FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

14

Chapter 14

I called my mother.

Right there in that corridor with the board member three feet away and four men watching me and Eli Cole standing behind his brother like a ghost who had finally decided to be real again.

She answered on the second ring.

She said: Sienna. I have been waiting for you to call.

I said: How long have you known Eli Cole.

A pause. Long enough to confirm everything.

She said: Three years.

I said: You came to this campus.

She said: Once. To meet him in person. He reached out to me because of your father. Because he had found evidence connecting your father to people I had been trying to protect you from for years.

I said: You should have told me.

She said: You were not supposed to come back here. I thought if I kept it contained you would never have to know any of it.

I looked at the photograph in my hand. My mother on a campus path, her face turned toward a young man who had risked everything to warn her.

I said: You let me walk back into this without a word.

She said: I tried to stop you. I told you the scholarship renewal could wait. I told you another semester off would not matter.

She had. I had not listened.

I said: We will talk later. Properly. All of it.

She said: I know. I am sorry, Sienna.

I hung up.

The corridor was silent.

I turned to the board member. He was watching me with the expression of someone who had deployed his weapon and was waiting to see the damage.

I said: You thought that photograph would fracture us. You thought if I saw my mother's face in it I would stop trusting the people around me.

He said nothing.

I said: She was trying to protect me. That is all that is in that photograph. A mother and a young man who both knew something dangerous and were trying to figure out how to keep someone they cared about safe.

I held the photograph out to Kane. He took it without looking away from the man in front of us.

I said: You have nothing.

The board member's composure finally cracked. Not dramatically. Just at the edges, a tightening around his eyes, the specific look of a man watching a plan dissolve.

He said: You cannot prove anything from that room. The chain of evidence is compromised. None of it is legally admissible.

Kane said: I do not need it to be admissible yet. I need it to be true. The admissible part comes later.

Axel stepped forward and the board member went still the way people went still around Axel, which was immediately and completely.

Axel said: You are going to want to leave this building now. And you are going to want to speak to a lawyer before you speak to anyone else.

It was not a threat. It was information delivered with the calm of someone who did not need to threaten anyone.

The board member left.

The six of us stood in the corridor and nobody spoke for a moment and then River said: That was either the end of something or the beginning of something worse.

Kane said: Both, probably.

Eli looked at me. He had not spoken directly to me yet. Up close his resemblance to Draven was striking and specific, not just the eyes but the quality of attention, that focused stillness that seemed to be a Cole family trait.

He said: You held that together.

I said: We all did.

He said: No. He looked at his brother and then back at me. I have been watching this campus for three years and in three years no one has moved as fast or trusted the right people as accurately as you have in six days. Whatever he told them about you, he was right to be worried.

I did not know what to do with that so I did what I always did with things I did not know what to do with.

I moved forward.

The rest of the morning was logistics. Axel secured the administrator's office and began the formal documentation process. Kane contacted his legal team. River got Dean on the phone and updated him on everything in the compressed efficient way of someone who had spent years distilling complicated situations for a difficult audience.

Draven and Eli disappeared into a side room together and I did not interrupt them.

By two in the afternoon the immediate crisis had contracted from a boil to a simmer and I had not eaten since yesterday and my hands were shaking from caffeine and adrenaline and the accumulated weight of a week that had lasted approximately forty years.

Kane found me in the east garden sitting on the low stone wall with my face turned up to the weak afternoon sun.

He sat beside me without speaking. Close enough that his thigh pressed against mine and the warmth of him cut through the cold.

I said: Is it over.

He said: This part. The next part starts when his lawyers make contact.

I said: How long do we have.

He said: Tonight, probably. Maybe tomorrow.

I turned to look at him. The afternoon light did something different to his face, made it less architectural somehow, more human. He was looking at the garden with his jaw slightly loose and his eyes quiet and he looked tired in a way I had not seen on him before.

I said: When did you last sleep.

He said: Define sleep.

I said: Kane.

He looked at me. Something in his expression shifted, the last of the control he had been running on releasing all at once, and he said: I have been terrified for six days. Every time you walked into a room alone. Every time I could not account for your location. Every time one of the others got to you before I did.

I said: Every time one of the others got to me.

He said: I am aware of how that sounds.

I said: It sounds like jealousy.

He said: It sounds like a man who has never wanted anything he could not control suddenly wanting something he cannot.

The honesty of it landed on me like warm water.

I took his hand. He looked down at it and then at me and I pulled him up from the wall and said: Come with me.

My room was quiet and the afternoon light came through the curtains in pale strips and Kane stood in the center of it and looked around like he was taking inventory and then looked at me like I was the only item on the list that mattered.

I crossed to him.

What followed was nothing like the kiss in the garden or the wall in his office. Those had been urgent, charged with everything unsaid. This was Kane with nothing left to prove and nowhere to be and the full weight of his attention turned on me without any of the careful management he usually kept between himself and the things he wanted.

He was devastating at close range.

Slow and completely deliberate, each movement chosen, his hands and his mouth learning me with a thoroughness that made thinking impossible. He said my name once in the middle of it, low and unguarded, and it was the most undone I had ever heard him sound and it undid me in return.

Every defense he had ever carried was gone.

Afterward he held me against his side with one arm and his other hand rested over mine on his chest and I could feel his heartbeat gradually finding its normal rhythm.

He said: I want this to be real. After all of it. When there is nothing pressing on it.

I said: It already is.

He said: I mean I want mornings. And ordinary evenings. And arguments about things that do not matter.

I turned my face to look at him. His eyes were closed and his face was loose and open and he looked more like a person and less like a fortress than I had ever seen him.

I said: You want ordinary.

He said: With you. Desperately.

I stayed in the quiet of that for a moment.

Then my phone rang.

It was a number I did not recognise. Not unknown. Just unfamiliar.

I answered.

The voice on the other end was male and unhurried and it said: Miss Cross. My name is not important. What is important is that the man who just left your building did not go to his lawyer.

I sat up.

The voice said: He went to your father's hotel room. They have been in there for forty minutes. And twenty minutes ago your father made a call to someone at this university whose name is going to surprise you.

I said: Who.

The voice said the name.

Kane's eyes opened.

Because the name was his.