Chapter Three
Elena
Her mother's kitchen still smelled like the lavender hand cream she'd used for thirty years, the same brand, refilled from the same corner pharmacy that had somehow survived every wave of gentrification that had taken everything else on the block.
Elena stood in the doorway for a full minute before she could make herself walk in, because once she walked in, she'd have to decide what to say, and she still hadn't decided.
Nico was at the table when she finally came through, scrolling his phone with the particular slouch of a man avoiding eye contact with his own life, and their mother was at the stove, back turned, stirring something that smelled like the one good thing that had happened to any of them all week.
"You're quiet," her mother said, without turning around, the way she'd always been able to read a room by its silence alone. "Bad day?"
"Long one." Elena set her bag down, sat across from Nico, and watched him not look up from his phone, and felt something in her chest crack a little, because she remembered him at nine years old, following her around their father's hotel lobby asking a hundred questions about the crown molding, memorizing the names of architectural styles the way other kids memorized batting averages.
She remembered exactly who he'd been before the Belmere was gone and their father was gone two years after it, and she didn't know how to reconcile that boy with the man across from her who'd falsified invoices rather than ask his sister for help.
"Nico." She kept her voice level, the same level she'd used in Damon Castellan's office three hours earlier, because apparently that was a register she had now, flat and controlled and holding something enormous underneath it. "I need you to tell me about the Hendersons' account."
His phone went still in his hand. He didn't look up.
"What about it."
"Someone flagged discrepancies." She watched his face, watched the color leave it in stages, like watching a building lose power floor by floor. "Federal discrepancies, Nico. Someone with real forensic accountants looked at it. They know."
"Who's they ." His voice had gone thin, and their mother had stopped stirring, had turned around now, wooden spoon still in her hand, her face doing the thing it did when she already sensed something was wrong and hadn't yet been told what.
"Elena." Her mother's voice, careful. "What is going on."
"Nothing you need to worry about tonight.
" The lie came easier than she expected, and she hated herself a little for how easily it came, for the specific skill of protecting her mother that she'd been building since she was seventeen and it had never once gotten less exhausting.
"I need to talk to Nico. Alone. Can you give us a minute. "
Her mother looked between them, the wooden spoon dripping sauce onto the stovetop she'd otherwise never let go unwiped, and for a moment Elena thought she might refuse, might plant herself at that table and demand the truth the way she had every right to.
But something in Elena's face must have told her this was a conversation that would end worse with her in the room, because she set the spoon down, wiped her hands on her apron, and went to the back porch without another word, leaving the door cracked exactly two inches, which was as much privacy as she was willing to grant and Elena understood that too.
"Talk," Elena said, once the door was shut enough.
Nico's composure lasted about four seconds before it came apart entirely, his shoulders dropping, his face collapsing into the particular exhausted misery of someone who's been carrying something alone for months and has just discovered they're not going to have to carry it alone anymore, which should have felt like relief and clearly didn't.
"I owed money," he said. "Bad money. The kind of people you don't want finding your apartment address."
"How much."
"Forty two thousand." He said it to the table, not to her. "I was going to pay it back, El. I was going to move the numbers around for two invoicing cycles, cover it from the next big contract, and nobody would ever have known. It wasn't supposed to be a thing. It was supposed to be a bridge."
"It's federal wire fraud, Nico." Her voice cracked on the word federal , the first crack she'd let show all day, and she hated it, hated that it happened in front of him instead of somewhere private where she could have managed it better.
"It's not a bridge. It's evidence, and someone has it, and they've had six weeks to build a case, and the only reason you're not already sitting in a lawyer's office right now is because of something I'm not ready to tell you yet. "
"What does that mean." His head came up, real fear in his face now, the kind that made him look nineteen again, the kind that made her want to protect him even as some cold, tired part of her wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. "Who has it? Who found it?"
"Castellan International." She watched the name land, watched him go pale in a different way. "Damon Castellan, personally. He offered me a way to make it disappear."
"What way."
She almost laughed, the sound that comes out when something is too enormous to cry about properly. "He wants me to marry him."
The silence that followed had a texture to it, thick and strange, and she watched her brother's face do a dozen things at once, disbelief and hope and shame all fighting for the same few square inches of expression.
"Marry him," Nico repeated. "You're joking."
"I'm not."
"Because of me."
"Because of a will clause his grandfather wrote, and because my name apparently still means something to people who used to care about the Belmere, and because he needs a solution to his problem, and you're my leverage in getting one.
" She stood, because sitting still had become unbearable, and walked to the window that looked out at the porch where she could see the shape of her mother sitting very still in the dark, giving them the two inches of privacy that was clearly killing her not to close entirely.
"You didn't put me in this position on purpose. I know that. But you did put me in it."
"El, I'm so sorry, I'll turn myself in, I'll tell them it was all me, you don't have to—"
"Turning yourself in doesn't fix Mom's bonding insurance.
" She said it quietly, and watched it land harder than if she'd shouted.
"The moment charges are filed, her firm loses every contract it currently holds, within thirty days.
You know what that means. You know exactly what that means, because you grew up watching it happen to Dad, watching what it did to him when the Belmere went, and I am not going to sit here and watch it happen to her too because you were too proud to ask me for help with forty two thousand dollars. "
Nico didn't have an answer for that, which was its own kind of answer.
He put his face in his hands, and his shoulders started to shake, and Elena stood at the window with her back to him because she didn't have room right now for his guilt on top of everything else she was carrying, and some ungenerous part of her resented him for needing to be comforted when she was the one who'd have to actually do something about any of this.
"How did it even start," she asked finally, quieter now, because the anger had burned through its first pass and left something more tired underneath it. "The gambling. When did that become a thing you were doing instead of a thing you did once at a bachelor party."
"I don't know." His voice was muffled behind his hands.
"After Dad. It felt like the only thing that made the noise in my head stop for a while.
And then it stopped working, and I kept doing it anyway, because by then I didn't know how to stop and admit how bad it had gotten.
" He finally looked up at her, eyes red, face raw in a way she hadn't seen since the week of the funeral.
"I used to think if I could just fix one thing, get us one win, prove I wasn't just the kid who watched Dad lose everything and did nothing, it would be enough.
I thought the invoices were going to be that.
I thought I was finally going to be the one who fixed something instead of the one who broke it. "
"You didn't break anything, Nico. Castellan International broke it. You were nine."
"Doesn't feel that way at three in the morning."
Elena didn't have an answer for that either, because she knew exactly what he meant, had spent enough three a.m.'s of her own doing the same arithmetic, assigning blame to a nine-year-old and a seventeen-year-old for a collapse that had actually been engineered by grown men in boardrooms decades before either of them had any say in anything.
She thought about Damon Castellan's face across the desk, the specific stillness of it, the way he'd laid out the destruction of her family like a set of terms in a contract he expected her to read carefully before signing.
She thought about the way he'd said none of them are you without a trace of flattery in it, like it was simply a fact he'd arrived at through some calculation she wasn't privy to.
She thought about his window, the city spread out under it like something already owned, and the specific, unwelcome awareness she'd had standing next to him that he was, in addition to being the man holding her family's future in a manila folder, genuinely, infuriatingly attractive in a way that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with something lower and more honest than strategy.
She had forty eight hours, and roughly forty four of them left.
"I'm going back," she said, mostly to the window, mostly to herself. "Tomorrow. I'm going to negotiate terms."
"Terms for what."