Heiress by blood, His by Fate

Chapter Four - Dinner with the Devil

I left the note exactly where I found it, because something told me that picking it up while someone could be watching was not the right move, and in this house, someone was always watching.

I changed into the only decent dress I had brought, a simple dark blue one that my aunt had given me two birthdays ago, and I sat on the edge of the bed for a while just breathing, trying to organise my thoughts before I had to walk into a room full of people who already had opinions about me.

Lucien knocked at six on the dot.

I opened the door, and he looked at me once, the kind of quick look that took in everything without lingering on anything.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Not even close," I said.

Something moved across his face, so fast I almost missed it, and it might have been amusement, or it might have been nothing.

"Stay close," he said, and turned.

I followed him through corridors I hadn't seen yet, deeper into the house, where the ceilings got higher, and the paintings got older, and the sound of our footsteps got swallowed by the space around us.

The dining room was at the back of the estate.

The doors were already open.

I heard voices before I saw anyone.

Lucien stopped just outside.

"Victor Voss is the patriarch of this family," he said quietly, "he speaks carefully, and he listens to everything. Don't give him more than he asks for."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because everything you say to him becomes something he owns."

I looked at him.

"Are you warning me about my own family?" I said.

"Yes," he said simply.

He pushed the door open.

The room was long and lit by candles along the centre of the table, warm and golden and deliberately beautiful, the kind of room designed to make you feel small without showing you anything sharp.

There were five people already seated.

Selene sat near the middle, watching me arrive with that same unreadable expression.

Ethan was near the far end, and he looked up and gave me a small nod that felt like the warmest thing in the room.

Two other people I didn't recognise sat further down.

And at the head of the table, in a chair that was slightly larger and slightly more positioned than all the others, sat an old man.

He was not what I expected.

He looked like someone's grandfather, silver-haired and broad-shouldered, with kind eyes behind thin glasses and the kind of face that looked like it had spent a lifetime being trusted.

He rose when I walked in.

"Arielle," he said, and his voice was soft and warm, "welcome home, my child."

Something in my chest shifted, and I hated that it did, because I knew better than to let warmth from a stranger make me feel safe.

"Thank you," I said.

"Come, sit near me," he said, gesturing to the chair at his right.

I sat.

Lucien took a seat a few places down, not far, but far enough that the distance was noticeable.

Victor looked at me for a moment, the way people look when they are searching for something familiar in a face.

"You look like her," he said quietly.

My hands stilled in my lap.

"Like who?" I asked.

His expression softened.

"Your mother," he said, "Isabella had the same eyes."

The name hit me like cold water.

My mother's name was not something I heard often, and hearing it here in this house, from this man, felt like something being pulled out of a place it had been buried.

"You knew her?" I asked, and I tried to keep my voice even.

"Of course," he said, "she was family."

I looked at him carefully.

"She died when I was seven," I said.

He held my gaze.

"Yes," he said, and his voice stayed soft, "a tremendous loss, it changed everything for all of us."

I wanted to push further, to ask every question that had been sitting inside me since I was old enough to have questions, but Lucien's words were still fresh in my head, don't give him more than he asks for.

So I nodded.

And I picked up my fork.

Dinner moved around me, conversations between Selene and the two guests I didn't know, small talk that felt performed, Victor asking me gentle questions about my life that I answered in short, careful sentences.

Ethan caught my eye once from down the table and gave me a look that I couldn't fully read, something between sympathy and caution, and then he looked away.

By the time dinner ended, I felt more exhausted than before it started.

Victor walked me to the corridor himself.

"I know this is a lot," he said, "a new home, new people, new responsibilities, it takes time to settle."

"Yes," I said.

He placed a hand gently on my shoulder.

"You are safe here," he said, and his eyes were so steady and kind that for one weak moment I almost believed him.

"Thank you," I said.

He smiled and walked away.

I stood in the corridor alone.

Lucien appeared beside me a moment later.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Like I just sat through something I don't fully understand," I said.

He looked at me steadily.

"Good," he said, "hold onto that feeling."

I was halfway to my room when I remembered the note on the windowsill, and when I pushed open my door and crossed to the window, my heart dropped clean to the floor, because the note was gone, and in its place was something else, a single photograph of a woman I recognised immediately from the worn picture my aunt had kept in a drawer for years, my mother, alive, dated just three months ago.