Loving My Enemy's Son

Chapter 3 — The Man on the Phone

LOVING MY ENEMY'S SON



Chapter 3 — The Man on the Phone







"Tiara?"



She couldn't answer him yet. She pressed the phone hard against her ear and let the sob work its way out of her instead, the first sound she'd allowed herself since her own teeth broke the skin on her hand.



"Listen to me," the voice said, low and steady, the kind of steady that felt almost like a hand on her shoulder. "I need you to breathe. Can you do that for me?"



"M-my mommy," she managed. "She told me to call. She said—"



"I know." Something in his voice shifted, tightened. "I know she did."



"Where are you?"



"On my way. I need you to tell me — are you still at the estate?"



"...Yes."



"Good. Stay exactly where you are. Don't come out for anyone but me." A pause, and she heard him say something sharp to someone else, muffled, urgent. "Where's your mother? Where's your father?"



Tiara didn't answer. She didn't have words for it yet, not out loud, not to a stranger on a phone.



That was when she heard it happen on his end — a sharp intake of breath, and behind it, faint but unmistakable through the connection, the sound of the fire on her end of the line, roaring loud enough now that it must have carried even through the phone's small speaker.



He understood before she said anything at all.



"I'm coming," he said, and something in his voice had gone rougher, faster. "Don't come out. I'm coming."



The line went dead.



---



She kept the phone pressed to her chest and watched the mansion burn through the gap in the leaves, and some small, stupid, stubborn part of her kept waiting for her parents to walk out of it anyway.



Maybe her father had only fallen. Maybe he was hurt, not — not what she was afraid he was. Maybe her mother was crawling somewhere safe right now, out of sight, and any minute now she would hear her name called across the garden in her mother's voice.



She watched the fire eat through the roofline. She watched a section of the east wing collapse in on itself with a crash loud enough to shake the ground beneath her. Neither of her parents walked out of anything.



She stayed anyway. Because she had promised.



---



Headlights broke through the smoke sometime later — she had lost all sense of how long, minutes stretched thin and endless — a line of black cars tearing up the long drive fast enough that gravel sprayed out behind them. Doors flew open before the vehicles had fully stopped. Men spread out across the grounds with a speed that told her, dimly, that these were not the same men as before.



A tall man was out of the lead car before it finished rolling, and the moment his eyes found the burning house, everything in him seemed to stop at once.



"No—"



He searched the garden first — she watched him find the two shapes on the stones and go completely still for one long, terrible second before he forced himself to keep moving, sending men in every direction, checking hedges one after another with the kind of urgency that made her chest ache in a way she didn't understand yet.



He reached hers third.



He crouched down but didn't reach for her, didn't even lean closer. "Tiara."



She didn't move.



"My name is Gabriel," he said, quiet, careful, the way you talk to something you're afraid of frightening off. "Gabriel Blackwood. Your father trusted me with things he trusted almost no one else with. I know you don't know me. I know you have no reason to believe a word I'm saying." He stayed exactly where he was, patient, unmoving. "But I promise you, on my life, I am not going to hurt you. I only want to get you somewhere safe."



Still she didn't move.



He was quiet a moment, thinking, and then he said something else — something lower, something that made her go very still on the other side of the branches.



"Your father used to say you liked the ending of the same book so much your mother read it to you every night for two years. He told me that himself, laughing about it, three weeks ago." A pause. "He wouldn't tell a stranger something like that. Only someone he trusted."



Something in her chest cracked open at that — not trust, not exactly, not yet, but the first small crack that trust might eventually grow through.



Slowly, the branches parted. A small hand came through first, crescent-shaped bite marks scored deep across the back of it, blood dried between the fingers.



Gabriel's face changed the instant he saw it. Something in it broke, quietly, completely, the look of a man understanding all at once exactly how long a child had been hiding there, and what it had cost her to stay silent that whole time.



"Oh," he said softly. "Oh, sweetheart."



He didn't reach for her. He simply opened his arms and let her decide the rest of the distance on her own.



She crawled into them.



---



"I want to see them," she said, the moment he lifted her, twisting to look back toward the garden. "I have to say goodbye."



Gabriel hesitated only a second before he nodded, and carried her close enough that he could set her down beside them himself.



She knelt first at her father's side, and shook his shoulder the way she might have if he'd only fallen asleep somewhere he shouldn't have, somewhere strange, somewhere that would make him laugh once he woke up and saw where he'd ended up.



"Daddy." Her voice barely made it past a whisper. "Wake up. Please wake up."



He didn't.



She crawled to her mother next, and took the cooling hand in both of hers, and pressed it against her own cheek the way her mother used to do to her when she had a fever, checking for warmth that wasn't there anymore.



"You promised." The words came apart as she said them. "You said I wouldn't lose you."



Some promises are made to be broken by the very people who mean them most.



She stayed there a long while — long enough that Gabriel didn't rush her, though she heard him murmur something to the men behind him, low, urgent, *give her a minute, just one minute* — and she said the small, ordinary things a child says when she doesn't yet understand that goodbye is supposed to be permanent. That she'd finish the tiramisu recipe properly next time. That she'd be a good doctor, the kind her father said she'd be. That she was sorry she hadn't come out sooner, hadn't tried harder, hadn't done something, anything, other than hide.



She cried until there was nothing left in her small body to cry with, curled between the two people who had built her entire world, while the fire behind them slowly ran out of house to eat.



Gabriel let her have every second of it.



---



It was the sound of the roof finally caving in — a crash loud enough to send sparks spiraling up into the dark — that seemed to bring her back into her own body. She flinched hard against Gabriel's side, and he crouched down beside her, gentle now in a different way than before.



"They might come back," he said quietly. "To make sure no one survived. I wish I could give you longer, Tiara. I wish I could give you all the time in the world. But we can't stay here."



She looked at her mother's face one last time.



Then she let him carry her to the car.



---



Neither of them spoke for a long while once they were moving. Tiara sat with her knees pulled to her chest, watching the smoke column shrink smaller and smaller in the rear window until the estate disappeared behind a bend in the road entirely, and something in her chest settled into a hollow, aching quiet that felt, in that moment, like it might stay that way forever.



She thought about her father stealing bread off her plate. She thought about her mother letting the tiramisu come out crooked every single time. She thought about the ordinary Tuesday that had somehow, impossibly, been the last one, and she hadn't even known to notice it while it was happening.



"Your father knew this day might come," Gabriel said finally, breaking the silence carefully, like he wasn't sure it was his to break. "The phone your mother gave you — that wasn't an accident. They'd prepared for the possibility that something like this might happen, and that you might need someone who could reach you fast." His jaw tightened. "I was supposed to be closer. I was away on an assignment for your father when it happened. I will spend a long time being sorry I wasn't here sooner than I was."



Tiara didn't answer right away. She let the words settle, the way she was learning, already, in the space of one night, to let things settle before she reacted to them.



"Why did they kill my parents?" she finally asked.



Gabriel's eyes found hers in the mirror. He didn't answer.



Her eyes narrowed, some old, sharp instinct already awake in her that she wouldn't fully understand for years — the same instinct that would one day make her very good at reading exactly what people weren't saying.



"You know," she said.