Chapter 45
Forty Five
Aria
The motel room is a coffin I have rented for a few hours.
I leave it without a backward glance. I take a taxi, a deliberate, calculated risk.
A digital breadcrumb. I want him to know I am not hiding.
I want him to know I am moving. Let the hunter track his prey.
Let him think he knows the direction I am running.
The taxi ascends into the hills, leaving the grit of the city behind for the sterile, manicured perfection of the obscenely wealthy.
We arrive at a set of iron gates that look like they were forged to guard the entrance to hell.
Beyond them, the Kostas mansion sits on the hillside, a sprawling beast of glass and white stone.
It is not a home. It is a monument to power, cold and perfect and dead. A graveyard with a pulse.
I pay the driver, the wooden box clutched in my arm. He looks from the house to me, his eyes wide. He sees a ghost holding a wooden box, arriving at a palace she has no right to be at. He is right.
I walk to the intercom. My heart is not pounding. It is still. A cold, hard stone in my chest. I press the button.
A clipped, professional voice answers. "Yes?"
"My name is Aria Miller," I say, my voice as cold and clear as the winter air. "I'm here to see Caroline Kostas. I'm here to collect what she has stolen."
The silence is a weapon, meant to intimidate. I do not flinch. After a moment a loud buzz echoes, and the gates begin to swing inward. They are letting me in.
The fool, the child, the ghost girl. They think they are granting me an audience. They have no idea I am the one who has called the meeting.
A man in a black suit, with an earpiece and the dead eyes of a loyal soldier meets me at the front door and escorts me inside the house, a cavern of white marble and cold air.
The silence is absolute, the kind of quiet that costs millions of dollars.
The few staff I see are well-paid ghosts, flitting through the halls without making a sound.
My mother is waiting in the center of a vast, sunken living room with a wall of glass that overlooks the city. She is perfect. Not a blonde hair out of place, dressed in a cream-colored cashmere dress that probably costs more than my entire life's rent. She is a porcelain doll filled with razors.
"Aria," she says, her voice smooth and disappointed, as if I am a stain on her white carpet. "This is not a good time."
"Grief is rarely convenient," I say, stopping twenty feet from her. I do not approach her as a daughter. I approach her as an adversary.
Behind her, a man emerges from the shadows of a hallway.
Dimitri Kostas. He is older, his hair a distinguished silver but he has the same brutal frame as his son, wrapped in a perfect, tailored suit.
His eyes are not like Cassian's. Cassian's are a storm.
Dimitri's are black holes, devoid of all light and warmth.
"I believe you have something of mine," I say to my mother, my voice echoing in the cavernous room. "My grandmother's locket."
Caroline waves a dismissive hand. "Don't be absurd. I'll have someone find it and send it to you."
"No," I say. "I'll take it now."
Her face tightens. The porcelain doll is cracking. "You will leave. Now."
"No," I say again. And with a deliberate, steady hand, I walk to the massive marble coffee table between us and place the wooden box upon it. The sound of the wood hitting the stone is a gunshot in the silent room.
Dimitri takes a step forward, his eyes narrowed on the box. He knows it.
"You wear my sister's death like a crown," I say, my voice low and shaking with a fury I don't know I possess. "I'm here to watch it choke you."
"You have two seconds to walk out of this house," Dimitri says, his voice a low, gravelly threat. He is used to giving orders. He is used to being obeyed.
I look from his cold, dead eyes to my mother's furious face. I laugh. It is a broken, ugly sound.
"You think these walls are your strength?" I ask, the words pouring out of me, a torrent of fire and ice. "Cassian taught me that cages have two sides. I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me."
And I click open the box.
I don't reach for the recorder. I reach for the marriage certificate. I pull it out and slide it across the cold marble. It stops just before it reaches Dimitri's hand.
"You didn't marry a grieving mother," I spit. "You bought a co-conspirator."
Dimitri looks at the paper, then back at me, a flicker of something that might have been surprise in his dead eyes. Caroline’s face goes white. The porcelain has shattered.
CRASH.
The sound of the massive front doors being thrown open rocks the entire room.
And there stands Cassian.
He is a hurricane in the doorway, his chest heaving, his face a mask of primal fury. He has come, he has followed the breadcrumb, and he has walked right into my trap.
But he isn't looking at his father. He isn't looking at my mother.
He is looking at me. And the hunt is back in his eyes. He isn't here to save them. He is here because I have brought the war to his front door, and he is the only one who knows how to fight it.