CHECKMATE YOUR GRACE

Chapter Ten: The Address

Serena didn't sleep.

She sat at the long table in her study until well past three in the morning, the folded slip of paper smoothed flat in front of her, the address on it committed to memory the way she committed everything to memory instantly, permanently, whether she wanted to or not.

17 Rue des Bergues. Tomorrow, 9 p.m.

Damian had insisted on staying. Not in the house he'd been precise about that boundary himself, some old-fashioned instinct she found more disarming than she wanted to admit but in the guest wing, close enough that Alix's team could keep both of them inside the same perimeter until morning. He'd come to find her twice already, both times without a word, just the quiet weight of him in the doorway until she told him she was fine, and both times he'd looked at her like he didn't quite believe it and chosen not to push anyway.

She was grateful for that more than she planned to tell him.

By four, she'd run the address through every database she had access to, official and otherwise. It came back to a private art gallery in the old town, closed to the public for renovations for the past eight months, ownership buried three shell companies deep in a way that felt, by now, depressingly familiar.

"You should be asleep," Damian said from the doorway.

She didn't look up. "So should you."

"I don't sleep well the night before someone hands me a location and a countdown." He crossed the room and set two cups of coffee on the table, one in front of her, and pulled out the chair beside her without asking. "What did you find?"

"A gallery. Closed for renovation. Owned by nothing I can trace past the third shell company, which means whoever set this up learned the same lessons my father did." She pushed the printout toward him. "It's a trap, Damian. It has to be. Nobody who wanted a fair conversation would arrange it like this."

"Probably." He studied the printout, jaw tight. "Which means we don't walk in there alone, and we don't walk in there without knowing every exit before we're inside."

"I already told Alix to run the building's schematics. She'll have something by morning."

"Good." He was quiet for a moment, turning his coffee cup slowly without drinking from it. "Serena. Before tomorrow I need to ask you something, and I need an honest answer, not the version of the truth you give people who haven't earned it yet."

She finally looked up at him. "That's oddly specific phrasing."

"I've had a lot of hours tonight to think about phrasing." His eyes held hers, steady, none of the boardroom coldness left in them at all. "Whoever's doing this knows things about your family, about mine, about a marriage arranged before either of us was born. They want us to be afraid of each other. Instead" He paused, like even he wasn't fully sure how to say it. "Instead I keep finding myself more certain of you with every hour that passes, not less. And I need to know if that's mutual, or if I've spent the last four days making a fool of myself over a woman who's simply better than I am at hiding what she actually feels."

The study went very quiet.

Serena set down the printout, and for a long moment she said nothing at all, the silence stretching taut between them in a way that felt, to her, considerably more dangerous than any of the night's actual threats.

"I don't let people in," she said finally. "Not because I don't want to. Because every single time I have, it's cost me something I couldn't get back. My father taught me that lesson before I was old enough to understand I was learning it." She held his gaze. "And I have spent every hour since you knocked on my door tonight trying to decide whether letting you in is the smartest thing I've ever done, or the most reckless."

"Which is it?"

"I don't know yet." Her voice was quiet, unguarded in a way he hadn't heard from her before. "But I know that when that message told me to run tonight, the only thing I actually thought about wasn't the danger. It was whether you were still behind me."

Something shifted in his expression not triumph, nothing that simple. Something closer to relief, the particular relief of a man who had spent eleven years assuming he'd never let himself want something enough to be afraid of losing it, discovering he'd been wrong.

He didn't reach for her. Some careful instinct in him seemed to understand that this moment belonged to her to close, not him.

So she closed it.

She reached across the small distance between their chairs and laid her hand over his on the table, deliberate, steady despite everything.

"Tomorrow," she said, "we walk into that gallery together. Whatever's waiting for us. And whatever happens after that I'm done pretending I don't know exactly what this is becoming."

"And what is it becoming?"

"Something I don't have a strategy for." The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile, something more honest than that. "Which terrifies me considerably more than an unmarked car outside R's building ever did."

Damian turned his hand beneath hers, closing around it properly for the first time all night not urgent, not searching for reassurance the way it might have been hours earlier, just steady, certain, the way he did everything once he'd finally decided.

"Then we're terrified together," he said. "Starting tomorrow, at nine."

Neither of them moved to let go.

Outside, the first grey edge of dawn was beginning to show over the lake, and somewhere across the city, in a gallery that had been closed to the public for eight months, someone was already waiting for the sun to set again.