The Lion’s Den

After Salome passes off her new art piece to one of the staff to get it finished and framed, she gives me a tour of the house grounds that only takes a few short hours to complete. She tells me, sounding abashed, that a truly comprehensive tour would take more than the entire day, but she has a lunch engagement for some charity event, and so I’m left to fend for myself as the clock strikes eleven.

I make my way back to my living quarters in the northwest corner of the residence, getting purposefully lost on my way back one or two times, just in case any of the staff I see are secretly following me. I’m in the lion’s den now, I think to myself as I push open the door to my new bedroom, and you never know who could be—

Hyerim is bent over by the desk on the side, the edges of her grey silk panties on display as her skirt hikes up over the edge of her ass.

She stands up and spins around as she hears the door open, looking at me.

She smiles.

“Claude, you’re just the person I was hoping to see. Salome showed you around? How do you like the mansion?”

“I’m still in awe over it,” I lie with a smile of my own. “I’m honoured to be sharing this residence with you and your family for the next few months.”

“In awe?” Hyerim says, sitting down gracefully on the edge of my bed. She swings one leg over the other and cocks her head, as if puzzling over something I said. “Didn’t you live in a place like this, when you were younger?”

“Not many people know that about me,” I laugh, running a hand through my hair. “But the residence I grew up on was much smaller than this one, much less impressive. And, I guess you must know, it didn’t last.”

“Ah.” An arrogant simper curls on her lip. “I can’t say I know what that’s like, losing a family fortune.”

“It screwed me up for a good number of years,” I admit. This one’s a truth.

“Aww,” Hyerim purrs, no trace of sympathy in her eyes. “I was wondering about that large gap in your records. There’s a peculiar… lack of information, spanning several years.”

“I’ve never seen my own record,” I say, sounding curious. “But I’m not surprised that there was a gap. I didn’t exactly hold a job or get a degree or really, do much of anything in those years. Not until I was well into my twenties.”

“That raises a red flag,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “And we Najbreits do not tolerate failure of any kind.”

“I was working on my art back then,” I backpedal, “I just never managed to sell much or make a living off of it at first. It took a few years for me to establish myself.”

“Really. Is that all you were doing?”

“I worked some odd jobs to scrape by,” I say. I think about elaborating, but I stop, unable to find the words on my lips.

Mr. Samuel left scarcely any notes on these late teenage and early twenties of Claude Ashworth’s life. Large gaps in the record, as Hyerim put it. And I don’t want to say anything wrong, lest she have any information I don’t. So I stay silent.

Hyerim gets up and flashes me another fake smile.

“You’ll have to tell me about it some day,” she says, touching my arm. “Maybe we’ll do it when Warren is there to listen in. You know how he is with the truth.”

With that, she walks out the door, leaving me staring at the king-sized bed, perfectly arranged save for the faint crease where Hyerim sat on it.

I wait for a few seconds more, to make sure that she’s really gone, and then casually stroll over to the desk which Hyerim was crouching by earlier. I open and shut the empty drawers, pretending to look through them, when in reality, I am scanning for the telltale sign of bugs.

It doesn’t take me long to spot them. There’s a small mic wired up to the underside of the drawer, and as I pace around the room, I see another one by the windowsill. It’s only when I flop onto the bed and look up that I spy the miniscule lens glued to the fan, a tiny speck that most would mistake for a quirk of the light fixture at the fan’s centre.

All told, this reeks of Vidocq. I had to deal with that man for the better part of twenty years, so I’d better be able to tell when that fucker’s gotten involved.

I resist my first instinct to rip out the bugs and crush them, like I would have back home in New York. There’s a lot of things that I want the Najbreits to think of me, but savvy enough with surveillance technology to counter this effort is not one of them. And besides, even if it might be annoying to have to watch my words and actions at all times in this room, this means that I now have a way of planting information in their minds.

That, I will say, is one of the reasons why I walked into this lion’s den.