Kept by the kane men

Elena My father was buried on a Thursday, in the rain, and he would have hated every minute of it. Marcus Voss didn't trust weather he couldn't bribe. I stood under an umbrella someone else had opened for me and counted the mourners. Forty-one men in dark coats. I could name six of them. The rest had the look of people at an auction, there to see who else had shown up and what the house might fetch. The priest talked about peace. I watched a man by the cypress check his phone. I was twenty-three and I hadn't cried yet. Three days earlier my father's car had gone off the coast road with him in it, and the police had called it an accident in the careful voice of men who'd been told what to call it. Since then I had signed forms and nodded at lawyers and eaten half a piece of toast. Nobody warns you that grief is mostly paperwork. My father's death had been tidy that way. Everything about it came with a form, a fee, a signature line. What it didn't come with was a reason, and I kept waiting for someone to hand me one, the way they'd handed me the pen. "Miss Voss." Harold Pryce, my father's attorney, had come up beside me smelling of wet wool and cough drops. He was seventy, and he looked like a man who'd read the future and found it badly drafted. "Whatever happens at the house this afternoon," he said, "I'd ask you to keep your temper." "Why would I lose it?" He didn't answer. He was looking past my shoulder, and so, I realized, was everyone else. Dominic Kane had arrived. I'd met him maybe a dozen times, always at the edge of some room. He was the man my father talked to behind closed doors, the one whose name made the staff go quiet and the drivers stand up straighter. My father called him his partner. He said it the way you call a wolf a dog so the neighbors won't panic. He walked up the gravel path without an umbrella. The rain soaked his coat through at the shoulders and he ignored it. Early forties, gray coming in at the temples, a hard, handsome face that seemed to have given up on being pleasant years ago. The crowd opened for him. Nobody stepped aside, exactly. They just weren't where he was going. He stopped at the grave and looked at the casket for a long time. A muscle moved in his jaw. Then he took a white rose from inside his coat, held it, and let it drop. It was the only grief I'd seen all day that looked like it cost anything. I hated him for it immediately. Then he turned and looked at me. Men have looked at me before. They've sized me up, and worse. This wasn't that. He looked at me like a man checking a door he'd been told was locked: slowly, thoroughly, making sure. His eyes were gray and flat as a winter sky. "Elena," he said. His voice was low and unhurried, and he said my name like he'd been saying it for years. "I'm sorry about your father." "Are you?" Something happened at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't a smile, just the place where one might go. "More than you'll believe," he said. Then he walked away before I could answer. I would learn that was how he won most of his arguments. My father's house was too full. Strangers stood in the marble hall eating canapés under his portrait, and I moved through them like something nobody could see until Harold took my elbow and steered me into the study. Nobody had been allowed in that room while my father was alive. Now it held four of us: Harold, a junior clerk with a briefcase, me, and Dominic Kane, standing at the window with his back to the room. My father's reading glasses were still folded on the blotter. I was looking at them when Harold cleared his throat. "The will is unusual," he said. "I'll read the relevant portion." Legal language is always dry right before it wrecks your life. Harold read and I listened, and the sentences piled up: the companies, the properties, the accounts, all held in trust, all mine on my twenty-fifth birthday. Until then they would be administered by a trustee, who would also serve as my guardian. "Mr. Dominic Kane," Harold finished. His voice had gotten very small. It landed like a glass breaking in another room. I knew what it was before I understood it. "Guardian," I said. "I'm twenty-three. I'm an adult." "The trust requires--" "I have a degree and an apartment and a job. I haven't lived in this house in four years." "Your father was very specific." Harold rubbed his eyes. "Residence is part of the guardianship. You live under Mr. Kane's roof until the trust matures. If you refuse, the estate goes to the creditors listed in Schedule C." "What creditors?" Harold didn't look at Dominic. He didn't need to. "My father didn't have creditors." "Your father," Dominic said, "had a great many things he didn't tell you." He'd turned from the window. It was the first time I saw all of him: tall, still, hands loose at his sides, a man who had never once needed to raise his voice. "Did you ask for this?" I said. "No." "Did you want it?" A pause, just long enough to notice. "No." "Then refuse it." "I can't." "Can't or won't?" "Both." It was the most honest answer anyone had given me all week, and it scared me more than a lie would have. I laughed, a high cracked sound, and clapped a hand over my mouth. The room swam. I was going to be sick or scream or, finally, finally, cry in front of a man who looked like he'd watched people do it before and found it dull. I did none of them. I put my chin up. "I won't live in your house." "Then you'll live nowhere," he said, not unkindly. "Your lease belongs to a company that stops existing at five o'clock. Your accounts are frozen until probate clears. Some of the men downstairs aren't mourners, Elena. They're bidders." He glanced at the door. "Your father built a very large house on a very thin floor. I'm the only thing holding it up." "Why would I trust you?" "You shouldn't." He said it flatly, like a weather report. "But you'll come, because the alternative is worse. Get your coat." The car was black and silent and warmer than it had any right to be. A driver I didn't know, a second car close behind. Nobody asked where I wanted to go. The driver caught my eye in the mirror. Dark hair that wouldn't behave, a crooked grin that looked wrong on a day like this, a thin white scar through one eyebrow. "Rafe Moreau," he said. "I'm the one who keeps you breathing, Miss Voss. Figured you should know the face." "Eyes on the road, Rafe," Dominic said, without heat. "Always, boss." But the grin hung on a second longer, and when Rafe's gaze went from Dominic to me and back, something passed between the two men, quick and wordless, like one hand closing around another. Dominic sat beside me and took up the whole back seat without trying. I stared out at the rain until my breath fogged the glass. He didn't talk. The silence went on so long it started to feel like a conversation. I thought about the apartment I'd left that morning with a coffee cup still in the sink. I thought about my father's voice on the phone Sunday, impatient, already half hanging up. I thought about how nobody I'd met today had said the word murder, and how loudly all of them had been not saying it. "Is it far?" I asked finally. "Forty minutes." "Do I get a phone?" "Not tonight." "Am I a prisoner?" "You're a ward," Dominic Kane said. "The difference will become clear." I turned to look at him properly. I wanted something cutting. I wanted to tell him my father had been a good man, or at least a better one than whatever this was, and that I'd find out what he'd been hiding and Dominic would regret every minute. Then we passed under a streetlight and the light slid over his wrist, where his cuff had ridden up. A watch. Steel, scratched, the crystal cracked, the leather strap worn pale. It was cheap and ugly and my father had worn it every day of my life. I knew its tick like I knew my own pulse. The night before, at the viewing, I'd stood alone at the casket and buckled it onto his cold wrist myself, because I couldn't stand to bury him without it. It was ticking now. I could hear it in the quiet of the car, small and steady under the rain. I looked up. Dominic was already watching me. He'd seen exactly where my eyes had gone. He didn't cover it. He didn't explain. He just looked at me, gray eyes unreadable in the dark, and let the silence answer for him. The car turned between iron gates, and the gates closed behind us.