I didn't understand what I was actually walking into. I understood housekeeping. I understood floors and linens and the particular silence expected of staff who are meant to be present and invisible in the same breath. What I didn't understand was what it would mean to be inside those walls every day, close enough to watch two women who ran an empire the way other people run a household budget.
I learned faster than I expected to, which hallways got walked at which hour, which rooms Claire filled with noise and which ones Celeste kept so quiet you could hear the building settle. Housekeeping suited me better than I thought it would. Nobody cornered a man holding a laundry basket. Nobody needed to.
What it also did, though nobody had planned it this way, was put me in every room the two of them talked in when they thought no one worth mentioning was listening. I
I learned their rhythms before I learned their names properly. Celeste rose early and moved through the house like she was already three arguments ahead of whatever the day intended to bring her. Claire rose late and moved through it like the house existed to be admired by her, and occasionally, when she thought no one was paying close enough attention, it looked like it exhausted her more than she'd ever admit to anyone standing close enough to notice.
I noticed. That was, after all, the entire skill they'd found useful enough to keep me for.
I'd been given access to something considerably more valuable than a task, and that Celeste had likely understood that before I did.
I had just been handed something neither of them would have given me on purpose. Not information. Not leverage. Just the plain, unguarded shape of two people who loved each other and drove each other half to madness in roughly equal measure - the way sisters everywhere apparently did, mafia or otherwise.
Claire found me first, in the proper sense. She looked at me with appraising interest, as if deciding whether I was worth the trouble of owning. One day she caught me refolding a stack of towels for the third time because the first two attempts hadn't satisfied whatever standard I'd absorbed without meaning to, back when precision in small things was the only kind of control available to me, and she leaned against the doorframe and watched me do it with an expression I hadn't yet learned to read.
"You fold towels like they've personally wronged you," she said.
"Old habit," I said. "I like things done correctly."
"Do you?" She said it like a challenge, or an invitation, or possibly both, the two things apparently not being mutually exclusive in her particular grammar. "I'll have to find out exactly how far that habit extends."
I didn't answer that, because I had already learned, in less than a week, that not answering Claire directly was its own kind of answer, one she seemed to find considerably more interesting than whatever I might have actually said.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I like you considerably more than I expected to, for a man I only ever meant to keep for a single night. Don't let it go to your head. I still don't repeat myself twice."
She was gone before I could tell her I understood that as the compliment it actually was, buried, the way most true things in that house arrived, sideways, and quickly, and gone again before anyone had the chance to properly thank her for it.
Celeste was hard to read, and harder to be read by. It suited me. She didn't watch me the way Claire did. She watched me the way she watched everything, cataloguing without appearing to catalogue, filing information away behind a face that gave up nothing it hadn't already decided to surrender.
In the sixth week, in the hallway outside the kitchen, she stopped long enough to say, without any particular preamble, "Settling in?"
It wasn't quite a question. I answered it as one anyway. "Better than the center."
"That's not a high bar."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
She studied me a moment, the particular stillness I would come to recognize as the look of her deciding how much of a thought to say out loud and how much to keep filed away for later use. "If anyone in this house makes you uncomfortable," she said, "the way that man did. You tell me. Not eventually. Not once you've decided you can manage it on your own. You tell me the same day."
"I understand."
"I don't think you do," she said, "not fully, not yet. But you will."
And then she was gone, down the hall, already three thoughts ahead of the conversation the way she always was, and I stood there a moment longer than the task in front of me required, turning the sentence over the way I'd once turned over things men said to me that I suspected meant more than they appeared to on the surface.
Celeste's POV
I tested Jace twice, in that first stretch of silence, in small ways I did not expect him to notice and was mildly unsettled to discover he had.
The first was simple enough; I let it be known, within his hearing but not directly to him, that a guard's shift schedule had changed for reasons that were, in fact, entirely fabricated. I watched to see whether the information found its way back to me through some channel it had no business traveling through.
It didn't.
He said nothing to anyone, asked no questions, gave no indication he'd registered the information at all, which told me either that he hadn't been listening as closely as I suspected he listened to everything, or that he'd understood, immediately and without needing to be told, that repeating things he overheard in that house was not a habit that would serve him well.
The second was less simple, and I am considerably less proud of it. I left a folder of genuinely sensitive material within his reach one evening, unlocked, in a room I knew he'd be cleaning within the hour. I did not return for it until the following morning. I found it exactly where I'd left it, untouched, the seal I'd pressed into the closing flap still intact. He did not mention it.
"You left a folder in the east sitting room," he said, the one time I came close to raising it directly, weeks later, when the memory of my own small test had started to feel less like due diligence and more like something closer to shame. "I put it back exactly where I found it."
"I know," I said. "I checked the seal."
He looked at me for a long moment, understanding exactly what I'd done and exactly why. He did not seem angry about it, which surprised me more than anger would have. "You didn't need to test me that way," he said. "You could have simply asked whether I'd look."
"I don't generally ask people questions I can answer for myself instead."
"No," he agreed. "I don't imagine you do."
He didn't say anything else about it, and neither did I. Though I understood, in the weeks that followed, that something had shifted slightly in how closely I felt I still needed to watch him. Not because I trusted him entirely, not yet, but because I had run out of small, deniable ways to test something I had already, quietly, begun to believe.