Chapter Six
928 Words
She should have let it go.
She didn't.
"In an ambulance." Elara stood up. "You're going to say that and just stand there?"
Damien didn't turn from the window.
"She was injured."
"How?"
Nothing.
"Damien. How was she injured?"
He turned. His face was the usual wall but something behind his eyes was different. Crowded. Like a room with too much furniture shoved against the walls so nothing could move properly.
"She fell," he said.
"People don't leave in ambulances because they fell."
"This one did."
He said it like that was the end of it. Like she was supposed to nod and go back to her room and pretend the last sixty seconds hadn't happened. He actually picked up his coffee again. Took a sip. Looked at his phone.
She laughed. Short and humorless.
"You're unbelievable."
"I've been told."
"I'm serious. You brought me into your home, you told me I'm a target, you showed me a photograph of a dead woman who has my face, and now you're telling me the last person who slept in this room left in an ambulance and your entire response is she fell?" She crossed her arms. "Who was she?"
Silence.
"Who was she to you?"
He set the phone down.
"Her name was Nina." He said it like he was reading from a document. Flat. Measured. "She worked for me. She found out about Harlow before I was ready to move. She went to confront him alone." A pause. "He pushed her down a flight of stairs and made it look like an accident."
Elara's stomach turned over.
"She survived?"
"Barely." His jaw tightened. Just slightly. "She is in physical therapy in another city. She doesn't know I moved someone else into her room." Another pause. Smaller. "I should have told you that."
That last sentence surprised her.
She could tell it surprised him too.
He looked slightly annoyed at himself, the way someone looked when a word slipped out before the filter caught it. It was the most human thing she had seen him do.
She sat back down on the bed.
"So Harlow has already hurt someone in this building."
"Yes."
"And you put me in the same room."
"The building is more secure now than it was then. Different entry protocols. Different team." He looked at her directly. "Nina went outside these walls without telling me. That is what got her hurt."
"Is that a warning?"
"It's information."
She looked at him for a long moment.
He looked back. Steady. Patient. Giving her nothing extra.
"You're scared," she said quietly.
Something shifted in his face.
"I don't—"
"Not of Harlow. You've been hunting him for years, you're not scared of him." She watched his eyes. "You're scared of what happens if someone else gets hurt because of you."
The room went very quiet.
Damien said nothing.
Which was its own kind of answer.
Her phone buzzed on the bed between them. She looked down. A message from an unknown number. Different from the distorted voice call. Just five words.
**Nina didn't fall. She jumped.**
Elara looked up.
Damien had already seen it from where he stood. She watched it land on him. Watched the wall go up so fast it was almost impressive.
"That's not true," he said.
"How do you know?"
"Because I know Nina."
"Do you?" She held his gaze. "Or did you know the version of Nina who worked for you? Because those are sometimes two very different people." She paused. "Like how my father was one person at the dinner table and a completely different one outside the hospital when Lydia was dying."
That landed.
She watched it land.
Damien put his coffee down. Walked to the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame.
"Don't go anywhere today," he said.
"Because of Harlow?"
He didn't answer that.
"There's a car downstairs at nine. I need you at a meeting."
"I thought I wasn't supposed to go anywhere."
"With me is different."
He left.
She sat in the quiet and looked at those five words on her screen until they blurred.
Nina didn't fall. She jumped.
She thought about a woman in this exact room. Same bed maybe. Same window. Looking at the same city. Working for the same man. Finding out the same secrets.
What had Nina found that was bad enough to make her want to leave that way?
And why was someone telling Elara about it now?
Her eyes moved to the door.
Then to the window.
Then to the ceiling.
The building was more secure now. Different team. Different protocols.
She thought about that for a while.
Then she got up, got dressed, and went to find the file Damien had given her.
Page thirty one.
She needed to read page thirty one.
She found it in under a minute. The forgery documents. Harlow's signature buried deep. Dates that matched. She read it twice to make sure she was reading it right.
It was real.
The building had been stolen from Damien. Lydia had died in something that was taken from him before he could protect it. Before he even knew it was gone.
She turned to page thirty two.
And stopped.
A name she recognised. Not Harlow. Not her father.
Her own mother's name.
Signed as a witness to the original acquisition.
Her mother who had died when Elara was nine.
Her mother who had apparently been in a room with Harlow Vance seven years before Elara was born.
The file slipped from her hands.
- Writer
