Chapter Eleven #2
"Possibly." Damian considered it, something calculating moving behind his exhaustion.
"Half of them arrived undecided today. It wouldn't surprise me if one of them wanted eyes on the house afterward, some insurance against the possibility that today's performance didn't hold once I was out of the room.
Men like that rarely trust a verdict until they've watched it survive contact with the world outside the boardroom. "
"That's not comforting."
"No," he agreed, something wry and exhausted in it. "It isn't meant to be. I've found comfort is rarely the correct response to this particular kind of problem. Vigilance is more useful, however much less pleasant it is to sit with."
Mrs. Voss, who had been standing near the window through the whole exchange, arms crossed, finally spoke again. "There's a third possibility neither of you has said aloud yet."
Damian looked at her, something wary entering his expression. "Say it, then."
"It could be someone who has nothing to do with Julian at all.
" Mrs. Voss's voice had gone careful, measured, the tone of a woman choosing her words with more precision than usual.
"Someone from further back. Before Julian's father, even.
You've spent twelve years assuming the fire began and ended with one family's grievance.
I've never been entirely as certain of that as you were, and I've kept that doubt to myself longer than I probably should have, because you needed somewhere to point twelve years of grief, and Julian's family was standing closest when you needed it. "
The room went very still at that, and Sienna watched something complicated cross Damian's face — not quite anger, not quite fear, something closer to a man being asked to reconsider a foundation he'd built an entire life's worth of certainty on top of.
"You've never said that before," he said finally.
"I've never had reason to say it before tonight.
" Mrs. Voss held his gaze, steady despite whatever it cost her.
"I'm saying it now because a car with no plate we can trace sat outside this house for forty minutes, and I'd rather you go into tomorrow suspicious of everyone than confident about the wrong enemy. "
Mrs. Voss closed the laptop with a decisive click, rising from her seat with the brisk efficiency Sienna had come to rely on more than she'd expected to, back when all of this was new and frightening in a simpler way.
"You've both had a day considerably longer than either of you should have survived without sleep.
I'll have someone watching that road until morning, and Damian, you will eat something before you do anything else, because I refuse to have you collapsing from exhaustion in the one week you actually need to be sharp.
" She was already moving toward the kitchen, though she paused at the doorway, glancing back with an expression that had softened considerably from the brisk instructions a moment before.
"For what it's worth. You did well today.
Both of you. I don't say that often, and I'd rather not make a habit of it, so take it while it's offered. "
She left them alone in the quiet of the front room, the lamp throwing warm light across a house that had spent the entire day braced for something worse than it got, and Sienna felt the day's fear finally begin to loosen its grip, replaced by something rawer and more urgent — the particular hunger of two people who had each spent the last several hours genuinely uncertain they'd see the other one again.
"I meant what I said in the kitchen this morning," she told him, stepping closer, her hands finding the lapels of a jacket he hadn't bothered to remove. "About finishing it. I wasn't just saying it to make you leave easier."
"I know." His hands settled at her waist, careful even now, even exhausted, some old instinct in him apparently incapable of touching her without checking first whether she wanted it.
"I spent the entire drive to that meeting furious with you for saying it, and the entire drive back grateful you had.
I'm not certain those two feelings are supposed to coexist as easily as they seem to. "
"Maybe that's just what this is." She reached up, tracing the edge of the mask the way she'd learned to, feeling him go still beneath her palm the particular way he always did.
"Being furious and grateful about the same person, at the same time, because the alternative is caring less, and neither of us seems built for that anymore. "
Something moved through him at that, raw and unguarded, and when he kissed her it carried none of the deliberate patience of every kiss before it — no careful negotiation, no unhurried claiming, just the blunt, desperate relief of a man who'd spent hours convincing himself he might not get to do this again.
She kissed him back with the same urgency, her hands fisting in his shirt, and felt him make a low, broken sound against her mouth when she pressed closer instead of pulling away.
He walked her backward, not toward the stairs but toward the nearest wall, pressing her against it with a hunger that had nothing composed left in it at all, his mouth finding her jaw, her throat, the fluttering pulse point beneath her ear, murmuring her name like it was the only word he still remembered how to say.
She arched into him, one hand sliding beneath the torn shoulder seam of his jacket to find skin, feeling him shudder at the contact, feeling the low groan he pressed into her collarbone when her nails dragged lightly down toward his spine.
"I want to hear you say you're staying," he said, rough, pulling back just far enough to look at her properly, something almost desperate in the request. "Not because I doubt it.
Because I've spent twelve years assuming the people I let close eventually get taken from me, and I find I need to hear it out loud tonight, more than I've needed anything in longer than I can remember. "
"I'm staying." She said it steady, certain, watching something in him break open at the words the way it always did, twelve years of careful architecture giving way another degree further.
"Through whatever's in that car. Through whoever's watching from wherever they're watching from.
I already told you — I understand what I agreed to now. That doesn't change tonight."
He kissed her again, slower this time, deliberate despite the hunger still coiled beneath it, and carried her the rest of the way to the stairs with a single-minded intensity that left no room for anything except the two of them and the particular quiet of a house finally, briefly, safe enough to stop bracing.
Later, tangled together in the dark with her head resting against his chest and his heartbeat finally slowing beneath her ear, she found herself thinking not of Julian, or the room full of witnesses, or the mask lying discarded on the nightstand where she'd learned, weeks ago now, exactly how much trust it cost him to set it down.
She thought instead of the car on the access road, gone before anyone could catch more than three digits of a plate, and wondered, drifting toward sleep in the warm dark, exactly how many more watchers were waiting somewhere beyond the gate for their own turn to step into the light.
The trace came back at seven the next morning, while Sienna was still half-asleep and Damian was already dressed, standing at the window with his phone pressed to his ear and something gone rigid in his posture that pulled her fully awake before she'd even opened her eyes.
"Read it to me again," he said, quiet, controlled in a way that told her the control was costing him considerably more than it appeared to. A pause. "You're certain of the name."
Another pause, longer this time, and Sienna watched his free hand curl slowly into a fist at his side, watched something old and complicated move across the visible half of his face.
"That's not possible," he said finally, low. "That name has been dead for twelve years. I watched the obituary run myself."
He ended the call without another word, standing motionless at the window for a long moment, the grey morning light catching the edge of the mask, and when he finally turned to look at her, Sienna understood, before he said a single word, that whatever name had just come back on that trace had changed the shape of everything he thought he understood about the fire that started all of this.