Chapter Nine
1230 Words
The address led to a house that shouldn't exist anymore.
Elara could tell by the way Damien's jaw locked the moment the car turned onto the street. He hadn't said a word the entire drive. Forty minutes of city traffic and complete silence and his hand gripping his phone so tight she could see the tendons in his wrist.
She had learned not to push him in those silences.
She pushed anyway.
"You grew up here?"
"Yes."
"In this neighborhood?"
He looked out the window. "It was different then."
She looked too.
It wasn't a bad street. Old money quiet. Big trees. Houses set back from the road behind iron gates and overgrown hedges. The kind of neighborhood that had been expensive once and was now just forgotten. Like everyone who could afford to leave had left and taken the life with them.
The car stopped outside a house at the end of the row.
Three stories. Stone facade. Every window dark.
Damien got out before the driver finished parking. Elara scrambled out after him because she was not sitting in a car alone on a street like this while he walked into a dark house by himself. She caught up to him at the gate.
"Stay behind me," he said.
"Absolutely not."
He looked at her.
She looked back.
He pushed the gate open.
The front door was unlocked. Not forced. Unlocked, like someone had a key, like someone had been here recently enough that the hinges didn't creak when Damien pushed it open.
Inside smelled like old wood and cold air and something underneath both of those things. Something floral. Faint. Almost gone.
Elara stopped breathing for a second.
She knew that smell.
She had spent the first nine years of her life falling asleep to that smell. Her mother's perfume. The specific one. Not a similar one. Not something close. That exact combination that she had never found in any shop in any city because she had looked, she had actually looked, at seventeen and twenty one and twenty four, standing in department store perfume sections spraying things onto her wrist and trying not to feel stupid about it.
"She was here," Elara said.
Damien turned.
"Recently," she said. "That smell. It's her perfume."
Something shifted in his face.
He pulled out his phone. Made a call. Two words. "Sweep it." Then he kept moving.
The hallway was empty. The sitting room to the left was dusty and untouched. The kitchen at the back was the same. But on the kitchen table, placed deliberately in the center, was a single envelope.
Elara's name on the front.
Her full name. Written in handwriting she hadn't seen in seventeen years and would have recognized in her sleep.
Her hands were shaking before she picked it up.
She hated them for it.
She opened it.
One page. Handwritten. Dated three days ago.
*Elara. I know you have questions and I know you're angry and you have every right to be. I can't explain everything in a letter. What I can tell you is that leaving was not a choice I made freely and finding your way back from something like that takes longer than it should. I have been watching you. I know who you're with. I know what he's looking for. Please listen to me very carefully. Damien Kane is not your enemy. But the person standing closest to him is. Don't trust the woman with grey eyes. You'll know her when you see her. Don't let her see you first. I love you. I'm sorry. Don't look for me yet. It isn't safe.*
No signature.
She didn't need one.
Elara read it three times. Then she folded it carefully, put it back in the envelope, and held it against her chest with both hands like it might disappear if she let go.
Her mother was alive.
She had been in this house three days ago.
She had watched Elara her whole life from somewhere Elara couldn't reach.
Damien was standing across the kitchen watching her with an expression she had never seen on him. Not pity. Not strategy. Something quieter and more uncomfortable than either of those things.
She looked up.
"She says don't trust the woman with grey eyes," Elara said. "Standing closest to you." She watched his face. "Who is that?"
He went very still.
"Damien."
"My lawyer," he said. "Cassandra."
The woman from the meeting that morning. Sharp suit. Controlled smile. The one who had pushed for Elara to go to lunch with Harlow. The one who had slid the photograph across the table like she already knew what Elara's reaction would be.
Grey eyes.
Elara had looked right into them.
"She's working for Harlow," Elara said.
"She has been my lawyer for six years." His voice was careful. Controlled. But underneath it something was pulling apart at the seams. "She has been inside every conversation about this case. Every strategy. Every piece of evidence." A pause. Small and terrible. "She knows where the witnesses are."
The color drained from his face.
Just slightly. Just enough.
"Call them," Elara said. "Right now. Call the witnesses."
He was already dialing.
She watched him make the first call. His face while it rang. His face when it went to voicemail. His face when he dialed the second number.
His face when that one went to voicemail too.
He stood in the middle of his childhood kitchen with his phone at his side and said nothing for a long moment.
Then quietly, almost to himself.
"She's been one step ahead the entire time because she was standing in the room when I planned every move."
Elara crossed the kitchen.
She didn't think about it. She just moved. Stopped in front of him and looked up at his face and said nothing because there was nothing to say that would fix the specific look of a man realizing he had been betrayed by someone he trusted completely.
He looked down at her.
His eyes were different up close. Darker. A crack running through all that control.
"I need to go," he said.
"I know."
"I need you to stay here. My driver will—"
"I'm coming with you."
"Elara."
"She wrote that letter for me." She held up the envelope. "Your lawyer knew we were coming here. She knew about this house. Which means she knows about my mother." Her voice didn't shake. She made sure of it. "I am not sitting in a car while you go deal with the person who has been inside every conversation about the woman who raised me."
He stared at her.
Three seconds. Four.
"Stay beside me," he said. "Not behind. Beside."
She nodded.
They walked out of the house together.
The street was quiet. Same trees. Same gates. Same forgotten neighborhood.
But parked two houses down, engine running, was a black car that hadn't been there when they arrived.
Damien saw it the same second she did.
His hand found her arm.
"Don't run," he said quietly.
"I wasn't going to run."
"Good." His grip tightened slightly. "Because they're not watching us."
She looked at him.
"They're watching the house." His eyes stayed on the car. "Which means they don't know we already found the letter."
A pause.
"Which means we have about four minutes before they figure it out."
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