Kept by the kane men

Three rules

Elena

The estate sat at the end of a private road, forty minutes from the city and a lifetime from anywhere I had ever felt safe. It was not beautiful. It was built: grey stone, narrow windows, a roofline like a clenched jaw. Floodlights washed the lawn, and they didn't welcome anyone. They marked fields of fire.

"Home sweet home," Rafe said, killing the engine. "Don't let the charm fool you."

"Rafe," said Dominic.

"Sorry, boss. Welcome speech is over."

Inside, the hall was bare the way expensive things are bare: black floor, white walls, a staircase rising into shadow, not one photograph. My father's house had been loud with ego, with trophies and oil portraits of himself. This one held its breath.

The air smelled of lemon polish and cold stone. Somewhere a clock was ticking, slow and heavy, nothing like the small quick tick I'd heard in the car.

Two men in dark suits straightened at the foot of the stairs. Dominic gave them a nod I couldn't read, and they dissolved into the walls.

"Leave your coat," he said. "Rafe will have your things brought up."

"I don't have any things. You took my phone."

"Your phone is safe."

"Safe from whom?"

"From anyone who'd find you through it."

He shrugged off his own wet coat, and a woman I hadn't seen appeared, took it, and vanished.

"Come."

He led me down a corridor into a study: dark wood, a fire already burning, a desk bare except for one closed folder. He didn't sit. Neither did I.

Books lined one wall, but the spines were all the same dark leather, uncracked, bought by the yard. The only thing in the room that looked used was the armchair by the fire, and the dent in its cushion was the shape of exactly one man.

"Three rules," he said.

"I'll say them once."

"Do I get to refuse?"

"You get to say whatever you like. They remain rules." He raised one finger.

"One. You don't leave the grounds without me or Rafe. Not for a walk, not for air, not for a phone call. The gates open for us."

"Or what, the cellar?"

"Or someone puts you in the ground beside your father." He said it with no emphasis at all, which was worse.

"Two. Every room in this house is yours except the east wing, and this study when the door is shut. Three."

He paused, and for the first time something shifted in his voice, like a stone moving beneath still water.

"You eat. You sleep. You don't make yourself ill over this. I'm not explaining to a dead man why his daughter starved in my house." I stared at him.

"That's rule three? Eat?"

"Yes."

"You're threatening me with dinner."

"If it works."

It was so absurd, so unexpectedly human, that I almost laughed again. I bit it back and made myself cold instead.

"Who killed my father?"

The fire popped. Dominic's face didn't change, but the stillness in it deepened, the way a lake goes still before it freezes.

"The police say it was an accident."

"I didn't ask what the police say."

"No." He studied me.

"You didn't."

"Do you believe it?"

"I believe in what I can prove."

"And can you prove it?"

"Not yet."

Not yet. Two words, and the floor of the room tilted. He hadn't said it was an accident. He hadn't said it wasn't. He had only told me that he was looking, and that he would tell me when he found something, and he'd said it in the voice of a man who did not make promises he couldn't keep. I should have been comforted. I wasn't.

"The watch," I said.

"On your wrist. That's my father's." He didn't glance down.

"Yes."

"I buried him in it."

"I know." A beat.

"Ask me again when you've slept, Elena. You won't hear the answer tonight, and I'd rather you heard it properly."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I have." He turned toward the fire, dismissing me without ever raising his voice.

"Rafe will show you up."

Rafe was waiting in the corridor, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He straightened the moment I came out, like a man who'd been pretending not to listen and was about to be bad at it.

"So," he said.

"Rule three. He's been working on that one for a week."

"A week?"

"The speech. He rewrote it a few times." He fell into step beside me, hands in his pockets, taking the stairs two at a time and slowing when he noticed I wasn't. Up close he was a decade younger than Dominic, and he moved like someone who had never been afraid of a room in his life.

"Don't take it personally. He's like this with everyone. Worse with people he cares about."

"He doesn't care about me. He's barely spoken to me."

"Mm," said Rafe.

"That's one theory." I stopped on the landing.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing." The grin returned, quick and easy, like a lie he'd told so often it had become part of his face.

"It means you should sleep. East wing's off-limits, by the way. Not because of anything sinister. It's just where he keeps his, you know. Ghosts."

"You make it sound like a joke."

"I make everything sound like a joke. Occupational hazard." He glanced back down the stairs, and I followed his look.

Dominic had come to the foot of the staircase. He wasn't watching me. He was watching Rafe, and the look on his face was one I had no name for. Not the flat, closed look he'd worn all day. Something raw and tired and fiercely careful, a man looking at the one thing in a ruined house he hadn't yet lost. Rafe held his gaze a beat longer than a bodyguard should, and then Dominic turned away, and Rafe let out a breath I don't think he knew he'd been holding. I filed it away. I didn't understand it. Not yet.

"This way," Rafe said, a little too brightly.

He stopped at a door at the end of the upstairs hall and pushed it open.

The room was beautiful. High ceiling, tall windows with the curtains drawn, a bed with a white duvet, a fireplace with a low fire already catching. But it wasn't the size or the fire that stopped my breath.

It was the books. My books, the battered paperbacks I'd carried through three apartments and a degree, spines cracked, shelved in the order I always kept them, by the color of their covers, a habit nobody on earth knew about. My lamp, the green glass one I'd bought at a flea market. My grandmother's quilt folded over the chair. The photograph of my mother on the nightstand, with the chipped corner.

I walked in slowly. Everything was here. Everything I owned that mattered.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Then I pressed my palm into the mattress, and that was the detail that got me, because it was exactly as firm as I like it. Not soft, not hard. Nobody had ever asked me. Somebody had found out anyway.

"The apartment," I said.

"He told me the lease ended at five today."

"It did." Rafe was still in the doorway.

"Doesn't mean it was full."

"I haven't been back since the accident. Who packed this?"

"Boss had it done."

"When?"

He hesitated, and I saw it: the moment a man realizes he's about to put his foot through a floor.

"A couple of weeks ago," Rafe said. The room went very quiet.

"Two weeks," I said.

"My father was alive two weeks ago."

"Miss Voss--"

"He was alive. He called me on Sunday, three days before. We argued about nothing. He was alive." My voice cracked on the word.

"Why would Dominic Kane move my things into his house two weeks before my father died?"

"I wasn't supposed to say that." Rafe's grin was gone. Without it he looked younger and far more tired, and a good deal more like a man who'd been given an order he hadn't liked.

"Boss said you'd need it ready. That's all I know. He told me to get it done, and I did."

"Ready for what?"

"Goodnight, Miss Voss."

"Rafe--"

"Lock your door if it makes you feel better." He was already stepping back, drawing the door closed. Through the narrowing gap his dark eyes met mine, and what I saw in them wasn't menace or amusement. It was apology.

"The key's on the inside. For the record, I'd want one too." The latch clicked.

I stood in the middle of a room that had been waiting for me, among the small relics of my life, and listened to the fire and the rain and, somewhere far below, a house that was not mine settling around me like a held breath.

Somebody had known my father was going to die.

And whoever it was had made sure I'd have a place to sleep.