Chapter 41 Lance
Lance
Leo DeGrance cooks the way Genevieve does.
It’s the same instinct, the same hands moving without thought, pulling ingredients by feel instead of measurement.
He hums while he works, something low and French I don’t recognize, and Genevieve curls into the chair beside me with her knees pulled to her chest and watches him like she’s memorizing the scene.
I don’t blame her. I’m memorizing it, too.
The brownstone kitchen is small compared to the estate I grew up in, but it’s warmer than anywhere I’ve ever lived.
Copper pots hang from a rack above the stove.
There’s a framed photograph on the wall of a woman with Genevieve’s hair, and I look away from it before the ache becomes something I can’t swallow.
Leo sets a plate in front of me. Chicken in dark wine sauce, potatoes, fresh bread. It smells like something that belongs in a different life.
“Eat,” he says.
I eat because he told me to, and because the last thing I consumed was gas station coffee somewhere outside Hartford, and because turning down a meal that a father made for his daughter feels like a sin I’m not willing to commit.
It’s good. But Genevieve’s is better.
Genevieve catches me chewing and her mouth twitches. “Told you.”
“You didn’t tell me anything.”
“I told you he was the best cook I know.”
“Second best,” Leo corrects, pointing his fork at her.
She rolls her eyes, but her cheeks flush, and something loosens in her face that’s been wound tight for weeks.
Leo asks about the drive, and Genevieve gives him the version that doesn’t include me killing a man forty-eight hours ago.
He asks how long we can stay, and I tell him as long as he thinks we’re safe, because Paxton’s cover will hold and the car can’t be traced and for right now, nobody knows where we are.
But I’m not naive enough to think they won’t come looking here.
When the plates are cleared and the wine bottle is nearly empty and Genevieve is leaning against my shoulder with her eyes half-closed, Leo starts talking about the case again.
Specifics. Timelines. The footage and what it could mean if they can get it to the right people.
I answer what I can. Genevieve fills in gaps I don’t have.
Between the three of us, a plan forms, loose and fragile, but real.
For the first time in years, a little bit of hope seeps through the cracks.
This could work. I could get out.
It’s almost ten when the knock comes.
Three raps. Measured. Unhurried.
Leo goes still.
I’m on my feet before the second knock ends, my body moving the way it always does when danger shifts the air, and Genevieve straightens beside me, the drowsiness gone from her face like someone flipped a switch.
“Are you expecting someone?” I ask.
Leo doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the door with a look I can’t read, and that bothers me more than the knock itself, because Leo DeGrance is a man whose face I’ve been reading all night.
“Papa?”
“Stay here.” He stands, and there’s something heavy in the way he moves toward the hallway.
I follow him anyway.
“I said stay.”
“With respect, sir, that’s not happening.”
He looks at me over his shoulder, and whatever he sees makes him stop arguing.
The hallway is dim. Leo looks through the peephole, and almost in slow motion, his shoulders droop, his forehead rests against the door, and then it slams open like someone kicked it in.
There are four men on the stoop. Suits, no ties, with the kind of build that says private security or ex-military.
Two of them have hands inside their jackets in a way that doesn’t leave much to the imagination.
They’re flanking a woman the way you’d flank someone worth protecting, and I register all of this in the space of a heartbeat.
Then I see her face.
And the floor drops out from under me.
Beverly.
She looks older. The lines around her eyes are deeper, and her hair is shorter than it used to be, threaded with more silver at the temples.
She’s dressed well, expensive but understated, the kind of clothes that say money without saying look at me.
Her posture is the same. Straight-backed, chin level, hands folded in front of her like she’s waiting for a concert to begin.
Her gaze hasn’t changed either. Dark and calm and seeing everything.
The same eyes that watched me throw my first punch and told me I dropped my shoulder too early.
The same eyes that tracked me across rooms and read my moods before I even knew I was having them.
The same eyes that crinkled when she smiled and went cold when she was mad.
“Beverly,” I rasp.
The name surfaces before I can stop it, dragging up a lifetime of memories that slam into me like a fist to the sternum.
Birthday cake at midnight because my parents forgot.
Chess on the back porch while Tyler did homework and she’d tell me I was smarter than I gave myself credit for.
Her hands wrapping mine around a pair of boxing gloves and her voice saying fighting is like chess, child. Think three moves ahead.
“Hello, Lance.”
Her voice is exactly the same. Low and warm.
The kind of warmth that used to make me feel safe and now makes my skin crawl, because I know it’s rehearsed.
It’s always been rehearsed. Every bedtime story, every packed lunch, every scraped knee she bandaged with careful hands was a performance, and I bought every second of it because I was a kid who wanted a mother and she was the closest thing I had.
She smiles.
There are a thousand questions stuck in my throat, and a headache stretching like a rubber band between my eyes, and I’m frozen, watching this happen like a car wreck I can’t stop.
“Leo, it’s nice to finally meet you,” she says, turning her attention to Genevieve’s father like I’m no longer the most important person in the room. “May we come in?”
Leo stiffens. “Who are you?”
They don’t answer him, and the men walk in, she follows, and the door hangs off its hinges behind them, and I realize with a sickening clarity that Leo doesn’t know her, but he’s not reaching for his phone or shouting or doing any of the things a man does when four armed strangers walk into his home.
“Papa.” Genevieve is in the hallway now, her eyes wide, taking in the men and the guns and the woman standing in her father’s foyer like she owns it. “What is this?”
“Mon chou, go back to the kitchen.”
Her eyes flick to Bever—Cassandra—and she tilts her head, like she’s trying to place her.
“Genevieve.” Leo’s voice is sharper than I’ve heard it all night. “Kitchen. Now.”
She doesn’t move. Her eyes land on me instead, reading my face, and whatever she sees there stops her cold.
“Bevie,” I say, and the name feels like broken glass in my mouth.
Genevieve’s lips part. Leo closes his eyes. And Cassandra stands in the center of it all, composed, patient, unhurried.
The queen doesn’t announce herself, after all. She waits until the board is set.
“You’ve always been sharp,” Cassandra says to me. “Even as a boy. You saw patterns other children missed. That’s what made you special.”
“Don’t.”
My stomach churns, and I feel sick.
“Don’t what? Give you credit?” She tilts her head. “You’ve survived six years in that cage, Lance. Most men would have broken in six months. You didn’t, because I built you not to.”
“You didn’t build me.”
She laughs.
“I put you in your first fighting class. I taught you discipline, strategy, how to read people. I told you the queen waits, and you listened. Everything you are, every skill you’ve used to stay alive, started with me.”
My hands are shaking. I shove them into my pockets so she can’t see.
“Is that why you’re here? For a trip down memory lane?”
“I’m here because you killed one of my men.”
Shock makes me woozy, and my vision blurs until I reach out and grasp the wall for support. “What do you mean ‘your men?’”
“Don’t play ignorant, child. That’s always been more of Alex’s trait.”
“You don’t get to talk about my family.”
“I raised you, Lance.” She says it simply, like it doesn’t slice me open from the inside.
“Who sat with you when you had nightmares? Who taught you to ride a bike because your father couldn’t be bothered?
Who played games with you every day until you learned how to outthink the world?
Who held you when you cried after Craig told you that you’d never be good enough? ”
My throat closes up.
“That was me,” she continues. “For years, I was the only person in that house who actually saw you. So don’t stand there and act like I’m a stranger.”
“You were a lie.”
I don’t add that Paxton will destroy her when he finds out she’s still alive. That he will deploy every resource at his disposal, burn every favor, scorch the earth if he has to.
He’s built for that kind of revenge. A younger, more brutal version of our father.
I’m not. I’m a wreckage pretending to walk upright.
“Everything about everyone is a lie, child. The sooner you accept that, the easier your life will be.”
“I don’t understand.” I grasp at my head. “What do you even want?”
She takes a step closer, and her security shifts with her, a choreographed adjustment that tells me they’ve done this before. “I’m not here to punish you for Bors, Lance. Soldiers die. That’s the cost of the game.”
She looks around the brownstone, her gaze cataloguing everything the way mine does, exits and angles and the distance between bodies. She learned it before I did. Or maybe I learned it from her. Who knows what the fuck is true anymore.
“I’m here to offer you something better.”
“I don’t want anything from you.”
“You want freedom, don’t you? I can give you that.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Genevieve interrupts. She takes a step closer, and my shoulders stiffen. I move to block her from Cassandra and her men.
“You work for Brutus? You’re part of Badon Hill?”
Cassandra laughs. “I am Badon Hill, foolish girl. Brutus is my brother.”
Her words hit me like a train, and I physically stumble back. “What?”