Chapter 12 #2
"Then he's a fool," Marisol's response is immediate and vicious.
"And when this goes bad—when Hallstein makes a move, when she shows her true colors—we all go down with him.
Everything our parents built, everything we bled for, gone, poof, because the most disciplined man any of us has ever met couldn't keep his dick in his pants for one fiscal quarter.
" A breath. Quieter, and somehow worse: "He's the careful one.
He's never once been the careful one about her. "
The crudeness of it makes me flinch.
"That's enough." Nico's voice carries an authority that ends discussion. "He's family. Until he proves otherwise, we back him."
I hear chairs shifting, the conversation trying to resettle.
"Dessert?" Sera asks, her voice deliberately light. "I made flan."
The conversation moves on, but I'm already backing away from the door. My chest feels hollowed out, scraped clean by Marisol's words. The family I've been listening to, the warmth I've been craving. They see me as a threat. An infection. Something that's destroying one of their own.
Just leverage.
My legs feel unsteady as I move down the hallway, but then something in me lurches sideways, decided before I can argue. The staff cubby is right there, those abandoned phones like a lifeline.
My hands barely shake as I pick up the first phone. Locked. The second, also locked. The third opens at my touch. Whoever owns it doesn't lock their phone with a password. Idiot.
My feet carry me further down the hall, past the garden door, to a quieter stretch where the family's voices fade to murmurs. My fingers dial from muscle memory. Ten digits that are written in my bones.
First ring. My pulse pounds so hard I feel it in my fingertips.
Second ring. What if he doesn't answer? What if three weeks of managed texts haven't been enough to keep him steady?
Third ring. He answers.
"Hello?" His voice is rough, tired, but not broken.
"Papa," I breathe, using the name only I call him.
"Daphne." The way he says my name, all that held-back relief letting go at once, nearly undoes me. "Mon Dieu, Daphne, is it really you?"
"I'm safe," I say quickly, keeping my voice steady though my free hand clenches into a fist. "I'm okay. I just… I needed to hear your voice."
"But the texts said, you said you needed space. Where are you? Your actual voice, I needed…" I hear something shift in the background. "Just tell me where you are."
"I can't." The words taste like betrayal. "Not yet. I need more time."
"Time for what? Daphne, please. I've been trying to give you space like you asked, but it's been three weeks. The roses are blooming and you're not here to see them."
My eyes stay dry but my chest cracks open. "Papa…"
"Is someone making you say this? Are you in trouble? Just say 'blue' if you need help. Remember? Like when you were little and scared?"
A laugh escapes despite everything. Even now, he's trying to protect me with our old code words.
"I'm not scared," I lie. "I'm… figuring things out. Important things."
"What's more important than coming home? I tried to paint your hands from memory yesterday and couldn't get them right. Twenty-six years of painting you and I couldn't remember if you have deux ou trois ridges on your left thumb knuckle."
"Three," I whisper. "It's three, Papa."
"Come home and show me."
"I have to go," I say, though hanging up might kill me. "I'm using someone else's phone."
"Don't." The desperation in his voice is raw. "Please. Just tell me, are you eating? The truth now."
"Yes."
"Are you dancing?"
The question surprises me. "I… yes. Of course."
"Good. That's good. Don't stop dancing, ma petite fleur. Even if…" He stops himself. "I love you. Whatever this is, wherever you are, I love you."
"I love you too."
I end the call. Forty-three seconds total. A lifetime compressed into less than a minute.
The phone screen blurs but I keep my composure, wiping it clean with my shirt hem. Each step back to the charger is measured, controlled. I will not break here. Not where they might see.
It's only when I'm past the staff cubby, climbing the stairs with the family's distant laughter still audible, that the tears come.
Hot and sudden, three weeks of accumulated grief flooding out.
I press both hands over my mouth, muffling the sob that tears from my throat.
Papa's voice echoes in my ears. Trying to give me space, painting my hands from memory, the roses blooming without me.
Thirty seconds of crying in this stairwell. That's all I allow myself. Then I scrub my face with my sleeve and continue up, each step taking me further from the family that doesn't want me, closer to the empty room where I've chosen to stay.
The apartment greets me with its familiar silence.
But now I notice how the space holds his presence even in absence.
The bedroll folded with military precision that speaks of hard-won discipline, the desk where he sits reading files about enemies I don't understand, maybe Hallstein, the bathroom that still smells faintly of his cedar soap.
I walk to the desk and sink into the chair, laying my left hand flat on the worn wood. Three ridges on my thumb knuckle, just like I told Papa.
I am Nicolas Gilles' daughter. The girl who learned to mix pigments before she could write, who dreams in French, who knows that roses need coffee grounds in their soil. That will always be true.
I am also the woman sitting in this apartment after hearing exactly what the people downstairs think of me. The woman who could have said "blue" and didn't. The woman whose body still aches for hands that took her captive.
The apartment door opens.
No warning. No footsteps on the stairs. Just suddenly Gunner filling the doorway completely, his massive frame backlit by the hallway's harsh fluorescents. The Saint Michael tattoo on his forearm catches the light as his hand grips the doorframe.
His eyes find me immediately. Not sliding past like they usually do. Not avoiding. Looking right at my face, taking in the evidence of tears I didn't fully wipe away.
"You called him."
A statement, not a question. He knows. Of course he knows. He monitors everything, every phone, every call from this building.
My breath catches. I can't read his expression. Not anger, not disappointment, something rawer and more dangerous.