THE KING'S PROPERTY

Chapter 3: Leverage

Xavier read the text twice, jaw tightening with each pass, then handed the phone back to her like it had burned him.

"She's watching this house," he said. "Which means either Julian told her you're still here, or she has someone on the grounds."

Abigail's pulse spiked. "Someone on the grounds. As in, right now."

"There's a groundskeeper who's been with this estate longer than I've been alive. I trust him with my life. There's also a security team Vivienne hired after Father died, and I've never trusted a single one of them." He moved to the window, scanned the tree line with the kind of practiced ease that told her this wasn't the first time he'd done it. "If she has eyes on the property, she already knows you haven't left."

"So what do I do? I can't just ignore her. She's the one paying me."

"She's not paying you to protect this house. She's paying you to help dismantle it." Xavier turned back to her, and the calculation in his eyes had shifted into something sharper, faster, a man rebuilding a strategy in real time. "Send her a message. Tell her you're finishing the last section and you'll have the card to her within the hour."

"That buys us what, exactly?"

"Time." He crossed to the desk, pulled a legal pad free from beneath a stack of folders, and started writing without sitting down. "Enough for you to give me copies of the photographs you already have and enough for my lawyer to see them before Delphine does."

Abigail hesitated, thumb hovering over her phone screen. "If I lie to her and she finds out, I lose the agency contract. That's not a small thing to me. That job is half my income."

Something in his expression eased, just slightly, like he'd forgotten for a moment that she had a life outside the four walls of his crisis.

"I'm not asking you to lie," he said. "I'm asking you to be slow. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"There is when I'm the one covering whatever it costs you." He said it simply, no performance in it, no attempt to impress her. "Whatever the agency pays you for this job, I'll match it twice over. You won't lose anything by giving me an hour."

Abigail stared at him. She'd been in enough rooms with wealthy clients to recognize when money was being used as a leash, a way of buying compliance and calling it generosity. This didn't feel like that. It felt like a man who genuinely didn't know another way to say he needed her help without sounding like he was asking for a favor he didn't think he deserved.

"Keep your money," she said. "I'll give you the hour because your brother looked at me like I was something he could pick up and use, and I don't like being used. Not by him, not by Delphine, and not by you either, so don't get comfortable."

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but close enough that she noticed the shape of what one would look like on him.

"Noted," he said.

She typed the message to Delphine, kept it short, apologetic in tone but vague on details, and hit send before she could talk herself out of it. Xavier watched her do it with an intensity that should have felt invasive and instead felt oddly steadying, like he was standing guard over the decision itself.

"Now what," she asked.

"Now I need everything on that card transferred somewhere Vivienne's people can't touch it." He gestured toward a laptop on the desk, already opening the lid. "And I need you to walk me through exactly what Delphine told you when she hired you. Every word. Sometimes what people don't say matters more than what they do."

Abigail settled into the chair across from him, plugged her camera into the cable he handed her, and started talking through the phone call from three days earlier while photographs uploaded one by one onto his screen. He listened without interrupting, occasionally jotting something on the legal pad, and there was a focus to him that she found herself watching more than she meant to. Most men she'd worked for treated a hired photographer like part of the scenery. Xavier looked at her like she was the only useful thing in the room.

"She never mentioned your name," Abigail said, reaching the end of the call in her memory. "Just said the client needed documentation before a family matter was settled. I assumed it was a divorce or a sale. I didn't think inheritance dispute."

"Most people wouldn't." He leaned back, rubbing a hand over his jaw, and for a moment the exhaustion she'd noticed earlier crept back into his face, unguarded. "I've spent eight months fighting this quietly. Court filings, depositions, appraisals. I didn't expect it to spill into my own garden."

"Do you think you'll lose the house?"

The question came out before she could soften it, and she watched it land somewhere tender in him, a wound she hadn't meant to press.

"I don't know," he said, and the honesty in it surprised her more than a confident denial would have. "My father built this place from nothing. It's not just brick and land to me. It's the only thing that still feels like him. Losing it would feel like losing him twice."

Abigail didn't have a response for that, not one that wouldn't sound hollow, so she didn't try to fill the silence. She just sat there, letting it exist between them, and something about not rushing to fix it seemed to be exactly what he needed, because his shoulders dropped half an inch, the tension in them loosening for the first time since she'd met him.

"Thank you," he said quietly. "For not telling me it'll be fine."

"I don't know that it will be."

"No. You don't. And you didn't pretend otherwise." He looked at her like that mattered more than anything else she'd offered him all day. "Most people around me only tell me what they think I want to hear. It's exhausting, being managed by everyone who's supposed to be on my side."

The upload finished. Xavier closed the laptop, and for a moment neither of them moved, the study quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of a car engine turning over somewhere near the front of the house.

"That's Delphine's hour running out," he said, glancing toward the window. "She'll come looking herself soon."

"Then I should give her the card."

"You should give her a copy. Not the original." He was already reaching for a blank drive in the desk drawer, moving with the kind of speed that told her he'd done this exact maneuver before, just never with these particular stakes. "I'll have my assistant duplicate the memory card contents onto this. You hand her the copy, she never knows the difference, and I keep the originals here."

Abigail took the drive from him, their fingers brushing for half a second longer than necessary, and she felt it everywhere it shouldn't have mattered, a small electric current she chose to ignore.

"You're very good at this," she said. "Manipulating evidence, I mean."

"I'd call it surviving." He held her gaze, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "You could walk away from all of this right now, Miss Lee. Hand Delphine what she wants, take your two thousand dollars, and never think about this house again."

"But?"

"But you're still here." His voice dropped, quieter now, almost like he was asking a question he wasn't sure he wanted the answer to. "Why is that."

Before Abigail could find words for something she didn't fully understand herself, the study door burst open again, no knock this time either, and Delphine stood in the frame, phone in one hand, eyes sharp and furious as they landed on the two of them standing far too close together over an open laptop.

"Well," Delphine said, voice like ice cracking. "This is not what I was told to expect."