No matter how hot the water was, Elena couldn’t get her hands to lose the feeling of blood on them, constantly finding more blood in cracks and under her nails. The blood on Elena’s hands turns the white lather a rusty, diluted pink, swirling down the drain between their feet. Lisa’s hands are also scrubbing at her forearms, which were even worse than her own. The bar of soap was dragging over her skin, already pink and raw. She could see blood on the tile, smeared where they stumbled in. The steam mixing smells of iron and lavender body wash.
“Talk,” Lisa says. Her voice is a thin wire, stretched taut. Her own clothes are soaked, her shirt clinging to bloody water. She doesn’t look at Elena’s face. She scrubs. “Who the fuck was that? Why were they shooting at us? At Victor?”
Elena watches the pink water circle the drain. Her hands are trembling. “I don’t know.”
Lisa’s head snaps up. Her eyes are wide, the amused glint gone, replaced by a stark, jarring fear. “Bullshit. Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare, ‘I don’t know’ me, Elena. He was after us. This wasn’t some random shooting. He chased and shot at Us. Your driver just took a bullet. People don’t get shot at over an art consultancy. What is this place?”
“I can’t—” Elena starts, the contract a cold, silent collar around her throat. She looks at her friend’s terrified face and feels the lie curdle on her tongue. “It’s complicated. Business.”
“Business.” Lisa laughs, a sharp, broken sound. She drops the soap. It thuds against the tile. “You are a terrible liar. You always have been. You're always twitchy. Right now. You’re twitching. So stop it. Tell me what is going on here.”
Elena reaches to turn off the water. The sudden silence is deafening, filled only with their ragged breathing and the drip from the showerhead. She steps out onto the bathmat, water puddling around her. Her uniform is ruined, dark with blood and water. “Lisa, please. I can’t tell you.”
“Fine!” Lisa shouts, the sound echoing off the marble walls. She yanks a towel from the rack and throws it at Elena. It hits her chest and falls. “I’m going home. Because this? This is apparently some kind of fucking warzone you’re living in, and you’re standing here giving me nothing. ‘Business.’ ‘Complicated.’ My hands are covered in your bodyguard’s blood!”
She holds her hands up, fingers splayed. They are clean now, from the water, but she stares at them as if they’re still stained. She’s shaking.
“I want to tell you,” Elena whispers, the words ripped from somewhere deep and bruised. “You have no idea how much I want to tell you.”
“Then tell me!” Lisa’s voice cracks. “What is he holding over you? Is he threatening you? Is it money? What does he have that you can’t tell me?”
Elena just shakes her head, mute. The terms are ironclad. Disclosure voids the agreement. Voids her brother’s safety. She wraps the towel around herself, the cotton rough against her chilled skin.
Lisa watches her. The anger drains from her face, leaving something worse: a hollow, disappointed understanding. “You can’t. He won’t let you.” She says it flatly. She nods, once, a sharp, final motion. “Okay. Okay. I get it.”
She pushes past Elena into the bedroom. She snatches her phone from the nightstand, her fingers flying over the screen. The light from it paints her face in a harsh, blue glow.
“What are you doing?” Elena asks, following her.
“Calling a taxi. I’m not spending another night in this fucked-up prison.” Lisa puts the phone to her ear. Her eyes are on Elena, hard and unblinking. “Yes. I need a car. Thorn Manor, up on the west ridge.” She gives the address, her voice eerily calm. “Twenty-three minutes? Fine.”
She hangs up. She crosses the room to where she left out some of her clothes earlier, throwing them on over her still damp skin, hair wet and dripping down her shoulders and back. She slips on shoes, then reaches down and grabs one of the olive-green duffels she’d brought and slings it over her shoulder.
“Lisa, wait.”
“For what?” Lisa stops at the door, her back to Elena. “For the next time someone opens fire? For you to finally decide I’m worth trusting? You made your choice. You’re staying here and dealing with this. I’m not.”
She walks out. The door doesn’t slam. It clicks shut, soft and definitive.
Elena stands in the middle of the room, dripping, the towel hugged tight. She hears Lisa’s footsteps fading down the hall. She moves before she fully thinks, scrambling out of the towel, pulling on the first clothes she finds—a soft pair of leggings, a thin sweater. They stick to her damp skin.
She can’t let Lisa leave like this. Not knowing. She has to make Liam understand.
She finds him in the main hall. He is not still. He is pacing before the cold, monumental fireplace, a phone pressed to his ear. His suit jacket is gone, his sleeves rolled up. He’s issuing low, terse commands. “...and I want every camera on that route pulled from an hour before to an hour after. The vehicle description was a dark sedan, common. Find any detail you can. A scratch, a decal, a fucking fuzzy dice. Do it now.”
He listens, his free hand clenched into a fist at his side. He sees Elena, but his gaze slides over her, preoccupied, cold. “Presley.”
The butler appears from the shadow of the corridor, his expression grave. “Sir. Victor is stable. The medic says the bullet passed through cleanly. He is sedated. He will need stitches and a blood transfusion. He should recover.”
Liam gives a single, sharp nod. He ends his call. The hall is tomb-quiet. His eyes finally land on Elena, and he really sees her. They are the blue of a winter sky, devoid of warmth. “You should be in your room.”
“Lisa is leaving,” Elena says. Her voice sounds small in the vast space. “She called a taxi.”
“No, she shouldn’t leave. It’s not safe. Don’t let her leave.” He turns as if to walk away, back toward his study, toward the crisis.
“Liam.” The name stops him. She takes a step forward. The marble floor is icy under her bare feet. “I need to talk to her. To explain. She’s my best friend, and she’s terrified, and she thinks I’ve lost my mind. I need to tell her about the contract.”
He turns back slowly. The fire in the grate casts shifting shadows across the planes of his face. “No.”
“Just the broad strokes. Not the details, not the numbers, just… why I’m here. Why I can’t leave. So she doesn’t hate me.”
“The contract is a closed system, Elena. Its power is in its secrecy. You tell one person, and it becomes a story. Stories spread. They reach the wrong ears. They reach Marco’s creditors. They reach Stern.” He takes a step toward her. His control is a palpable force, a wall she can feel. “The answer is no.”
“She won’t tell anyone!”
“You don’t know that. I don’t know that. The risk is unacceptable.” His voice is that low, irrevocable baritone. A final fact. “She must stay uninformed. That is the only way to keep her safe from men like that. Do you understand? She needs to stay here where we can keep her safe.”
The words hang between them, brutal and simple. Safe. He isn’t just talking about the contract’s validity. He’s talking about a man with a gun. About Xander Stern. Knowledge is a target.
Elena’s shoulders slump. The fight drains out of her, leaving a cold, heavy resignation. She nods, once.
“Go to your room,” he says again, softer now, but no less an order. “Lock the door. Do not come out until Presley or I come for you.”
He walks away, Presley falling into step beside him, their low voices resuming as they disappear down the corridor.
Elena stands alone in the great hall. She moves through the main doors and out into the drive.
Her bare feet pad against the stone floor, then the coarse gravel of the front drive. The night air is a cold slap after the manor’s contained heat. The taxi isn’t here yet. Lisa stands under one of the wrought-iron lanterns that flank the massive entrance, her duffel and green backpack at her feet, hugging herself against the chill.
“Lisa!”
Lisa doesn’t turn around. “Go back inside, Elena.”
Elena stops a few feet away, breathless. The manor looms behind them, a silhouette of darkened windows and sharp angles against the starless sky. “Please. Just listen.”
“Listen to what? More nothing?” Lisa finally faces her. Her eyes are red-rimmed. “I washed your bodyguard’s blood off us. I saw the look on Thorn’s face when he carried him in. That wasn’t employer-employee. That was family. And this place, this whole situation, it smells like death and money and things I don’t want to know.”
“I know it’s not safe,” Elena says, the words tumbling out. “I know that better than anyone. But I have to be here.”
“Why? Give me one reason that isn’t a lie.”
Elena opens her mouth. The confession presses against her teeth. My brother’s debt. My mind and body are collateral. My life for his. She chokes on it. She looks down at her hands, clean now. “I can’t.”
Lisa lets out a long, shuddering breath. “That’s what I thought.” She looks past Elena at the darkened manor. “This isn’t a place for people like us. Rich men like him play games; they demand the unobtainable. They create beautiful cages. And you’re choosing to stay in it. I can’t watch that, and I won’t be part of something I’m not allowed to understand. I’m not staying.”
Headlights appear at the end of the long drive, winding up toward the gate. The taxi.
“I’m sorry,” Elena whispers. It’s all she has left.
Lisa picks up her bag. She looks at Elena, and for a second, the fear is gone, replaced by the fierce, loyal friend Elena has known since childhood. “Just be alive when this is over, okay? However it ends. You must be alive.”
She turns and walks toward the approaching car. She doesn’t look back.
Elena watches as the red taillights disappear down the mountain. The cold seeps through her sweater, into her bones. She stands there until the silence is absolute, until the only light is the pale glow from the manor’s lanterns, holding her in a small, lonely circle on the gravel. She crashes down to her knees and starts to cry.
The call comes as Liam is descending the grand staircase, his phone a cold weight against his ear. The medical team is en route, ETA eight minutes. He hears the engine first—a ragged, straining growl that isn’t right, followed by the crunch of gravel scattering wildly under tires. He picks up his pace, his dress shoes hitting the marble with sharp, echoing reports.
He pushes through the main doors just as the SUV slews to a halt near the fountain, not at the porte-cochere. The headlights are shattered. The windshield is a spiderweb of cracks centered on a dark, puckered hole. The driver’s side window is gone. The night air smells of hot metal, burnt gunpowder, and the coppery tang of fresh blood.
Elena is behind the wheel. Her face is a pale moon in the dark interior, her eyes wide and unblinking. In the passenger seat, Victor is slumped forward, one massive hand braced against the dash, his head down. The shoulder of his black coat is soaked, dark, and gleaming in the manor’s exterior lights.
Liam is moving before he consciously decides to. “Presley!” The shout tears from his throat, raw. “Now!”
He yanks the driver’s door open. Elena doesn’t move. She’s staring straight ahead, her hands locked on the wheel at ten and two, knuckles bone-white. “Elena.” No response. He leans in, his hand going to her chin, turning her face toward him. Her skin is cold. Her green eyes focus on him slowly, dazed. “Let go of the wheel.”
She releases it. Her hands fall into her lap, trembling.
Presley is already at the passenger door, opening it. Victor groans, a low, pained sound. “Boss.” His voice is slurry. “Got… nicked.”
“Shut up,” Liam says, the words clipped. He’s assessing: entrance wound high on the trapezius, exit wound likely out the back. Bleeding is heavy but not arterial spray. Conscious. Coherent enough to be a stubborn bastard. “Can you walk?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t. Wait for the gurney. Presley, keep pressure on that.” He turns back to the car. Lisa Chen is in the back, staring at her blood-smeared hands. “Out. Both of you. Now.”
Elena stumbles out, her legs unsteady. Liam catches her elbow, a firm, brief grip, then steers her toward Presley as the butler shifts to help the girls, his own hands now bloodied from Victor’s shoulder. “Take them inside. Get their bags. Get them cleaned up. Do not let them leave the main hall.”
The medical van arrives, tires spitting gravel. Two men and a woman in tactical gear jump out, rolling a collapsible gurney. They work with brutal efficiency. One cuts Victor’s coat and shirt away with shears. The wound is an ugly, meaty tear. The female medic packs it with hemostatic gauze, her movements rapid and precise.
“On three,” the lead medic says. They heave. Victor is six-foot-three, two-forty of solid muscle. The gurney groans under his weight. They strap him down. Liam walks alongside as they wheel him toward the detached guest house fifty yards from the main manor, its lights already blazing. “What do you need?” Liam asks, his voice low.
“Space, light, and silence,” the lead medic replies without looking at him. “We’ll assess for bone and vascular damage. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
They disappear, heading towards the guest house nearby, the team moving quickly.
Liam stands on the gravel path, alone. The cold night air seeps into his suit jacket. He turns slowly, taking in the vehicle. The bullet hole in the windshield. The shattered glass glittered like ice across the dark leather seats. The dark smears of blood on the center console, the passenger seat.
His vision tunnels. The careful, controlled architecture of his plan—the contained environment of the manor, the regulated exposures, the calculated risks—lies in ruins around him. They found her. In a town he controls, on a route that was supposed to be sterile. They shot at his car. They shot his man. They were seconds, inches, from shooting her.
The anger is a white-hot column in his chest. It has no target, so it turns inward, corrosive. This is his failure. His misstep. He allowed the girl a visitor. He allowed a deviation from the security of the manor. He underestimated Stern’s reach, or his audacity, or both. The thought of Elena’s body, limp and broken on the leather, of her green eyes, glassy and empty—it doesn’t arrive as a feeling. It arrives as a physical void in his gut, a sudden, nauseating drop.
He strides back to the main house, the gravel crunching like bones under his heels. Presley is in the grand hall, standing sentinel. The girls are gone, presumably upstairs. “Status?” Liam’s voice is sandpaper.
“Miss Rossi and Miss Chen are in Miss Rossi’s ensuite, cleaning up. Shall I arrange a room for Miss Chen in one of the servant quarters?”
“No. She stays with Elena. I want them together. Keep them safe.”
Presley’s expression doesn’t flicker. “Sir.”
Liam paces. The vast hall feels like a cage. He pulls out his phone and makes the first call. His voice is flat, devoid of its usual controlled baritone. It is pure, sharp intent. “The boutique on Elm. The shooting. I want the security footage from every camera within three blocks. I want the shell casings. I want the make and model of whatever vehicle the shopkeeper saw. I want it in my hands before dawn.” He listens, his jaw tight. “I don’t care what it costs. Burn the place down if you have to. Just get it.”
He ends the call. Makes another. And another. Each conversation is a blade, cutting through bureaucracy, through fear, through loyalty. He calls in markers he’s been hoarding for years. He threatens. He promises. The web of his influence tightens, vibrating with the strain of his fury. How did they know? A tracker on the car? Did Stern have someone in the town watch? The possibilities scroll through his mind, each one a fresh failure.
He is midway through his fourth call when he sees her on the stairs. Elena. She’s changed into sweatpants and a thin sweater. Her long brown hair is damp, hanging straight. She looks small. She looks young. The sight of her, whole and walking, sends a contradictory pulse through him—relief so acute it feels like anger.
He gives a single, sharp nod. He ends his call with his final command. The hall is tomb-quiet. His eyes finally land on her, and he really sees her. They are the blue of a winter sky, devoid of warmth. “You should be in your room.”
“Lisa is leaving,” Elena says. Her voice sounds small in the vast space. “She called a taxi.”
He processes this. The risk vector multiplies, spirals. A scared girl, alone, with partial information, moving through uncontrolled space. “No.” The word given as a command, he expects her to follow. “She shouldn’t leave. It’s not safe. Don’t let her leave.” He turns as if to walk away, back toward his study, toward the crisis, toward the next call that might stitch this breach shut.
“Liam.” The name stops him. She takes a step forward. The marble floor is icy under her bare feet. “I need to talk to her. To explain. She’s my best friend, and she’s terrified, and she thinks I’ve lost my mind. I need to tell her about the contract.”
He turns back slowly. The fire in the grate casts shifting shadows across the planes of his face. “No.”
“Just the broad strokes. Not the details, not the numbers, just… why I’m here. Why I can’t leav, so she doesn’t hate me.”
“The contract is a closed system, Elena. Its power is in its secrecy. You tell one person, and it becomes a story. Stories spread. They reach the wrong ears. They reach Marco’s creditors. They reach Stern.” He takes a step toward her. His control is a palpable force, a wall she can feel. “The answer is no.”
“She won’t tell anyone!”
“You don’t know that. I don’t know that. The risk is unacceptable.” He couldn’t let her know the full details. Too many people knowing would create a greater breach of the security he worked so hard to build. “She must stay uninformed. That is the only way to keep her safe from men like that. Do you understand? She needs to stay here where we can keep her safe.”
The words hang between them, brutal and simple. Safe. He wanted to make sure both Elena and Lisa were safe. Ignorance is a flimsy, pathetic shield, but it’s the only one he can offer the civilian girls who shouldn’t be anywhere near this war.
He watches Elena’s shoulders slump. She is no longer fighting. She gives him a nod.
“Go to your room,” he says again, softer now, but no less an order. “Lock the door. Do not come out until Presley or I come for you.”
“With me,” he says to Presley, and strides toward the doors, not waiting to see if the butler follows. The night is waiting. The consequences are waiting. He walks into the cold, his breath clouding in the air, each step carrying him toward the faint, yellow light of the guest house, and the price of the damage done.
Elena’s room was dark, with the only light from outside her window, casting shadows across her ceiling. She closed the door behind her with a click. The cold from the marble floor had seeped up through her feet and into her bones. She stood in the center of the room. Her face was still wet. The salt of her tears stung the corners of her mouth. She felt nothing but failure.
Lisa was gone. The taxi’s taillights had vanished into the dark, taking her best friend’s trust with them. Last she saw, Victor was bleeding out. Liam was walking toward the violence, his back against a wall. She wrapped her arms around herself, but the pressure was hollow. The sobs came again, wracking and silent, shuddering through her slender frame. She cried for Lisa’s frightened eyes. She cried for Victor’s stillness in the car. She cried for the confused, treacherous heat that had flashed through her when Liam had looked at her on the stairs—relief and fury warring in his winter-blue eyes.
She didn’t remember lying down. The pillow was cool against her hot cheek. The weight of the day pressed her into the mattress, a physical exhaustion that felt like drowning. Her mind churned, a sickening carousel of images: the shattered glass, the bloom of red on Victor’s shoulder, Lisa’s backpack tearing open, Liam’s voice saying no. The blackness outside her window was absolute, a void that promised nothing, revealed nothing. She stared into it until her eyes lost focus, mind lost in the mess of the day.
Next thing she knew, she was standing in her room. The room was the same, but the silence had a texture, a woolly density that muffled her own breathing. A noise. Not a sound from the hall, but a noise from the walls themselves, a low, wooden groan of shifting weight. She moved toward the door, her bare feet soundless on the rug. The handle was cold brass. The hallway beyond was longer. The sconces cast weak, yolk-yellow light that didn’t reach the corners. The Persian runner stretched into a tunnel, its pattern blurring.
Walking down the hallway, she turned the corner toward the main stairway. The air grew colder. The portraits on the walls seemed to tilt, the eyes of long-dead Thorns following her progress. The dark wood paneling shimmered, like the grain was liquid, flowing. She reached the top of the grand staircase. The chandelier above was dark. Below, the grand hall was a pool of black marble.
The front door exploded inward.
Splinters of dark oak flew. The man from the store stood in the jagged opening, backlit by a sourceless grey light. He held the pistol in both hands, arms locked, the same clinical pose. He didn’t scan the room. His head tilted up. He found her at the top of the stairs. The barrel rose. It was a black eye staring at her heart.
Something dropped from the balcony above. A blur of cobalt, a streak of savage grace. The beast with the blue fur hit the shooter from the side, all muscle and silent fury. There was no roar, just the wet crunch of impact. The gun went off, a deafening crack in the enclosed space, the bullet pocking the marble somewhere to her right. The man and the beast went down in a tangle of limbs. They did not struggle. They sank. As if the marble floor was black water, they submerged, the man’s wide, startled eyes the last thing to disappear, swallowed by the shifting shadows that bled across the stone.
To her right, Victor stood by the library doors. He was pale, his skin the color of wax. The hole in his shoulder was a precise, dark circle in his black shirt, not ragged, but clean and awful. It wept a slow, thick crimson. His eyes were open, unseeing. He did not breathe. He was a statue of a dying man.
At the shattered doorway, Lisa stood. Her new backpack was on her shoulders, straps tight. She was looking back over her shoulder, into the grey light. She turned her head slowly, her gaze crossing the hall, passing over the pale specter of Victor, and landing on Elena. Her expression wasn’t fear. It was the disappointing look. A deep, weary sadness that said, I wish you could trust me. She shook her head once and turned away, stepping through the ruined door and vanishing into the dark, shadowed wall.
Elena’s mouth opened. A scream was supposed to come out. It was supposed to tear her throat raw, to shatter the terrible tableau. Nothing emerged. Her lungs were stone. Her vocal cords were severed threads. She was a silent witness in a gallery of her own ruin.
Then the vibrations started. A low, subsonic hum came up through the soles of her feet. It traveled through the banister under her hand, up into her bones. It grew, tuning itself, until it was a recognizable tone—the specific, escalating buzz and vibrating noise on a hard surface. It wasn’t just in her room. It was in the walls, in the air, it was the manor itself ringing. The sound tightened around her skull. She felt something slip, a lurch in her stomach, a disconnect.
Then she was on her back. The ceiling was above her, familiar and still. The vibrations continued, but they were smaller, localized, buzzing against wood. She turned her head. Her phone skittered on the nightstand, lit from within. The screen cast a blue glow on the dark wood. LISA CHEN, the caller ID read.
Her hand shot out, fumbling, her fingers clumsy with sleep and residual terror of her dream. She swiped to answer, bringing the device to her ear. “Lisa? God, Lisa, I’m so sorry, I—”
The voice that came through was smooth, cultured, and utterly alien. It was a man’s voice, warm with a mockery of intimacy. “Hello, Elena.” A pause, just a beat, letting her confusion curdle into dread.
“Still wearing Thorn’s dresses?”