Chapter Seventeen
Say It to My Face
A call came at six the next morning, and Sienna knew before Damian answered it that whatever Thomas Calloway had promised about quiet, careful days had just run out early.
“Slow down,” Damian said into the phone, already moving toward the study, already reaching for the shirt draped over the back of the chair. “Say that again. All of it.”
Sienna followed him, catching only Harlan’s voice on the other end, fast and clipped in a way she’d never heard from him at the negotiating table.
Damian’s face didn’t change so much as harden, piece by piece, until by the time he lowered the phone he looked like a man standing at the edge of something he’d spent twelve years specifically trying to avoid.
“Julian knows,” he said. “About the accounts. Windward pulling his access. He knows it’s Thomas doing it, and he’s decided the fastest way to stop losing quietly is to stop letting either of us stay hidden at all.”
“What does that mean.”
“It means he’s called three journalists this morning who owe his family favors going back two administrations, and he’s told them he has a story about a dead man who isn’t dead, wearing a mask and another man’s grief like a costume.
” Damian’s hand tightened on the back of the chair.
“He’s not threatening me with violence anymore.
He’s threatening to hand the world my face. ”
Mrs. Voss appeared in the doorway, already dressed, already carrying the second phone she reserved for exactly mornings like this one. “I’ve heard. Harlan called the house line as well, in case your mobile didn’t reach you fast enough.”
“How much time.”
“Hours, not days. Reporters like that don’t sit on a story from a man who’s angry enough to be careless with it.
” Mrs. Voss’s mouth had gone thin. “You have a choice this morning you didn’t have yesterday.
You can spend those hours hiding, which has never once worked for you before.
Or you can spend them deciding what the world hears, instead of letting Julian decide it for you. ”
Damian was quiet for a long moment, and Sienna watched something settle over him that looked less like fear and more like a door closing on twelve years of a particular kind of life.
“Get Thomas on the phone,” he said finally.
Mrs. Voss’s eyebrows rose, the first genuine surprise Sienna had seen from her in days. “You’re certain.”
“I’m not certain of anything this morning except that I’m done letting Julian write the story before I’ve decided what version of it I actually want told.
” He looked at Sienna, something raw moving beneath the composure he was visibly rebuilding in real time.
“You spoke to him first. I find I’d rather not do this for the first time without you in the room. ”
The call connected within minutes, Thomas’s voice coming through the speaker unhurried even now, though something sharper moved underneath the calm the moment Damian identified himself.
“I’d hoped we’d have longer before this conversation,” Thomas said. “I take it Julian’s decided patience is no longer serving him.”
“He’s talking to reporters. About the fire.
About me.” Damian’s voice was flat, controlled in the specific way Sienna had learned meant the control was costing him everything.
“I have hours before this stops being something I control at all, and I find I have exactly one person left who might actually be able to help me control it, and it happens to be the man who let me believe he burned to death twelve years ago.”
Silence stretched over the line, and when Thomas spoke again, the practiced warmth had gone out of his voice entirely, replaced by something that sounded, for the first time, genuinely uncertain.
“I have contacts at two of the three outlets Julian’s likely called,” he said slowly.
“I can slow it, possibly stop it, if I’m willing to spend considerably more of my own exposure than I’ve spent in a decade doing it.
I want to be honest with you about what that costs me, since honesty seems to be in short supply between us and I’d rather not add to the debt. ”
“What does it cost you.”
“It means stepping into daylight myself, in a controlled way, on my terms rather than a reporter’s.
It means the story that runs isn’t *dead man’s masked son hiding in plain sight*.
It’s something closer to the truth, which is considerably stranger and, I’d argue, considerably more sympathetic, if handled correctly.
” A pause, weighted. “It means telling the story of a man who faked his own death to protect a child who wasn’t his by blood but was his in every way that mattered, and who’s spent twelve years watching that child from too great a distance to ever risk closing it.
It means telling people about your mother, Damian.
All of it. There’s no version of stopping this today that doesn’t cost us both considerably more privacy than either of us has enjoyed in longer than you can remember. ”
Sienna watched Damian’s jaw work, watched him war visibly with twelve years of instinct that said *hide, always hide, hiding is the only strategy that’s ever kept you alive.*
“Do it,” he said finally, low.
“You’re certain.”
“I’m not certain of a single thing this morning except that I’m tired of a story about my own life being something other men get to write first.” Something almost like relief moved through his voice despite everything underneath it. “Tell it however you need to tell it. I’d only ask one thing.”
“Name it.”
“Leave her out of it.” His hand found Sienna’s, gripping hard. “Whatever version of this reaches print, Sienna doesn’t become a detail in it. Not her name, not her face, not one sentence that lets Julian or anyone else use her as leverage again.”
“Understood.” Something shifted in Thomas’s voice, warmer again, though carefully so.
“There’s a second matter, while I have you both.
If I’m stepping into daylight today, I’d rather not do it as a voice on a phone you’re both still deciding whether to trust. I’d like to meet.
In person. Today, if the hours allow it, somewhere with better light than a hangar. ”
Damian didn’t answer immediately, and Sienna felt the weight of the question sitting in the room with them — twelve years of a dead man’s name, a lifetime of grief built on a lie, and the small, terrifying gap between a phone call and a face.
“Where,” Damian said finally.
“There’s a house I still own, an hour from yours, quiet, defensible.
I’ll send the address.” A pause, and when Thomas spoke again something almost unguarded had entered his voice.
“I’ve imagined this conversation more times than I’d like to admit, Damian, in more versions than I could count.
I find none of them adequately prepared me for how it might actually feel, now that it’s finally arriving. ”
“I imagine we’re even, on that count.”
“I imagine we are.” The call ended on that, quiet, unresolved in the way Sienna understood some things simply had to stay unresolved until two people were standing in the same room.
They left within the hour, Mrs. Voss staying behind to manage the house and field whatever calls the morning’s chaos produced, and the drive out felt different to Sienna than the one to the airfield had — less like reconnaissance, more like a man driving toward something he couldn’t fully turn back from once he arrived.
“You don’t have to do this today,” she said, somewhere past the halfway point, watching his hands flex once on the wheel.
“I do, actually.” He didn’t look away from the road. “I’ve spent twelve years choosing later. Later feels safer, right up until it isn’t, right up until someone else decides the timeline for you instead. I’d rather choose today on my own terms than have Julian choose it for me by tomorrow morning.”
The house, when they arrived, was smaller than Ashworth House, older, ivy climbing one entire wall like it had been left deliberately to soften something about the place that might otherwise have looked too much like a fortress.
Thomas was waiting on the front step, alone, no visible security, dressed plainly in a way that made him look, for the first time, less like the composed man from the hangar and more like someone bracing for something he couldn’t fully control the outcome of.
Damian got out of the car slowly, and for a long moment the two men simply looked at each other across the gravel, twelve years and a fire and a lie standing visibly in the space between them.
“You look like your mother,” Thomas said finally, quiet. “I used to tell myself that was simply memory being generous. I can see now it wasn’t.”
“You should have told me.”
“I should have done a great many things differently. I’ve had twelve years to catalogue all of them, and I find the list doesn’t get shorter with practice.
” Thomas’s composure cracked, just slightly, something raw moving underneath it.
“I told myself distance was protection. I’ve since had considerable time to understand that distance is simply cowardice wearing a more comfortable name. ”
“That’s not an apology.”
“No,” Thomas agreed. “I don’t think I’ve earned the right to offer you one yet.
I thought I’d start with the truth instead, and let you decide, in your own time, whether an apology is something you’d even want from a man who let you grieve a father who was never actually gone, only hiding badly enough to let you believe otherwise. ”
Something moved through Damian, visible even from where Sienna stood by the car, and for a moment she thought he might simply turn and walk back to the vehicle, twelve years of careful architecture refusing, at the last possible second, to come down.
He didn’t.
“Inside,” he said instead, rough. “You have a story to tell reporters within the hour, and I find I’d rather hear the true version myself first, before the rest of the world gets a version I haven’t checked for accuracy.”
Thomas’s mouth curved, something fragile and grateful moving behind it, and he stepped back to let them both pass into the house, and Sienna, following Damian through the door, understood that whatever came out of the next hour — whatever version of the truth finally reached print, whatever Julian did once he understood his last card had just been taken cleanly off the table — this was the actual turning point.
Not the hangar. Not the phone call. This doorway, this house, two men choosing, finally, to stop letting twelve years of silence make the decision for them.
She reached for Damian’s hand as they crossed the threshold, and felt him hold on like it was the only steady thing left in a morning that had asked him to burn down the last careful lie he’d been living inside of, and give the world, for the first time in twelve years, his actual name.