THE BLACKSTONE'S RECKONING

Chapter Six: The Hour Before Midnight

"Move her where?" Wendy's voice had dropped to something low and dangerous, the kind of quiet that came right before she did something Richard Blackstone would regret.

"I don't know yet." Alexander glanced back toward the house, jaw tight. "The call was vague on purpose, I think he knew I might be listening. But he said tonight. He said before she remembers anything else."

"She's not going anywhere." Wendy was already moving, mind racing three steps ahead of her feet the way it always did when the stakes turned real. "I need eyes on every exit of this house by nightfall. I need to know which car he's using, which staff he trusts enough to help him, and I need it in the next six hours."

Alexander caught her arm before she could walk off toward whatever plan had already assembled itself behind her eyes. "Wendy. Slow down. Who exactly do you think is going to hand you that information?"

She looked at him for a long moment, weighing something, and then said, flatly, "People who work for me."

"People who" Alexander stopped. Recalculated. "What people?"

"That's not something I'm ready to explain to a man I met four days ago who's been reporting on me to my uncle."

"I haven't reported anything." His voice sharpened, real frustration finally cracking through the careful composure he'd worn since the foyer. "Wendy, I told you about your father. I told you Richard's planning something tonight. If I wanted to help him, I would have handed you over the moment I found you standing in his study."

She held his gaze, searching it, and something in her chest loosened slightly, not trust exactly, but the absence of active suspicion, which for Wendy amounted to nearly the same thing.

"Fine," she said. "Then help me instead of questioning me."

By four that afternoon, Tobias had confirmed it. A car scheduled at eleven, a driver who wasn't one of the regulars, papers already drawn up for a property two states over, quiet, remote, the kind of place a woman with no memory and no family to ask questions could disappear into without anyone noticing for months.

"They're not moving her for her safety," Wendy said, pacing the length of the small guest cottage Tobias used as an unofficial meeting spot whenever business required discretion the house couldn't offer. "They're moving her because that folder proves something, and Richard's terrified of what happens if she's ever in a room with someone who could jog what's left of her memory."

"So we stop the car," Tobias said.

"We stop the car." Wendy's eyes cut to Alexander, who'd been quiet in the corner, listening with the particular stillness of a man recalculating everything he thought he knew about the woman in front of him. "You're not saying anything."

"I'm reconsidering several assumptions." A faint, almost helpless smile touched his mouth. "You run an operation. An actual operation. With men. And schedules. And apparently the ability to intercept a private vehicle on four hours' notice."

"Is that a problem?"

"No." He said it slowly, like the answer surprised even him. "It's the least surprising thing that's happened to me all week, honestly. It explains a great deal."

"Careful," Wendy said. "That almost sounded like a compliment."

"Don't get used to it."

Back at the main house, Sofia was having an entirely different crisis, one involving significantly less strategy and significantly more hair.

"He asked me where the good silverware was kept," she reported to Wendy in an urgent whisper as they passed each other in the hall, arms full of linens neither of them actually cared about right now. "Damien. He asked ME. Not you. Me. And then he told me I had, quote, an honest face, which I've decided to take as a compliment even though I have genuinely no idea what it means."

"Sofia, my mother is being kidnapped tonight."

"I'm aware, and I am extremely helpful and useful and available to assist, but also, an honest face, Wendy. What does that even mean. Do I look trustworthy? Do I look like someone who'd help him hide a body? Because those are very different compliments and I need to know which one I'm working with."

"I genuinely do not have the bandwidth for this right now."

"Fine, fine, priorities, I get it, kidnapping first, my emotional spiral later." Sofia fell into step beside her, voice dropping to something more useful. "What do you need me to do?"

"Keep Patricia distracted after dinner. She notices everything, and if she notices staff moving oddly tonight she'll go straight to Richard."

"Distracted how?"

"I don't care. Spill something. Compliment her taste in curtains. Ask her fifteen questions about flower arrangements. You're very good at making people talk about themselves for uncomfortably long periods of time."

"That is either the nicest or meanest thing you've ever said to me and I choose to receive it as the former."

Dinner that night stretched long and strange, every ordinary motion weighted with everything none of them were saying aloud. Richard held court at the head of the table, cheerful and expansive, entirely unaware, or performing unaware so well that Wendy couldn't tell the difference anymore, that the woman quietly refilling water glasses at his elbow was three hours away from stopping his plan cold.

Elizabeth hummed her nameless tune while she worked, oblivious to the fact that she was the entire reason the whole house had gone electric with tension.

At half past ten, Wendy slipped out the servants' entrance into the dark, dressed once again in the black that belonged to her other life, Tobias waiting two streets over exactly where he always waited. Alexander was already in the car when she climbed in, having insisted, over her fairly firm objections, that he wasn't about to sit in a guest room while a woman his own father had once tried to protect got driven off into the night.

"You didn't have to come," Wendy said.

"I know." He met her eyes, steady, something unspoken sitting behind them. "I wanted to."

They intercepted the car eleven minutes outside the estate, on the quiet stretch of road where the streetlights thinned to nothing, Tobias's headlights cutting across the driver's path with the kind of confidence that left no room for negotiation.

The driver, a stranger, young and clearly out of his depth, put both hands up the second Wendy stepped out of the car. Whatever Richard had told him to expect tonight, it hadn't been this.

Elizabeth sat in the back seat, small and pale and utterly bewildered, blinking against the sudden headlights like someone waking from a dream she hadn't chosen.

"Wendy?" Her voice cracked with confusion. "What's happening? Why am I"

"You're safe, Mama." Wendy pulled the door open and helped her out, hands steady even though her heart wasn't. "You're not going anywhere tonight. I promise."

Elizabeth's eyes, glassy and lost, drifted past her daughter's shoulder toward Alexander standing in the headlights' spill.

And stopped.

Her whole body went rigid.

"You," Elizabeth whispered, the word barely audible, terror bleeding into her voice in a way Wendy had never once heard from her mother in five years. "I know you. I know your face. You were there. You were there that night, in the"

She never finished the sentence. Her knees buckled, and Wendy barely caught her before she hit the ground, Elizabeth's eyes rolling back, her whole body gone limp and shaking in a way that looked less like fainting and more like a memory finally, violently, breaking through five years of careful silence all at once.