DEVOUR ME, MR. KANE

Chapter Five

Elara found the east wing at 5am because she couldn't sleep and bad decisions felt easier in the dark.

The door wasn't locked.

That was the first wrong thing.

She pushed it open anyway. One room. No furniture. Just white walls, a single overhead light, and a photograph mounted at eye level like someone had measured the exact height it needed to be to hit you in the chest when you walked in.

A woman.

Laughing. Dark hair. Eyes that caught the camera like she didn't know anyone was watching.

Elara stepped closer.

Her stomach dropped.

The woman looked like her. Not vaguely. Not if you squinted. Actually, structurally, undeniably like her. Same jawline. Same way the eyes tilted slightly at the corners. Like someone had taken Elara's face and put it on a stranger who had died before Elara knew she existed.

She couldn't breathe.

"You found it."

She spun around.

Damien stood in the doorway. No jacket. Shirt half buttoned. He looked like a man who hadn't slept either, which somehow made him more dangerous, not less. His eyes went to the photograph. Then to her face. Then back to the photograph.

Something moved through him.

He shut it down in under a second.

"I wasn't—" she started.

"Leave."

Not angry. Not loud.

Worse.

She left.

She made it back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her palms flat against her thighs and just breathed. The woman in that photograph had Elara's face. Damien had said Lydia was going to be his wife. Which meant for fourteen months of building his case, every time he looked at Elara's file, every time he made the decision to pull her into this, he had been looking at a dead woman's face walking around in someone else's life.

She wasn't bait.

She was a ghost.

Her phone buzzed.

Maya. Her journalist friend. Six in the morning and already sending files because Maya operated on a schedule that made no sense to anyone but herself.

Elara opened it.

A property record. Seven years old. The building that burned, the one Lydia died in, had been owned by a shell company. Three layers deep. Registered offshore.

Traced back to Kane Global.

Elara sat very still.

She read it again. Slower.

The building belonged to Damien.

Lydia had died in a building that belonged to the man who claimed to be avenging her.

Her mind went to places she didn't want it to go.

She was still sitting there twenty minutes later when her door opened without a knock.

Damien.

Fully dressed now. Jacket on. The version of him that faced the world, controlled and impenetrable. He held a coffee mug in one hand and set it on her nightstand without asking.

She looked at it.

Then at him.

"The building was yours," she said.

No preamble. No softening.

He didn't flinch.

"Yes."

"Lydia died in a building you owned."

"A building that was stolen from me six months before the fire." He sat down in the chair by the window like she had invited him. "Forged acquisition documents. Harlow's signature buried under three shell companies. By the time I found it she had already been dead for eight months."

She studied his face.

Looking for the lie.

"You can check," he said quietly. "The forgery documents are in the file I gave you. Page thirty one."

She hadn't read that far.

She hadn't trusted him enough to read that far.

He watched her process it. Didn't push. Didn't explain further. Just sat there in the grey morning light with his coffee and his unreadable face and waited like a man who had learned that patience was the sharpest weapon available.

"Why does she look like me?" Elara asked.

Silence.

"Damien."

"I don't know." He said it like it cost him something. "I saw your photograph in your father's file two years ago and I stopped moving for about thirty seconds. That had never happened to me before."

She didn't know what to do with that.

Neither did he, by the look of it.

Her phone rang.

Unknown number. The same one that had sent the photographs. The same one that had told her to walk away.

She answered before she could think about it.

Silence on the other end.

Then a voice. Low. Distorted. Like someone speaking through a filter.

"Ask him what happened to the last woman who lived in that penthouse."

The line went dead.

Elara lowered the phone.

Looked at Damien.

His eyes were already on hers. He had heard it. The room was that quiet.

He didn't look surprised.

He looked like a man who had been waiting for that specific question and had not yet decided what to do with the answer.

"Damien." Her voice came out steady. She was proud of it. "What happened to the last woman who lived here?"

He set his coffee down.

Stood up.

Walked to the window.

"She left," he said.

A pause.

"In an ambulance."