Chapter seven
1115 Words
Her mother's name was on that page.
Elara picked the file up off the floor. Read it again. Slow this time. Like reading slower would make it say something different.
It didn't.
MARGARET VOSS. Signed witness. Property acquisition. Thirty one years ago.
Her mother had been dead for seventeen years. Elara had exactly four memories of her. The smell of her coat. The way she hummed while cooking. The sound of her laugh from another room. And the morning Elara woke up at nine years old and her father was sitting at the kitchen table staring at nothing and her mother was simply gone.
She had never questioned it.
She was nine.
She sat on the floor of Damien Kane's penthouse with a file in her lap and questioned everything.
Her phone said 8:47.
Thirteen minutes before the car.
She shoved the file under her mattress, changed her shirt, and walked out of her room like her legs weren't made of water.
Damien was already in the lobby. Jacket. Watch. That particular stillness he carried everywhere like a second skin. He looked at her when she came out of the elevator and something in his expression shifted slightly.
"You read it," he said.
Not a question.
"The meeting," she said. "Where?"
He studied her face for exactly two seconds. She kept it blank. He let it go.
She was going to tell him. Just not yet. Not until she understood what she was telling him.
The car ride took twenty minutes. Neither of them spoke much. He answered three emails on his phone. She watched the city move past the window and thought about a woman who hummed while cooking and apparently knew a man who pushed people down staircases.
The building they pulled up to was glass and steel and important looking. A law firm. Damien's lawyers. Six people around a table already waiting when they walked in.
She sat where he gestured. To his right.
The meeting was about Harlow. Evidence timelines. Witness statements. Legal strategies that went over her head in places but she caught enough. They were close. Weeks away from filing. Everything hinged on one thing.
A witness who would go on record.
The lawyer across the table, a sharp woman named Cassandra, looked directly at Elara.
"We believe you can get him to talk," she said.
Elara blinked. "Me."
"Harlow has been watching you since you moved in. He's curious about you. More than he should be." Cassandra slid a photograph across the table. "He requested a lunch meeting with you yesterday through an intermediary. We intercepted it before it reached Damien."
Elara looked at the photograph.
Harlow. Smiling at a restaurant table. Comfortable. Untouchable.
She looked at Damien.
He was looking at the table.
"You knew," she said.
"I found out this morning."
"And you were going to tell me when exactly?"
"After the meeting."
She laughed. That short humorless one again. The lawyer shifted in her seat. Nobody else moved.
"So the plan is what?" Elara asked. "I go have lunch with the man who paid my father to watch a woman burn and I just smile and get him talking?"
"Essentially." Cassandra didn't flinch. "You're the only person he'll lower his guard around. He thinks you're isolated. Scared. Manageable."
"He thinks wrong."
"Yes." A small smile. "That's why we want you in that room."
Elara looked at the photograph again.
Harlow's easy smile. His relaxed shoulders. The absolute confidence of a man who had never once faced a consequence he didn't buy his way out of.
She thought about Lydia.
She thought about Nina at the bottom of a staircase.
She thought about her mother's name on a thirty year old document.
"Fine," she said. "I'll do it."
Damien's head came up.
Fast. Sharp. Like she'd said something in a language he wasn't expecting.
"No," he said.
"I just agreed to—"
"I heard what you agreed to." His voice was level but something underneath it wasn't. "The answer is no."
Cassandra opened her mouth.
"Give us a minute," Damien said.
She gave them more than that. The whole room emptied in under thirty seconds. Elara almost laughed at how fast six lawyers moved when Damien Kane used that tone.
Then they were alone.
He stood up. Walked to the window. Same thing he always did when he needed a second. She was starting to recognise his patterns. That bothered her.
"You can't keep me wrapped in cotton wool while also using me as bait," she said. "Pick one."
"This is different from what we discussed."
"How?"
He turned around. His face was doing that crowded thing again. Too much behind the walls.
"Harlow doesn't just want information from you." His voice dropped slightly. Not softer. More careful. "He wants you scared. He wants you compromised. If you sit across a table from him he will spend the entire lunch finding the exact thing that breaks you and pressing on it until it does."
"Let him try."
"Elara."
"Let. Him. Try." She stood up. "I found my mother's name in your file this morning. Signed witness to the acquisition that Harlow forged. My mother who died when I was nine and who my father has never once mentioned in connection with any of this." Her voice didn't shake. She was proud of it. "I have my own reasons to sit across from that man. And they have nothing to do with your case."
Silence.
Complete. Heavy. The kind that had weight.
Damien looked at her for a long time.
Something moved across his face that she had never seen there before. It wasn't pity. It wasn't strategy.
It looked almost like recognition.
"How long have you known?" he asked quietly.
"An hour."
He nodded once. Slowly.
Then he picked up his phone and made a call.
"Set up the lunch," he said into it. "Thursday. Neutral location." A pause. "She goes wired. My team outside. Any sign of movement and we pull her out."
He hung up.
Looked at her.
"You don't go alone," he said. "Ever. You understand me?"
She held his gaze.
Something pulled between them. Tight and unnamed and neither of them moved toward it.
"You knew about my mother," she said. "Before today."
Not a question this time.
He didn't answer.
Which was its own kind of answer.
Her phone buzzed on the table between them.
She looked down.
A photograph. Her mother. Young. Alive. Standing outside the building that burned. Smiling at someone off camera.
The timestamp on the photograph was three weeks before the fire.
Her mother had died seventeen years ago.
This photograph was taken seven years ago.
- Writer
