Chapter 20 Lena
LENA
I left the manor before dawn.
Not because I had anywhere to be at five-thirty in the morning.
Not because there was urgent business at the hotel that couldn’t wait until a reasonable hour.
I left because I couldn’t stand the thought of running into him in the hallway, catching his scent on the air between us, having to make small talk over coffee while we both pretended we hadn’t torn chunks out of each other’s walls two nights ago.
The roads were empty. Winter darkness pressed against the windshield, broken only by my headlights. Ice glittered on the pavement. I drove too fast, taking the curves of the mountain road like something was chasing me.
Maybe something was.
The hotel lobby was a warm welcoming sight. Night shift staff looked up in surprise as I walked through, managing a smile for each of them. The automatic expression of someone trained since childhood to be pleasant at all times.
Inside, I was anything but.
I didn’t go to my father’s office. Not yet. Instead, I took the private elevator up to the apartment where I’d grown up. Where Marjorie still kept everything exactly as it had been, as if my father might walk through the door any moment, as if I might come back to stay.
The first thing I noticed was that the door was unlocked.
Marjorie never left the door unlocked. Not in all the years I’d known her. She’d grown up in a neighborhood where you learned to lock doors and check them twice, and thirty years of living in a luxury hotel apartment hadn’t changed that habit.
I pushed the door open slowly. “Marjorie?”
The living room looked wrong. It took me a moment to understand why. Books pulled from shelves. Drawers left open. The photograph of my parents’ wedding, the one that always sat on the mantle, lying face-down on the carpet.
Someone had been here. Someone had gone through our things.
“Marjorie?” My voice came out sharper, edged with fear.
“In here, sweetheart.”
I found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table instead of standing at the stove. Her hands were wrapped around a mug of tea that had gone cold. She was wearing her familiar blue robe, but it was buttoned wrong, and there were shadows under her eyes I’d never seen before.
“What happened?”
“I woke up around three.” Her voice was steady, but I could see her hands trembling. “Heard something in the living room. By the time I got up the courage to look, they were gone.”
“They broke in while you were sleeping?” The words came out hollow.
This woman had raised me when my mother couldn’t.
Had held me through nightmares, taught me to braid my hair, sat with me through every childhood illness.
And someone had been in her home, going through her things, while she slept defenseless down the hall.
“They left something.” Marjorie nodded toward the counter.
A photograph lay there. Me, walking through the manor in my robe, taken from somewhere beyond the property line. The kind of image that shouldn’t exist, that meant someone had been watching with a telephoto lens, patient and purposeful.
Written on the back in red marker: I SEE EVERYTHING.
My stomach dropped.
“Marjorie, we need to call the police.”
“I already did. They came and went an hour ago. Took some photos, made some notes.” Her laugh was bitter, exhausted. “They said it was probably just teenagers. A prank. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about an old woman living alone.”
“This isn’t a prank.” I stared at the photograph, at the red letters that seemed to pulse against the white backing. “Someone’s been watching me. Someone got into your home.”
“I know, sweetheart.” Marjorie finally looked up at me, and I saw something in her eyes I’d never seen before. Fear. Real fear. “I know.”
I thought about calling Raphael’s security team. For half a second, my thumb hovered over the contact.
My phone buzzed before I could decide.
Raphael: I know about the break-in. My people are already reviewing your hotel’s security footage.
My blood went cold. How did he know? It had been less than an hour. The police had barely left.
Another message: You should have called me first.
Not “are you okay.” Not “is Marjorie hurt.” Just that cold statement of fact, wrapped in expectation. I should have called him first. Because I was his. Because my safety was his concern, his property to manage.
A third message: We’ll discuss this tonight.
The words felt like a summons. Like a threat. Like a promise of something I wasn’t sure I wanted to face.
I put the phone away without responding.
For all I knew, he was behind this. The man who’d maneuvered me into a contract that gave him access to my body, who watched me with those dark eyes like he was cataloging every weakness. The man who’d admitted, outright, that what he felt for me was dangerous.
Maybe this was part of it. Scare me. Isolate me. Make me dependent on him for protection from threats he’d orchestrated himself.
I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
“I’m calling hotel security,” I said instead. “And a locksmith. We’re changing every lock on this floor, and I’m posting one of our night guards outside your door until we figure out who did this. And I want every second of security footage from last night pulled and reviewed.”
Marjorie’s eyes softened. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do.” I sat down across from her and took her cold hands in mine. “You raised me, Marjorie. You’re the only family I have left. I’m not letting anyone hurt you.”
“I know you won’t.” She squeezed my fingers. “You’re stronger than you think, Lena. Stronger than your father ever was.”
We sat like that for a long moment, holding hands in the kitchen where I’d grown up, while the sky lightened outside and somewhere in the building, a person I’d trusted had let a monster walk through our home.
I made the calls myself. Hotel security arrived within twenty minutes, grim-faced and professional.
The locksmith came an hour later. I stayed with Marjorie until she’d eaten something, until the color had returned to her cheeks, until she insisted I had work to do and she wasn’t going to crumble just because some coward had pawed through her books.
Then I went back downstairs to my father’s office, where the spreadsheets were waiting, and tried to work.
The budget numbers made sense in a way nothing else did. Numbers didn’t have feelings. They didn’t look at you with dark eyes that saw too much, didn’t make your pulse race with a single word, didn’t hold you like you mattered and then pretend it meant nothing.
Numbers were safe.
I buried myself in them.
An hour later, our head of security knocked on my door with the footage review.
Nothing. Whoever had broken in had known exactly where the cameras were, had moved through the building’s blind spots like they’d memorized the layout.
The only image they’d captured was a blur of dark clothing disappearing into the service stairwell at 3:47 AM.
Someone who knew our security system. Someone who worked here, or had worked here, or had access to information they shouldn’t have.
The list of people I could trust was getting shorter by the hour.
The rest of the morning crawled past. Staff trickled in as morning light replaced the darkness outside the office windows.
I walked over to the interior windows which overlooked the lobby, watching the hotel come to life below.
Sophie texted asking if I wanted to grab lunch in the spa cafe, and I told her I was too busy, which was true and also a lie.
The truth was I couldn’t face anyone who might look at me and see what I was trying to hide. That something had split open in me two nights ago, something I didn’t know how to close again.
You think if you’re cruel enough, I’ll hate you.
I’d said that to him. Stood there naked with his release cooling on my skin and told him I could see right through his games.
And he’d looked at me like I’d reached inside his chest and squeezed.
The things I feel for you. They’re dangerous. For both of us.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars.
The spreadsheet blurred. I was so tired of this.
Tired of the push and pull, the hot and cold, the constant guessing about what was real and what was performance.
Tired of wanting his honesty, his heart, from a man who seemed determined to give me everything except that.
A knock at my door made me jump.
“Come in.”
It was Jessica, one of the front desk staff. She looked nervous. Her hands were clasped in front of her like she was delivering bad news to a firing squad.
“Miss Hughes? There’s something you should see.”
I followed her downstairs to the front desk, where three other staff members were clustered around a computer screen.
They scattered when they saw me coming, their expressions caught between pity and poorly disguised curiosity.
The kind of look you give someone who’s about to find out their life just got worse.
Jessica turned the monitor toward me.
The headline hit first: MYSTERY BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET MISTRESS? HOTEL HEIRESS SPOTTED IN LATE-NIGHT TRYSTS.
Below it, photographs. Me, climbing out of my car in the manor’s driveway, my face lit by the motion-sensor lights. Me, silhouetted in an upper window, my outline unmistakable.
Timestamped. Three different nights over the past week.
Someone had been watching the manor. Watching me.
“It’s on three different gossip sites,” Jessica said quietly. “And the Paradise Peaks Daily picked it up. They’re running a piece about hotel management and, um, personal conduct standards.”