DEVOUR ME, MR. KANE

Chapter Three

Damien Kane was standing in her apartment when she got home.

Not outside it. Not in the hallway. Inside. In her living room, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, studying the framed photograph on her shelf like he had been invited and was simply waiting for her to catch up. Her front door was closed behind him. No forced entry. No broken lock. He had simply walked in the way powerful men walked into everything, like ownership was a thing you decided, not a thing you were given.

Elara dropped her bag and her hand went straight to the kitchen counter where she kept the pepper spray her brother had bought her as a joke birthday gift eighteen months ago.

"I would not." Damien did not turn around. "You will miss. Then you will be embarrassed on top of everything else today."

"How did you get into my apartment."

"Your landlord." He set the photograph down and finally turned. His eyes swept over her once, fast and clinical, like a man checking inventory. They stopped on her jacket. On the dark stain visible at the collar where she had not managed to cover it completely. Something moved across his face, quick and controlled, gone before she could name it. "Go and change. We need to leave earlier than six."

"You do not walk into my home."

"I just did." He picked up his jacket from the back of her sofa and put it on with the casual ease of a man who had never once been told no by a room. "Your landlord has been receiving payments from the same account that funded the man who followed you this morning. Whoever is watching you has been embedded in your life for longer than today. This apartment is not safe."

The pepper spray felt very small suddenly.

"You are lying to get me out faster."

"I do not need to lie to get what I want." He reached into his inside pocket and placed a folded document on her coffee table. "Your landlord's banking records. The first payment was four months ago. Two weeks after your father's debt was first flagged for collection."

She did not want to look at it.

She looked at it.

The numbers were real. The dates were real. The account reference number meant nothing to her but the timestamps were four months of cold proof that someone had been building a cage around her life long before this morning.

Her legs felt strange.

"Who is doing this."

"That is what you are going to help me find out." He moved toward the hallway. "You have ten minutes. Take what matters. Leave everything else."

"I have a brother who comes home at four."

Damien stopped.

"Where is he now."

"School. He finishes at three forty and he takes the number eleven bus and he is always home by four fifteen." She hated how easily the information came out, hated that she was already talking to him like he was someone she trusted. "I am not leaving without telling him where I am."

"Call him from the car." He looked at her with something that was not quite impatience and not quite something else. "He cannot come back here either. Not tonight."

"You cannot just relocate my entire family because—"

"Someone put a professional outside your hospital an hour after you visited your father." His voice stayed level but something underneath it shifted, something with weight. "They knew you went to see him. They knew what you asked him. That means either your father's room is being monitored or you were followed from Kane Global and I had my people sweep the building this morning." He let that land. "It was not my people following you, Elara. Which means someone else knew you were coming before you did."

The room felt smaller than it had this morning.

She thought about the photograph on her phone. Taken thirty seconds after she stepped outside the hospital. The four words that followed it. Walk away while you can.

She went to her bedroom and packed.

She was not fast about it because her hands were not cooperating but she was thorough. Seven minutes. Everything that mattered fit into one bag and one backpack and the fact that her entire life compressed that easily was something she was going to feel terrible about later when she had the space for it.

She came back out and Damien was on the phone, speaking quietly, his back to her. She caught three words before he registered her presence and ended the call. East side. Confirmed.

She filed that away.

The car waiting downstairs was black and large and the driver did not look at her once. Damien opened the door himself which surprised her for reasons she could not immediately explain. She got in. He got in the other side. The car pulled out immediately.

She called her brother.

Theo picked up on the second ring, loud background noise, the cafeteria probably, his voice already carrying that particular teenage energy that meant he was in the middle of something and answering out of obligation.

"El, I am literally about to—"

"Listen to me. Do not go home after school today. Go to Aunt Priya's. Tell her I called and I will explain later."

A beat of silence. The background noise dropped.

"What happened."

"Nothing serious. I just need you somewhere else tonight. Please, Theo. Aunt Priya. Do not go home."

Another silence. Her brother was seventeen and sharp and she heard him making the calculation, heard him deciding whether to push.

"Okay," he said. Just that. He trusted her the way she had trained him to trust her, completely and without requiring an explanation, and that trust sat in her chest right now like a stone.

She hung up and stared at the window.

"Smart kid," Damien said.

"Do not talk about him."

He did not push it.

The penthouse was everything she expected and nothing she was prepared for. Forty-ninth floor. Floor to ceiling windows on three sides. The city laid out below them like something decorative. The kind of space that communicated a very specific message: I have so much that I stopped noticing it.

His housekeeper, a small sharp-eyed woman named Mrs. Park, showed her to a room that was larger than her entire apartment. White walls, dark furniture, a bed so large it looked architectural. On the pillow was a folded card with a handwritten schedule. Hours. Duties. A list of eleven rules in clean precise handwriting.

She read all of them.

Rule four: Do not discuss personal matters with external parties.

Rule seven: Do not ask personal questions.

Rule eleven: Do not enter the east wing under any circumstances.

She looked up from the card. Mrs. Park was already gone. She was alone in a room that belonged to a man she did not trust in a building she could not leave without his knowing and a threat she could not identify sitting somewhere outside waiting for her to make a mistake.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

Her phone buzzed.

Same unknown number that had sent the photograph. Same number that had told her to walk away.

This time it was not four words.

This time it was one sentence and a photograph and the photograph was not of her.

It was of Theo.

Getting onto the number eleven bus.

Taken eleven minutes ago.