The night did not loosen its grip on the Moretti estate.
It tightened it.
By morning, the surveillance infrastructure Dante had built did not retract. It refined itself. Learned. Adapted. Like any system designed by a man who believed that survival was not a feeling but a process.
Aria felt it the moment she opened her eyes.
Not the presence of guards, she had already accounted for them.
It was the absence of uncertainty.
The house no longer waited to see what she would do.
It anticipated her.
She lay still beneath the sheets, staring at the ceiling, cataloging the sensation with clinical clarity. The air hummed faintly through the vents, temperature calibrated to her sleep cycle. The curtains parted a fraction more than usual, letting in precisely enough morning light to wake without jarring.
Even her rest had been optimized.
Control, she realized, was no longer reactive.
It was predictive.
