The alarm came at eleven-forty, a hard electronic bark through every hallway of the estate, and within ninety seconds the house had gone from quiet grief to controlled chaos — men moving to windows, lights cutting out floor by floor, Damian's hand closing around Elena's arm before she'd even fully processed what the sound meant.
"Perimeter breach," he said, already pulling her away from the study, away from the windows, deeper into the house. "East side, near the wall you climbed over this morning."
"Could be nothing. Could be an animal."
"Could be. Nobody's taking that chance tonight." His grip didn't loosen until they were three rooms deep, in a windowless guest suite near the center of the house that Elena recognized as one of the safe rooms her father had built into the estate decad
