Chapter Seven
Elena
She found him on the terrace an hour later, alone, his jacket discarded over the railing, staring out at the city with the particular stillness she'd come to recognize as his version of falling apart quietly.
"You disappeared," she said, stepping out into the cold. "Everyone's asking where the host went."
"Everyone can wait." He didn't turn. "Victor asked me tonight how your audit was progressing. Very casually. In front of two board members, so I couldn't answer honestly even if I wanted to."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you were still working through the historical records.
True, and useless to him, which is exactly what I intended.
" He finally turned to look at her, and the gold ballroom light through the glass doors caught the exhaustion in his face that he'd been hiding all evening behind careful hosting.
"I've spent ten years trusting that man with everything I couldn't carry alone.
Tonight I watched him smile at me and felt sick. "
Elena came to stand beside him at the railing, close enough that their arms nearly touched, the city spread out gold and enormous below them.
"Can I ask you something," she said, "and you don't have to answer if it's too much."
"You can ask me anything."
"The fire. What do you actually remember about it? Not the official report. What you remember."
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might deflect, the way she suspected he'd deflected every version of this question for nine years.
But then he said, low, "I remember the smell first. Before I understood what was happening, I remember thinking something was burning in the kitchen, because that's the only version of fire a twenty-four-year-old who's never seen anything worse than a birthday candle knows how to imagine.
" His hands tightened on the railing. "I remember running toward the east wing instead of away from it, because my brother's room was down that hall, and I remember a member of the household staff — a man who'd worked for my family for fifteen years — physically holding me back from the door.
I remember screaming at him. I don't remember what I said.
I remember the fire trucks arriving too late to matter, and I remember standing on the lawn in bare feet, watching the wing collapse, and understanding, in the specific way you understand things you can't yet process, that I was about to become the last Castellan standing. "
Elena didn't reach for him this time. She simply stood close enough that her shoulder pressed against his arm, a small, steady point of contact, and let the silence hold what words couldn't.
"The staff member who held you back," she said finally. "Do you remember his name?"
Damon went very still.
"Thomas Ridley," he said slowly, like the name was surfacing from somewhere he hadn't visited in years.
"He'd worked for my family since before I was born.
He retired six months after the fire. I never questioned it — grief does strange things to people, and I assumed watching that happen had broken something in him too.
" His eyes found hers, and something in them had gone sharp, awake, alive in a way she hadn't seen yet.
"Elena, what if he wasn't holding me back to protect me from the fire? "
"What if he was holding you back," Elena said quietly, finishing the thought neither of them wanted to say aloud, "because he knew something was going to happen, and he needed to make sure you weren't in that hallway when it did."
The gold light of the ballroom spilled out onto the terrace behind them, warm and indifferent, and somewhere inside that light, Victor Kessler was still holding his champagne glass, still smiling his careful, comforting smile, and Damon Castellan stood on a terrace forty-two floors above Manhattan and felt, for the first time in nine years, that the ground beneath his entire adult life had just tilted on an axis he hadn't known was there.