Can you spot the AI in a real novel?

Serafina Valecourt was in the kitchen. Morning. The marble counter was already clean, but she wiped it anyway. White marble. Gold handles. Fresh flowers in a crystal vase. Quiet so deep it felt like a held breath. The kind of kitchen people on the internet called goals. Serafina called it expensive evidence. Everything in that house had been paid for by something ugly. She wasn’t cleaning for the sake of chores. She was waiting.

“At two hundred dollars, it’s a costume. It’s a prop.” She turned and walked to the sink. She ran water over her hands. She didn’t need to wash them, but she needed the movement. “Your standards are slipping, Kaelen. That’s what worries me. In this house, we don’t do slipping.” Silence filled the kitchen. Thicker than the steam from the espresso. It was the kind of silence that preceded a shift in power.

She saw it three blocks up — the black SUV. He always drove the black SUV when he was moving between lives. She followed, keeping two cars between them. Her heart was a drum in her ears. She was breaking the one rule that mattered: stay in the box. But the box was shrinking, and Irie Vale was tired of waiting for the air to run out.

Zillah Boudreaux sat at the head of a table she didn’t run. Long table. Twenty-foot mahogany. Darker than a debt. The men talked business over the women’s heads like they were part of the furniture — expensive, necessary for the look, but ultimately silent. Lucien sat at the other end. Her husband. Fifty-five. Face like carved mahogany. He ate like the crown wasn’t heavy. That was the first mistake. Men who forgot what hunger felt like forgot how to smell a predator.