They do this, he's pretty sure, so they don't know one another. He decides maybe this is so that if one gets caught, they can't fuck it up for the rest.
But he thinks it would be impossible for any of them to get caught. It's not as if their practices look shady. Three normal people living in a normal house. He doesn't even know their real names. Doesn't want to. He has no use for them.
The first time he notices he's alone, the second day, he wanders out into the hall, finds the front door. It's locked on the outside, which is curious if not unexpected. He thinks they're misled and extremist, but he doesn't think they're stupid. He tries to avoid the front door when someone's there.
On the third day, a girl comes in when he's in the front living room, scanning the bookshelf. There's a lot of material in French, which he supposes is to be expected. He's considering his less than impressive hold on the language when she comes in, and he doesn't think he's seen her before.
She's small and blonde, with dark eyes and a tired look. She's wearing faded jeans, ripped in the knees, and a beaten-in leather jacket that's probably not hers. He thinks she looks like she could kick his ass, if she wanted to. He thinks she probably does.
"Eh?" she asks him. She's standing in the doorway between the front hallway and the living room. She tilts her head to one side, putting her hands on her hips. He supposes this look is supposed to be fetching, but it looks menacing, instead.
"Eh?" he echoes, and folds his hands behind his back.
"You're out, then," she says, a question more than a statement, though he doesn't know what she's asking. She has an accent like the rest of them, but her voice is breathier, and she sounds too young to be in on this.
"Er," he says.
"It's a'right," she says, stripping off her jacket, and hangs it on a hook in the hallway. She's really fucking built, he notices. "No one was ever going to stop you." He knows this.
He frowns at her, and pulls a book at random off the shelf.
"Hey, hey," she says. She can't pronounce her Hs, like the other two. She strides across the room, stopping a small distance from him, and he notices she has to look up at him. It doesn't feel that way. "I haven't seen much of you."
"Yeah, well," he says, and inspects the book. It's soft-covered, and dog-eared, and pages are loose. "This isn't exactly. um. home or anything."
She laughs, a high, tinkling noise, and her eyes crinkle to half-moons. "You could've asked," she says, and seizes his hand. His breath catches, and he follows along the curve of her wrist up her arm, over her barely flexing bicep muscle, up to her face. She's grinning.
"Um," he says, for lack of anything better.
"I'm Bri," she says, and shakes his hand furiously.
He stares at her, and slowly withdraws his hand to replace it on the spine of the book. "Er, hi," he says.
"You're Chris," she says, and beams. He tilts his head in a vague nod. She elongates the vowel sound, hissing out on the S.
When she pats his cheek, he flinches involuntarily. He really didn't mean to, he doesn't think, because she's pretty and nice, if a little strange, but she's also his captor, he supposes, and he's not supposed to get too comfortable.
He doesn't think.
And he thinks too much.
He looks from her face to the spine of his book. La Mort Heureuse, Albert Camus, it says.
"A happy death," she says, and smiles at him again, before walking away. He wonders how long she's on duty.