Chapter Four
Elena
She refused, at first, to leave her apartment.
"Absolutely not," she said, for the third time, standing in her kitchen with her arms crossed while Anya Petrova — a woman whose stillness made Damon's look almost fidgety by comparison — waited by the door with the particular patience of someone who had done this exact conversation with difficult people many times before and always won.
"This is my home. I pay rent on this home.
I am not going to be relocated because two billionaires decided it's inconvenient for me to sleep in my own bed. "
"It's not inconvenience," Damon said. He'd taken up a position by her window, looking down at the street below with an intensity that suggested he was cataloguing every parked car for threat potential, which — she was beginning to understand — was probably exactly what he was doing.
"Whoever was in this apartment tonight has already demonstrated they can bypass your building's security without leaving a trace.
If I'm right about who's behind this, they won't hesitate a second time. "
"So call the police."
"The police will file a report that Victor Kessler's lawyers can subpoena within a week."
"Then get me a lock. A better lock. An alarm system, I don't know, I'm not saying I want to live in danger, I'm saying I'm not going to be moved into some corporate safe house like a piece of evidence."
Anya, from the doorway, said, mildly, "It's not a safe house. It's a furnished apartment in a building with actual security, which this building does not have, no offense." A pause. "And you'd still have your own space. No one's asking you to move in with him."
Elena caught the look that passed between Damon and Anya at that — quick, wordless, the kind of look that told her there was history there she didn't have access to yet — and something in her chest, embarrassingly, did something complicated at the word him, at the specific way Anya had needed to clarify that no one was asking her to move in with Damon Castellan, as if that possibility had needed ruling out before anyone could think clearly.
"I need my grandmother's number," Elena said instead, because focusing on anything else felt safer. "If something happens to me, someone needs to be able to reach the facility."
Something in Damon's face changed — not softened, exactly, that wasn't a word she'd have reached for yet, but shifted, the way a landscape shifts when a cloud moves off the sun.
"Nothing is going to happen to you," he said, and it wasn't a reassurance. It was, she realized with a small jolt, a promise — flat, absolute, delivered in the voice of a man who had built an entire company on the principle that if he said a thing would happen, it happened.
"You don't get to promise that," she said. "You don't know that."
"I know that I am not going to let it happen.
" He turned from the window to look at her directly, and for the first time since she'd met him that morning — had it only been that morning?
it felt like a different life — she saw something in his face that wasn't calculation.
It was closer to fear, though she suspected he'd have called it something else, something with less vulnerability attached.
"I have already failed to protect the people I loved once. I don't do it twice."
The room went very quiet. Even Anya, in the doorway, seemed to understand that something had just been said that mattered more than its careful surface suggested.
"Twenty-four hours," Elena said finally.
"I'll go to your safe apartment for twenty-four hours, while you tell me everything you know about Ashcombe Maritime Holdings and Victor Kessler and whatever it is you almost said tonight and then swallowed.
After that, we talk about what happens next. Together. Not you deciding for me."
Damon held her gaze for a long moment — long enough that Anya shifted her weight by the door, the small motion of someone recalibrating a timeline — and then he nodded, once.
"Together," he said, and the word came out of him strange, unpracticed, like a language he was only now remembering he used to speak.
Damon
The safe apartment was on the sixty-first floor of a building he owned under a shell company even his own board didn't know about, three blocks from Castellan Tower, furnished in the same restrained grays and blacks as everything else in his life, because comfort, to Damon, had always meant control rather than warmth.
He watched Elena walk the perimeter of the living room like she was casing it for exits — which, he understood, she probably was — and felt the specific discomfort of a man watching someone else evaluate a space he'd built to keep people out, not in.
"Talk," she said, dropping into the armchair by the window, tucking her feet beneath her with an ease that suggested exhaustion had finally won out over vigilance. "Ashcombe Maritime Holdings. Start there."
Damon poured two glasses of water — not wine, not tonight, tonight required a clear head — and sat across from her, close enough to speak quietly, far enough to keep his hands from doing the thing they wanted to do, which was reach for her wrist to confirm, by touch, that she was actually here and actually safe.
"Ashcombe is my family's estate," he said.
"Upstate. It's been in the Castellan family for four generations.
Nine years ago, the east wing burned down with my parents and my older brother inside it.
" He said it the way he'd learned to say it — flat, factual, a wound described from the outside rather than felt from within — and watched Elena's face do the thing most people's faces did when he told them this, the flinch of sympathy he'd learned to brace against and resent in equal measure.
She didn't flinch. She just watched him, waiting, and something in her stillness let him keep going.
"The official finding was faulty wiring.
I accepted that finding for nine years because I needed to accept something, and grief doesn't leave room to interrogate an insurance report.
" He turned the water glass in his hand, not drinking.
"Victor Kessler was my father's closest friend and business partner for thirty years.
He became COO after the fire, at my request, because I was twenty-four and had no idea how to run a company and he was the only person who'd known my father's business as well as my father had. "
"And tonight you told me his name like it was an accusation."
"Three days ago, I told Victor I was bringing in an outside forensic auditor with no connections to this building.
I told him because I trust him. Because I've trusted him for ten years.
" His jaw tightened. "Tonight, someone broke into your apartment and photographed your notes within seventy-two hours of that conversation.
I don't believe in that kind of coincidence. "
Elena was quiet for a moment, turning the information over the way he imagined she turned over a suspicious ledger entry — checking it from every angle before she'd accept it as true.
"The subsidiary is named after your estate," she said slowly. "Named after Ashcombe. That's not subtle. That's either an incredibly stupid criminal, or—"
"Or someone wanted it found eventually. Wanted a message left, even if it took nine years for the right person to read it.
" Damon set the glass down, because his hand had started to shake, very slightly, and he did not allow his hands to shake, had not allowed it since the week of the funeral.
"My brother's body was never — the fire was significant enough that identification was made through dental records.
I never saw him. I was told it was him, and I believed it, because why would anyone lie about something so cruel. "
He hadn't meant to say that last part. It came out of him unbidden, a thought he'd never voiced to anyone, not Anya, not the therapist he'd seen twice and never gone back to, not the string of women before Elena who had wanted access to a version of him that had never actually existed.
Elena went very still.
"Damon," she said — his first name, for the first time, and it landed in his chest with a force that had nothing to do with the conversation's content and everything to do with the way she said it, careful, like something she was setting down gently rather than dropping.
"Are you saying you think your brother might still be alive? "
He looked at her — at the steady, unflinching attention she'd given him all day, the first person in nine years who had asked him a question about the fire and stayed in the room to hear the answer instead of retreating into sympathy or silence — and felt the last of his carefully built control crack straight down the middle.
"I'm saying," he said quietly, "that until tonight, I would have told you that was a grief-addled fantasy I stopped entertaining years ago.
And now I don't know what I believe. And I don't know how to tell you how frightening that is, to build an entire life on top of a fact, and have a stranger walk into your building on her first day and hand you proof the fact might be a lie. "
Elena reached across the space between their chairs — slowly, giving him every chance to pull away, the way you'd move toward something wounded and unpredictable — and closed her hand over his.
He didn't pull away.
It was the first time in ten years that Damon Castellan had let another person touch him while he was afraid, and the fact that he let it happen frightened him more than the fire, more than Victor, more than whatever truth was waiting for them at Ashcombe.