Chapter 24 Killian
The scent of crushed mint and damp earth clung to her skin.
Chloe had spent the plane ride on the phone with her lawyer.
I listened to her as she advocated for herself—times, dates, names.
We'd stopped at a FedEx when we touched down and sent off a stack of signed paperwork, thicker than my wrist, back to Florida.
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, it would have been hard to believe she'd pretended to be anything but capable for so long.
Now we were in Woldenberg Park, near the Mississippi River.
Chloe had insisted on coming here directly off the jet; she said it was where her mother used to walk when she lived in New Orleans.
I had left Cartier back in Florida to watch Arthur and his clan.
I knew they would try to find Chloe, and I wanted to know the second they did.
She'd been sitting off to herself for hours, her knees pulled to her chest, running her fingers through the damp soil as if she were seeking some kind of communion with the dirt.
I stayed back, sitting against a tree about ten feet away, watching the way the humidity made her dark hair curl.
I heard her crying—everything in me wanted to go to her.
I didn't. I let her be. Some things need to be faced without an audience.
"I thought I would die in that attic," she said suddenly. She still didn't look at me. "I used to imagine how they'd do it. How they'd kill me."
My hands curled into fists against the grass.
"I thought about just killing myself. But I couldn't. They would have found a way to get that money. The people who murdered her would have won." She finally turned to look at me, her eyes red-rimmed but dry now. "So I stayed. And I waited. And I planned. I'm going to make them pay."
I was quiet for a moment. Then I asked the question that had been sitting in my chest since the first night I saw her in that tree. "Why didn't you leave? Before me. You had years. You had a tablet. You could have reached out to someone."
She went still.
"The sheriff came to Sunday dinner," she said finally, her voice flat.
"The doctors my father paid had files on me thicker than my wrist. If I ran, they'd find me.
They'd sedate me. They'd put me somewhere with no windows and no Mary.
" She picked at a blade of grass, pulling it from the dirt.
"My mother said a lawyer would come on my twenty-fifth birthday.
But I didn't know his name. I didn't know if he was real—she said a lot of things back then.
And even if he was... what could one man do against all of them?
His entire family knew I was up there and they said nothing, it felt like me against the world.
The truth of it settled between us.
I had heard similar explanation before, I didn’t know the term for it was, but it was more insidious than Stockholm Syndrome. Chloe hadn't had any delusions about her captors; she had simply been out-calculated by a system they had better access to.
"I wasn’t just sitting there playing doll, though," she continued, snapping the blade of grass between her fingers. "I plotted. I had a Plan A, B, and C. Waiting for a dead woman's promise was Plan A. There was a Plan B Mary helped me with—don’t ask."
"Why not ask?"
"I won’t tell you."
I frowned but let it go. "And where do I fit?"
"You were Plan C, Killian. The high-risk gamble."
She went quiet again, turning back to the river. The water was gray under the overcast sky, moving slow and heavy. I imagined that was how her emotions felt—slow and heavy.
"Tell me something about you," she said. "Something that isn't about me."
I leaned my head back against the tree. "What do you want to know?"
"Your parents. You've talked about your grandfather, but you never talk about them."
I was quiet for a moment, watching a barge move down the river. "They're alive. Both of them. I haven't spoken to them in... seven years? Eight? I stopped counting."
"Why?"
"Because they wanted me to be someone I wasn't. They wanted the company, the legacy, the right wife, the right house, the right friends. I wanted..." I trailed off, shrugging. "I wanted to matter. Not to them. To someone."
Chloe was watching me now, her head tilted.
"I joined the military. They said I was throwing my life away—throwing away their investment." The word still tasted bitter. "So I left. And I never went back."
"That sounds lonely."
"It was. Until I found Cartier. Until I found work that meant something.
" I paused. "But sitting here, knowing what your father did to you—what he allowed to happen for fourteen years.
.. my reasons for cutting them off feel small.
Petty, even. They didn't lock me in an attic.
They just... didn't love me the way I needed. "
Chloe was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood, crossed the grass, and sat down beside me—close enough that her shoulder pressed against mine. "Pain isn't a competition, Killian. Your childhood doesn't have to be worse than mine to count."
I looked at her. The girl who'd had everything stolen from her was telling me my pain mattered. I wanted to kiss her, but that wasn't what she needed right now. And after what happened before we got on the jet, I didn’t need it either.
So I just leaned my head back against the tree and watched the river. My phone buzzed in my pocket about five minutes into the silence.
Elara: I'm here. Where are you?
I texted back our location and slipped the phone away. "Someone's coming to meet us. A friend of a friend. Her name is Elara. She's going to help you get settled."
Chloe stiffened beside me. "I don't need a babysitter."
"She's not a babysitter. She's..." I searched for the right word. "She's someone who's been where you are. Not exactly, but close."
Chloe didn't look convinced, but she didn't argue.
Elara found us twenty minutes later. She walked down the path like she owned it—tall, graceful, her dark skin glowing against the gray sky.
She wore a cream-colored trench coat and heels that should have been impractical for a park.
Her hair was braided back from her face, and her eyes were warm.
I had met her husband, Julian, through Cartier; he had played bodyguard for him on a few Eastern Europe trips.
They became friends, and we'd had dinner a few times. They were good people.
We both stood. Chloe went very still beside me.
"Killian," Elara said, her voice smooth as honey. She hugged me briefly; she smelled like a crisp apple, but expensive somehow. She then turned to Chloe. "And you must be the survivor. I hope you don't mind that I asked Killian questions about you."
Chloe blinked. "I... yes and no?"
It was interesting seeing Chloe actually flustered. Elara smiled. She had the kind of smile that made you want to tell her all your secrets.
"You're... you're so pretty," Chloe finally said.
Elara laughed—a real laugh, bright and warm. "And beloved, you're gorgeous. Just look at you, looking like you stepped out of a magazine. Now come on. Tell me, how can I help you?"
Chloe looked down at her plain white tee, jeans, and the Nike slides on her feet, then found her words. "I want to go shopping, and I want shoes like those," she said, pointing at Elara's feet.
Elara laughed again. "The shoes are Jimmy Choo, darling. They've only been out for a month and are only sold in Paris. But don't fret—by the end of the day, you're going to have three pairs equally as 'bad' as these."
I watched them—the Ghost and the CEO.