15. Emilia #2
I check the dashboard clock. 5:47 PM.
"We have thirteen minutes."
The south garden entrance is a wrought-iron gate hidden behind a wall of Italian cypress.
My mother planted those trees the year before she died, and my father never cut them down because the landscaping company charges by the hour and no one ever told him to.
It's the one blind spot in his security grid because the camera that's supposed to cover this angle has been angled two degrees too far east since a Santa Ana wind knocked it in 2019.
I know this because I spent four years memorizing every flaw in my cage.
Justice follows me through the gap in the cypress wall. His shoulders barely clear the space between the trunks. I punch in the garden gate code, six digits, my dead mother's birthday, and the lock clicks open with a sound like a bone snapping.
The garden is exactly as I left it. Roses. Boxwood. A limestone fountain that cost eighty thousand dollars and sounds like someone urinating into a bowl. The grass is emerald green despite the drought because my father pays the water fines quarterly and considers them a business expense.
I cross the lawn fast, staying low, cutting between the pool house and the guest cabana. Justice moves behind me in absolute silence, which should be impossible for a man his size but isn't, because he's ghosted through mountain woods in the dark without snapping a single twig.
The study has its own entrance. A set of French doors off the east terrace that my father keeps unlocked during business hours because he likes to step outside and smoke his Cubans while he ruins people's lives on the phone.
I can see him through the glass.
He's sitting behind the mahogany desk. The desk is a heavy four hundred pounds.
The desk that was imported from an estate sale in Hampshire and that he never lets anyone touch, not the cleaning staff, not me, not anyone, because it belonged to some dead British lord and my father collects status symbols the way other men collect stamps.
And there, sitting in the leather wingback across from him, legs crossed, a tumbler of my father's scotch in his manicured hand, is Aiden Greaves.
My fiancé.
My former fiancé. The man my father sold me to in exchange for a merger that would triple his shipping company's Pacific fleet.
Aiden with his salon-perfect hair and his orthodontically engineered smile and his habit of squeezing my wrist under the dinner table whenever I said something he didn't like.
My feet stop moving.
Justice's hand lands on the small of my back. Warm. Steady. A single point of contact that says I'm here and I'm not leaving and we are doing this right now.
I open the French doors.
My father looks up. The cigar freezes halfway to his mouth.
His eyes, the same brown as mine but with none of the softness, none of the give, track from my face to my clothes, Justice's clothes, the shirt with the rolled sleeves and the cargo pants belted with paracord, and then his gaze travels up, and up, and up to the man standing behind me.
The cigar comes down.
"Emilia."
Dominic stands. The scotch tilts in his glass.
His eyes do the same calculation my father's did, running over Justice like he's appraising a piece of equipment, assessing the grease stains, the bandaged arm, the scarred knuckles, the sheer physical reality of a man who has never set foot in a room with crown molding.
"What is this?" My father sets the cigar in the crystal ashtray. Precision. Control. "Where the hell have you been?"
"I've been gone for nine days and that's your opening."
His eyes narrow. I've never talked to him like that. Not once in twenty-four years. The shift registers on his face like a seismic reading. Small. But there.
"Who is this man?"
"Nobody you need to know."
My father stands. He buttons his suit jacket. The gesture is automatic, the reflex of a man who learned long ago that authority lives in the details. He rounds the desk and his gaze locks onto Justice with the particular contempt he reserves for people he considers below the conversation.
"Let me guess. Some dirty grease monkey from whatever backwater you ran off to.
" He stops three feet from Justice and looks up at him.
My father is five-ten and has never been physically intimidated in his life because his money does his intimidating for him.
"I don't know what she told you, and I don't care.
You're in my house. Get out before I have you removed. "
Justice doesn't blink. Doesn't move. Doesn't speak.
"Did you hear me? Get out."
Nothing. Just those blue eyes, fixed on my father's face, reading him the way he reads a seized engine. Identifying the fault. Locating the fracture point.
My father makes a sound of disgust and turns back to me.
"You're coming home, Emilia. This tantrum is over.Aiden has been very patient and very understanding, and you will apologize to him tonight at dinner."
"I'm not apologizing to anyone."
Aiden unfolds himself from the wingback. He straightens his cuffs. And then he does the thing he always does, the thing that's muscle memory for him, the proprietary gesture that marked me as his property for eighteen months. He reaches out and grabs my arm.
His fingers close around my bicep. The exact same grip. The same pressure points. The same entitled, casual violence dressed up as guidance.
One second Aiden is touching me.
The next second he is not.
Justice moves so fast my eyes can't track it.
One moment he's a statue behind me and the next his hand is wrapped around Aiden's throat, all five fingers and that palm swallowing the column of his neck, and Aiden is off his feet, his Italian loafers scraping the hardwood, his back slamming into the mahogany-paneled wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind it.
The scotch glass shatters on the floor. Dominic's face goes purple.
His hands claw at Justice's wrist. Useless.
Like trying to pry open a pipe wrench with your fingernails.
Justice holds him there. Pinned. Three inches off the ground. And he doesn't say a word. He doesn't need to. The message is anatomical. Absolute. Biological. You touched her and now you can't breathe and those two facts are connected and will remain connected for as long as I decide.
Her father lunges for the desk phone.
Justice's free hand moves.
The hunting knife comes from somewhere on his belt, somewhere I didn't even know he was carrying it, and it arcs through the air in a silver blur and buries itself six inches deep into my father's four-hundred-pound mahogany desk with a sound like a gunshot.
The blade sinks through lacquered wood and antique grain and pins a stack of legal documents to the surface.
The handle vibrates. The crystal ashtray jumps.
My father's hand freezes two inches from the phone.
The room goes silent except for Aiden's wet, strangled gasping.
Justice holds both men exactly where they are. One by the throat. One by the knife. His breathing hasn't even changed.