Chapter Fifteen
Hangar Six
An airfield sat at the end of a road so poorly maintained it barely qualified as one, gravel giving way to cracked asphalt giving way to nothing at all, a single chain-link fence the only thing separating it from the pine forest crowding in on every side.
“Not on any registry,” Damian said, parking well short of the entrance, the car’s engine ticking as it cooled. “Not a real one, at least. Whoever built this wanted somewhere planes could land without anyone official asking why.”
“How did Mrs. Voss even find it?”
“She didn’t. I did, four years ago, chasing a lead that went nowhere.
” He reached into the back seat for a bag she hadn’t noticed him pack, dark clothes folded with the same economy he brought to everything else.
“I filed it away and told myself it wasn’t worth the risk of pursuing further.
I’m beginning to think most of my mistakes over the last twelve years have been things I filed away instead of finished. ”
They went in on foot, through a gap in the fence line Damian navigated like he’d memorized it in the dark years ago and never quite forgotten, the forest floor soft and silent underfoot.
Sienna had argued, briefly, that she should stay in the car — a token argument, one she’d known she’d lose before she finished making it, because some stubborn part of her had stopped being willing to sit somewhere safe while he walked toward danger alone.
“Stay close,” he said, low, “and if I tell you to run, you run. No arguing about it this time.”
“I won’t argue.”
“You will,” he said, without any real reproach in it, “but I appreciate you saying otherwise.”
The airfield itself was smaller than she’d expected — one runway, cracked and weed-choked at the edges, a scatter of low buildings clustered near a single hangar large enough to swallow a jet whole.
Lights burned in only one window, high up, near what looked like an office built into the hangar’s second floor.
“Someone’s here.”
“Someone’s always here.” Damian’s voice had dropped to something barely above breath. “A place like this doesn’t run itself. The question is how many, and whether any of them are paid to notice two people who don’t belong.”
They circled wide, keeping to the tree line, until they reached a side door set into the hangar’s long wall — unlocked, which told Sienna, watching Damian’s jaw tighten at the discovery, that it worried him considerably more than a locked one would have.
“That’s not careless,” he murmured. “That’s an invitation.”
“Do we go in anyway?”
“We came two hours for this. I’m not driving home with nothing to show for it because a door made me nervous.” He eased it open, slow, testing each inch of movement for sound before committing to the next. “Stay behind me. If it’s a trap, I’d rather be the one who finds out first.”
Inside, the hangar smelled of jet fuel and cold concrete, a single small plane parked near the far wall under a canvas cover, its tail number visible where the fabric had slipped.
Damian photographed it without a word, then moved toward a bank of filing cabinets against the near wall, working the lock on the nearest one with a tool she hadn’t seen him produce.
The files inside were thin, sparse, the kind of records kept by people who understood that thoroughness was its own liability.
But one folder near the back, unlabeled, stopped him cold — she watched his hands go still over it before he’d even opened it fully, some old instinct recognizing the shape of it before his eyes had caught up.
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer right away. He set the folder down on top of the cabinet and turned the first few pages toward the weak light from the window, and Sienna, looking over his shoulder, understood why his breathing had changed.
Photographs. Old ones, decades old by the fashion in them, a young woman laughing on a dock somewhere sun-bright and unfamiliar, and beside her, unmistakable even younger than in the fire-scarred newspaper clipping Sienna had found her first day at Ashworth House, a man who could only be Thomas Calloway.
“That’s my mother,” Damian said, very quietly.
Sienna went still, understanding arriving a half-second before the words that would confirm it. “Damian—”
“I know what this looks like.” His voice had gone rough, stripped of every careful register she’d learned from him.
He flipped to the next photograph — the same two people, years later by the look of it, standing close in a way that no longer looked accidental, his mother’s hand resting against Calloway’s arm with an ease that spoke of history rather than a single afternoon.
“I know exactly what this looks like, and I don’t want it to be true, and I can feel already that wanting isn’t going to be enough to make it not true. ”
“The message,” Sienna said slowly. “*My son.* He wasn’t talking about Julian’s father.”
“No.” Something in Damian’s face had gone somewhere she couldn’t follow, twelve years of certainty rearranging itself in real time.
“I always favored my mother, growing up. Everyone said so. I used to think it was simply a resemblance. I never once let myself wonder if it was something considerably less simple than that.”
A sound from above cut through the hangar’s quiet — a footstep, deliberate, unhurried, the particular weight of someone who wanted to be heard rather than someone trying not to be.
“I did wonder, myself, how long it would take you to find this room,” a voice said, from the office landing above them, warm and unhurried in a way that made the hair rise along Sienna’s arms before she’d even turned to look.
“I confess I expected longer. You always were better than your father gave you credit for. Both of your fathers, as it happens, though I imagine that phrase is landing rather strangely tonight.”
Sienna’s pulse slammed hard against her throat.
The man at the railing above them was older than she’d pictured, silver at the temples, dressed with the unhurried elegance of someone who had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed — and looking down at them with an expression that held no surprise at all, only something that looked, horribly, like fondness.
Damian’s hand found Sienna’s arm, steady despite everything, and drew her half a step behind him without ever taking his eyes off the man above.
“Calloway,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Thomas will do.” The man came down the stairs slowly, unbothered by the folder still open in Damian’s hands, by the tension coiled visibly through both of them, by anything at all.
“I’ve been rather looking forward to this conversation for twelve years, and I find now that it’s finally here, I’m not entirely certain where to begin.
Perhaps with an apology. Perhaps with the truth.
I’ve never been especially good at telling the two apart when it comes to you. ”
“You let me believe you were dead.”
“I let everyone believe that.” Thomas stopped a careful distance away, close enough to be heard clearly, far enough that Damian’s stance didn’t shift toward him.
“It was considerably safer for you if the man your mother had loved before your father stayed buried along with the fire that supposedly took him. I’ve spent twelve years watching from exactly the distance that kept you alive, Damian, and I find I’m no longer willing to keep doing it from quite so far away. ”
Sienna felt Damian’s grip tighten fractionally on her arm, the only outward sign of how close to breaking his composure actually was.
“You sent men to my house,” Damian said. “You sent a man to take her.”
“I sent a message.” Something in Thomas’s expression sharpened, the fondness cooling into something colder beneath it.
“I’ll admit the method was clumsy. Julian’s people are considerably less precise than I’d like, which is rather the point of finally stepping in myself instead of continuing to work through him.
” His gaze moved to Sienna, unhurried, assessing, and she made herself hold still under it the way she’d learned to hold still under Damian’s first look in that study, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a flinch.
“You’re exactly what Marcus described. I can see why he kept you. ”
“Don’t,” Damian said, low and immediate, the same word he’d used on Julian at that table, and Thomas’s mouth curved, something almost approving in it.
“There it is. That’s him. That’s exactly the man I hoped you’d become, watching from too far away to do anything but hope.
” Thomas took a slow step back, hands raised slightly, a gesture of surrender that fooled neither of them.
“I won’t ask you to trust a single word I’ve said tonight.
I wouldn’t, in your position. But I’d ask you to consider that the man who’s actually been circling your house, your girl, your entire fragile new life — the man who sent people to hurt her — isn’t standing in this hangar.
He’s the boy I raised believing he was owed something he was never going to get honestly.
I came here tonight to warn you, not to threaten you, whatever that message made it look like. ”
“Warn me of what.”
“That Julian’s done waiting for permission.
” Something grim moved behind Thomas’s careful composure, the first crack in it Sienna had seen.
“He knows about this place now too. He knows what I’ve been hiding here, and considerably worse, he suspects why.
A man like that, finding out the empire he thinks he’s owed has a second heir standing in the way of it — he won’t come quietly next time, Damian.
He’ll come with everything he has, and he’ll come for her first, because he’s finally understood that’s the only leverage that’s ever actually worked on you. ”
The hangar went very quiet, the only sound the distant tick of the cooling plane and Sienna’s own pulse loud in her ears.
“How long do we have,” Damian asked, finally, something steadying back into his voice even as everything underneath it stayed shattered.
“Not long.” Thomas glanced toward the door, some old habit of watchfulness moving behind his eyes.
“Days, if you’re fortunate. I’d suggest you use them well, and I’d suggest you stop trusting the safety of any house you haven’t personally rebuilt since Marcus learned to find them.
” He turned to go, unhurried even now, and paused at the base of the stairs, looking back with an expression Sienna couldn’t fully read.
“For what it’s worth — and I understand it’s worth very little, coming from a man who let you believe he was dead for twelve years — I am glad you found someone worth becoming dangerous for. Your mother would have been, too.”
Then he was climbing the stairs, and a door somewhere above closed with a quiet, final click, and Damian stood frozen in the hangar’s cold light with a folder of photographs in one hand and Sienna’s arm still gripped in the other, looking, for the first time since she’d known him, entirely undone.
“We need to go,” she said gently, when he didn’t move.
“Yes.” He didn’t move yet anyway, his eyes still fixed on the photograph of his mother laughing on a sunlit dock, a life he’d never known existed folded into a single image he was going to have to carry now alongside everything else. “In a moment. I just need — a moment.”
She wrapped both hands around the arm still holding hers, not pulling him toward the door, just standing with him in the quiet, letting him have the moment he’d asked for before the road home demanded he fold all of this away and be careful again.
“Whoever you find out you are,” she said quietly, “I already know who you are to me. That part isn’t changing tonight.”
Something moved through him at that, raw and grateful, and he finally closed the folder, tucking it inside his jacket like something too fragile to trust to a bag.
“Then let’s go home,” he said, low, “before Julian decides he’s done waiting to find out exactly how much I have left to lose.”