DEVOUR ME, MR. KANE

Chapter Two

Somebody had already scrubbed the blood off the marble before Elara reached the ground floor.

She stood in the lobby and stared at the exact spot where a man had stopped breathing forty minutes ago and felt something cold and permanently settled into her chest. The floor gleamed. The staff moved. A woman at the front desk smiled at a visitor and handed him a badge and the whole scene was so aggressively normal that Elara wanted to scream just to break it. A man had died on that floor. His body had been removed, his blood had been cleaned, and the building had swallowed the whole thing without even pausing to breathe.

Her phone rang the second she hit the pavement outside.

She knew it was him before she looked at the screen. Unknown number but she knew. She answered because refusing felt like the kind of small power move that meant nothing against a man who had just made a body disappear before she reached the elevator.

"You left without your copy." His voice was exactly the same as it was upstairs. Even. Unbothered. Like the last hour had been a routine Tuesday. "I sent it to your email."

Her hand tightened around the phone hard enough to hurt.

"You had someone scrub a crime scene in broad daylight."

"He had your photograph in his jacket pocket. Taken this morning outside your front door." No pause. No softening. Just facts dropped like stones. "Pack enough for a week. My driver collects you at six."

"I never agreed to move in today."

"You signed the contract today." He ended the call.

She stood on the street with traffic screaming past her and the phone still pressed to her ear and the full weight of what she had just done sitting on her chest like something physical. She had walked in there with a plan. She had left with a signed document and a dead man's blood on her clothes and the name of a woman she had never heard of rattling around her skull.

Lydia.

She had to get to the hospital.

The bus ride was twenty minutes of pure torture wrapped in traffic noise and other people's conversations. She sat in the back with her jacket zipped to her throat and her eyes on the window and turned the morning over and over in her head. The way he had already known her name before she gave it. The way the elevator had opened without her pressing a button. The way he had said Lydia like pulling the word up cost him something, like it lived somewhere deep and guarded and he had made a deliberate choice to let it out.

She was going to be my wife.

Past tense that had never stopped bleeding.

Her father was awake when she walked into the ward and the look on his face the moment he saw her knocked the breath clean out of her.

It was not a relief. It was dreadful.

She had never seen that look on him before and she had been visiting every single day for six days. He knew. Before she opened her mouth, before she said a single word, he knew why she was there and what she was going to ask and his whole body went tight against the hospital bed like a man bracing for something he had been dreading for seven years.

She sat down and looked him straight in the eye.

"I met Damien Kane this morning."

His fingers curled against the blanket. Slow. Involuntary.

"He made me an offer. I took it." She leaned forward. "Dad. Who is Lydia."

The heart monitor beeped. Steady. Merciless. Measuring out seconds that felt like they each weighed something.

He closed his eyes and in that single gesture she lost every version of her father she had ever believed in.

"Where did you hear that name."

"He told me to ask you. About a fire. About money." She kept her voice flat because if she let it move it would break. "Tell me the truth. Not a version of it. All of it."

He opened his eyes and they were wet and she hated that she still felt something when she saw that.

"I was paid to look away." His voice came out stripped raw. Nothing left of the man who used to run a company and sit at the head of their table like he owned every room he walked into. "That was the whole job. Look away from the building that night, keep my mouth shut after. Nobody told me anyone was inside. Nobody said her name to me."

Elara's stomach turned over hard.

"The fire started faster than it was supposed to." He stopped. Pressed his lips together. "I heard her. From outside. I heard her and I stood there and I made a decision and I took the money they offered afterward because I had you and your brother and a company already dying and I told myself I could carry it."

She stood up so fast the chair scraped back and hit the wall.

"She was burning alive and you stood outside and listened."

"I was terrified, Elara, I was—"

"You took money to forget a woman burned to death." Her voice came out quiet and that was somehow more frightening than if she had shouted. "And her fiancé has spent seven years destroying everything you built because of it. And this morning I signed a contract to live in his house."

He grabbed her wrist with both hands, harder than a man with drips in his arms should have managed.

"Do not go back to him. Whatever he promised, whatever he told you, he is using you. You are the closest thing to me he can get his hands on and he will not stop until he has taken everything and that includes you."

She looked down at his hands wrapped around her wrist.

Thought about Lydia reaching for something and finding nothing.

"Your bills are paid," she said. "The debt is gone. Theo is safe." She pulled her arm free. "I will handle the rest."

She walked out before her face could betray her.

She was three steps outside the hospital entrance when her phone buzzed and she pulled it out without thinking and opened the message and stopped walking completely.

A photograph. Her. Taken from across the street no more than thirty seconds ago, coat on, hand in her bag, standing exactly where she was standing right now.

She spun around and scanned the street in every direction. People. Cars. A food cart on the corner. Nobody looking at her. Nobody running. Just the ordinary movement of a city that had no idea her heart was trying to exit her body through her throat.

Whoever sent that picture was already gone.

And it was not Damien Kane. He already owned her time and her address and twelve months of her life. He had no reason to watch her from across the street like something that needed to be tracked.

This was someone else.

Someone who had been watching before today.

Someone who did not want her near Damien Kane at all.

Her phone buzzed again.

Same number. No photograph this time. Just four words.

Walk away while you can.