Buried Vows

Chapter Ten: The People He Trusts With His Life

Wren's Pov

Damian didn't tell me about the call until morning, over coffee I didn't taste, and by the time he finished repeating Silas's words back to me. I do hope you'll let me be the first to meet my niece properly, my hands had gone so still they might as well have belonged to someone else.

"He's not getting near me before Friday," I said.

"He isn't." Damian's voice was steady in the way that meant he'd already spent half the night calculating every version of that conversation. "But it means the timeline's compressed. He's not just suspicious anymore. He's confident enough to use the word niece out loud. Whatever caution he had left, he's decided it's not worth keeping."

An hour later he walked me into a conference room with four people I'd never met and one clear rule I understood without being told, watch everyone, trust no one yet.

Farrow I already knew, standing by the window with the stillness of a man who's spent twenty years in rooms where the wrong movement gets someone killed. A woman named Priscilla sat at the head of the table, legal pad already covered in notes, sharp enough that I understood immediately she'd fight Damian on every decision that put me at risk, which made her, oddly, the person in the room I trusted fastest. A younger man, Theo, sat across from her, studying me with the particular calculation of someone pricing risk for a living. And beside Farrow, a woman introduced only as Marguerite, Damian's aunt sat with her hands folded and an expression I couldn't read at all.

"This is Wren Hale," Damian said. "As of Friday, she'll be introduced publicly as my fiancée."

The silence lasted exactly as long as I expected.

"You didn't mention this," Priscilla said, setting down her pen. "An engagement is a corporate event, Damian. There are disclosure requirements"

"You'll have documentation by end of day."

"That's not what I asked."

"Ms. Hale is Aveline Cross," Damian said, and let the silence that followed do whatever work it needed to do.

I watched the information land differently on each of them. Priscilla's eyes narrowed with fast legal math. Theo went very still, the look of a man recalculating operational risk in real time. And Marguerite, Damian's aunt, quiet, careful Marguerite went pale in a way that didn't match anyone else's reaction at all.

"Marcus Cross's daughter," she said slowly. "The one who drowned."

"Who didn't," Damian said. "Who's been hiding for five years, and whose uncle just located her."

"This is insane." Priscilla's voice had gone flat, professional. "You're proposing a public engagement to the heir of a rival organization, four days after finding her, with no vetted security plan and no contingency for what happens when Silas decides the fastest solution is to eliminate you both at the event where you announce it."

"I have contingencies."

"I'd like to hear them from her." Theo nodded at me. "You've lived as someone else five years. That takes discipline. I'd like to know what kind, before I put my network anywhere near your name."

"I don't answer to you," I said, flat, unbothered, and watched something in Theo's expression shift, a flicker of respect he hadn't planned on offering this early. "But since you asked. I learned discipline watching people I loved get killed for being inconvenient, and deciding I'd rather be difficult to find than easy to explain."

Marguerite made a small sound, not quite a laugh, and looked at Damian with an expression I couldn't fully place. "She sounds like Elias."

Damian didn't answer that. I noticed the silence more than I noticed anything else in the room, the particular silence of a man protecting something, and I filed it away with everything else I was already keeping careful count of.

We spent the next hour on logistics I mostly understood and half trusted, the gala, the press strategy, a security perimeter Farrow refused to discuss in front of anyone but Damian. It was, by every measure, a productive meeting. It was also the first time I'd sat in a room with five people who each, individually, could destroy this entire arrangement if their loyalty ever cracked, and I found myself cataloguing their faces the same careful way I catalogue exits, out of habit more than suspicion.

The meeting was nearly over when Marguerite's phone buzzed, quiet, in her lap. She glanced at it, and something crossed her face, fast, controlled, gone almost before I caught it and she slid the phone into her bag without a word.

I watched Damian notice it too. I watched him decide, in real time, not to ask about it in front of the room.

"That's everything for today," he said, standing, and the meeting broke apart into the ordinary shuffle of people gathering folders and phones, and I might have let it go entirely if Marguerite hadn't paused beside me on her way out, close enough that only I could hear it.

"You have your mother's exact posture," she said quietly, not quite a compliment. "I knew her, you know. Before everything. I was there the night she made Marcus promise never to let Silas near either of her daughters." Her eyes held mine a beat too long. "He didn't keep that promise, in the end. I'd be careful, dear, about which promises in this room you decide to believe."