The Contract She Wrote

Chapter 6

The summons came the next morning, delivered by Mrs. Whitfield with the same flat courtesy she used for everything.

"Mr. Vance senior wishes to see you," she said. "In the conservatory, at eleven."

A chill slid down Elena's spine. She kept her face perfectly still.

"Of course," she said. "Thank you, Mrs. Whitfield."

The housekeeper left, and Elena stood alone in her rooms and felt the floor tilt, just slightly, as it had not tilted since the day of the funeral. She had known this moment would come. She had planned for it. She had rehearsed it a hundred times in the dark of her rented room. Now it was here, and her hands were cold. She hated herself a little for that.

Victor Vance. The man who had killed her father.

She had not seen him in three years. The last time had been at some function her father had dragged her to, a crowded room and a tall man with a cold smile and eyes that weighed everyone he looked at. She had been a girl then. She had not known what he was.

She knew now.

She had spent the last three years learning everything there was to know about the man, as a hunter learns the shape of the thing she means to bring down. She knew his habits, his temper, the names of the men who owed him and the men who feared him. He never raised his voice, because he had never needed to. He kept a loaded revolver in a drawer of his study, because a man with that many enemies never slept without a door he could lock and a weapon he could reach.

She knew, too, that he had a weak heart, and that the doctors had told him to avoid excitement. He ignored them, because a man such as Victor Vance did not believe that anything in the world could kill him except the thing he had not yet thought of.

That was his weakness, if he had one. The belief that he had already won.

She dressed carefully, in something simple and gray, nothing that would draw his eye, nothing that would make her memorable. A woman who meant to survive in a house of wolves did not dress to be noticed. She dressed to be forgotten.

At eleven she walked into the conservatory.

It was a long glass room full of green things that had no business surviving an English winter. It was warm inside, and the light came in soft through fogged panes, and the air smelled of damp earth and orchids. Victor Vance sat in a wicker chair at the far end of it, a cup of tea balanced on his knee.

He looked up when she came in. He smiled.

It was a terrible smile, the smile of a man who had been told a joke whose ending he already knew.

"Elena." He said her name as a man might name a new horse he was thinking of buying. "Come in. Sit down. I've been looking forward to this."

She sat in the chair across from him. She met his eyes. She did not look away.

It cost her more than she would ever admit.

"Damian tells me very little," Victor said, "which is his way. I had to learn about you from the papers." He sipped his tea, watching her over the rim of the cup. "The papers were not kind, I'm afraid. They never are, to women such as you."

"I've stopped reading them," Elena said quietly.

"Have you? Sensible." He set the cup down. "Let me be frank with you, since I'm an old man and frankness is the only luxury left to me. My son married you to spite me. I arranged a perfectly good match for him, and he went out and bought himself a contract wife from the gutter rather than take it."

The words were spoken without heat, as a man might remark on a small annoyance in the weather. Elena let them wash over her and did not flinch.

"With respect, Mr. Vance," she said, "I came from a house that owed eight million dollars, not from a gutter."

Something flickered in his eyes. Surprise. Then something colder.

"Did you now," he said softly. "And whose house was that?"

The question hung in the warm air between them.

Elena had known it was coming. She had known from the moment she sat down that he would test her, and this was the test, the first of many. Everything she had spent years building depended on the next words out of her mouth.

"The Wards," she said. "My father was a small man. He made small mistakes. They cost more than he could pay."

Victor said nothing. Then he smiled again, and this time there was a little more weight behind it.

"The Wards," he repeated, as if he were tasting the name and finding it uninteresting. "I don't recall them. But then, I don't recall most small men."

"No," Elena said. "I don't imagine you would."

She meant it as a small barb, and she let it land. She watched him decide whether to be offended, and then she watched him decide not to be, with the arrogance of a man who had never once in his life needed to notice the small men he had stepped on.

"Tell me," he said, leaning back, "what does a woman such as you want out of a year in my son's house?"

"The same thing the contract says," Elena said. "The debt paid. A clean end. Nothing more."

"And my son? What do you make of him?"

The question was casual, but Elena heard the hook in it. He was really asking whether she was weak enough to fall in love with the man he was trying to control.

She thought of the west wing. Of the lamp burning. Of Damian's cold eyes in the dark corridor.

"He's very like his father," she said.

She said it flat and without flattery, as she had planned to say it. She watched the old man's face to see what he would do with it. She had decided weeks ago that the safest way to survive Victor Vance was to give him exactly what he did not expect. Not fear, which he saw every day. Not flattery, which he heard from everyone. But a quiet refusal to be impressed.

It worked, more or less. The old man's eyes narrowed, and then he laughed, that dry sound. She knew she had passed some small test she had not even known she was taking.

She watched a flicker of something unreadable cross Victor's face, and she had said the one thing that would make him remember her.

Victor Vance laughed, a dry sound with no warmth in it at all.

"You'll do," he said. "For a year. You'll do."

He dismissed her with a wave of his hand, as he might dismiss a servant. Elena rose and walked out of the conservatory with her head high and her hands steady. She did not let herself breathe until she was back in her rooms with the door locked behind her.

Then she leaned against the door and pressed her hands flat against the wood. She let the shaking come. All of it. The fear, the fury, the grief she had been holding behind her teeth for three years.

He had looked at her, and he had not recognized her.

That was the first battle, and she had won it.

But as she stood there shaking, she knew something else, something colder. The old man was not fooled easily. He had watched her too closely, and the smile he had given her at the end had been the smile of a man who had decided to find out exactly who she was.

The year, she realized, was not going to be as long as she had hoped.

She stood at the window for a long time after that, looking out at the gardens and the gray sky and the oaks that lined the drive, and she made herself think about what had just happened. She had sat across from the man who had killed her father. She had smiled. She had lied. She had walked away with her life and her secret both intact.

It should have felt like a victory. It did not. It felt like the first move in a game she could still lose, and the board was only just beginning to fill.

She turned from the window and crossed to the small desk in the corner of her rooms, where a blank sheet of paper and a pen had been left for her, as if the house expected her to write letters. She did not write. She sat with the pen in her hand and let the silence settle, and she thought about the old man's smile, and about what it might cost her before the year was through.