The Nanny’s Lie (Empire of Hidden Desires #5)

1. Elijah

ELIJAH

Every part of her belonged to him. She just didn't know it yet.

The television cast a blue glow across his living room.

Hadley Winslow filled the screen the way she filled every room she'd ever walked into.

Blonde hair swept over one shoulder. Brown eyes that the studio lights turned to honey.

The tiny scar at the corner of her mouth that nobody else seemed to notice.

He noticed.

He always noticed.

She was reading a story about a warehouse fire in Queens. Four dead. Her voice carried the right amount of concern without tipping into performance. That was her gift. She made people trust her.

Elijah sipped his scotch and watched her lips form words he didn't bother to hear.

The content didn't matter. The news didn't matter.

What mattered was the way her collarbone caught the light when she turned to Camera Two.

What mattered was the small breath she took before transitioning to the next segment.

He'd memorized that breath. Timed it. One point four seconds. Always.

She'd been back on air for months now. After the shooting. After nine months of recovery. He'd tracked every step. The hospital waiting room. The physical therapy center. The quiet apartment in Brooklyn where she did her exercises by the window each morning.

He knew because he'd been there. Across the street. Every single day.

The bullet hadn't been part of his plan. He gave the hitman one instruction: remove the boyfriend. Cory Wheeler. The architect with the soft jaw who put his hands on her like he had any right.

Cory had to die. Nobody should have touched Hadley.

When the hitman fired that second shot, the one that tore through Hadley's belly, Elijah had done what any reasonable man would do.

He killed him.

Not the same night. He waited three weeks. Let the man believe he'd gotten away with the mistake. Then Elijah visited him in a parking garage in New Jersey, and the conversation was brief.

Nobody disobeyed Elijah Brooks. Not once. Not ever.

He finished his scotch and set the glass on the side table, his gaze still locked on the screen.

Hadley was wrapping up now. The sign-off.

The warm expression she saved for the end.

She loved this job. Loved the crew. Loved the ritual of saying goodnight to millions of strangers who felt like they knew her.

None of them knew her. Not the way he did.

Tonight should have been the night. His people had the route mapped.

The town car she rode from the studio to her apartment.

The thirty-seven seconds between when the driver opened her door and when she reached the lobby.

The doorman who stepped away at 11:20 and left the desk unmanned for four minutes.

Four minutes was more than enough.

The island was ready. A private estate in the Caribbean that he'd purchased two years ago under a shell company. Three bedrooms. A garden she would learn to tend. A chapel where a pastor, well-compensated and quiet, would perform the ceremony.

She would be his wife. She would give him children. She would learn to love the life he'd built for her, or she would learn what happened when she didn't.

Elijah didn't consider himself a cruel man. He considered himself patient. Devoted. The kind of man who saw what he wanted and was willing to wait for it.

He'd been waiting for fifteen years.

It started in a library.

Harvard. An October afternoon that smelled like old paper and rain.

He'd gone there to find someone to kill.

Not anyone specific. Just someone small and alone. Someone who wouldn't be missed right away. It was a need that built in him the way thirst built in other men. His father understood. Dad had sat him down when he was nineteen and said the words that shaped everything after.

Just make sure you're never found out.

Not "stop." Not "get help." Just don't get caught. Dad was a practical man. He ran the Lascus Property empire. He understood that some appetites couldn't be reasoned with. They could only be managed.

So Elijah managed. He was careful. He chose women who moved through the world without anchors. Women in transit. Women between lives. He studied them. Followed them. And when the time was right, he watched them bleed.

It wasn't about desire. Not the kind people assumed. He never touched them that way. He just needed to see the light leave. That was enough.

That afternoon in the library, he'd been walking the stacks on the second floor. Looking. Evaluating. The usual quiet calculation that preceded the hunt.

Then he turned a corner and saw her.

A girl in a pink t-shirt, sitting cross-legged on the floor between two shelves. A textbook open in her lap. Dark brown hair falling across her face. She couldn't have been more than seventeen.

She looked up.

She smiled at him.

Not a polite smile. Not the tight, cautious look women gave strangers in empty spaces. A real one. Warm and open and unafraid. As if she'd been waiting for someone to come around that corner and was glad it was him.

His chest did something it had never done before. Something cracked open behind his ribs. Something he'd kept locked since he was a boy.

"Hadley!" A voice from the end of the aisle. Female. Impatient. "Come on, we're going to be late."

The girl in the pink t-shirt rolled her eyes. She closed her book. She stood up, brushed off her jeans, and walked away without looking back.

Less than thirty seconds. Start to finish.

Elijah stood in that aisle for a long time after she left. He didn't kill anyone that day. He went back to his apartment and sat in the dark and thought about the way she'd smiled at him. Like he was just a person. Like she could see something in him worth smiling at.

He went back to the library every day for two weeks. She never appeared again.

He didn't have a last name. Didn't have a building or a class schedule. Just "Hadley" and a pink t-shirt and a smile that had broken something inside him that he hadn't known could break.

He looked for her the way he looked for his other targets. Methodical. Patient. Expanding the search radius week by week. But she was gone. Graduated, maybe. Transferred. Vanished into a world too large for him to search without resources he didn't yet control.

Years passed. He took over his father's business. Built his own empire behind the name Brooks, because Dad would never give him the Lascus name. Not because of shame. Because of evidence. A different surname meant a different trail.

He killed eleven women in those years. Each one precise.

Each one invisible. He moved through the fundraisers and galas of New York like a man who belonged there.

And he did. Women in silk dresses and diamond earrings greeted him across ballrooms. He greeted them back. The warmth never touched his face.

Then one night, he turned on the television.

And there she was.

Hadley Winslow. Investigative journalist. Rising star. Those warm brown eyes. That expression she'd given him in a library aisle when she was seventeen years old.

She'd changed her hair. Blonde now, professional and polished. But the face hadn't changed. The warmth hadn't changed.

The crack in his chest opened again.

He found her within a week. Address. Phone number. Daily schedule. The coffee shop she went to every morning. Black, two sugars, oat milk. The boyfriend. The apartment in Brooklyn. The bodega where she bought her groceries.

He sent flowers. Anonymous. Stood across the street as she carried them inside, beaming, assuming they were from Cory.

He installed cameras. Three of them. Bedroom. Living room. Kitchen. He saw her read on the couch. Saw her cook pasta in an oversized t-shirt. Saw her laugh at something on her phone, lean her head back, close her eyes. He thought: You have no idea how beautiful you are.

That was love. He was certain of it. What he felt for her was love.

The morning broadcast started at seven.

Elijah sat in the same chair. Same glass. Fresh scotch. The screen flickered to life with the opening graphics and the familiar jingle and the wide shot of the anchor desk.

A woman he didn't recognize sat in Hadley's chair.

He didn't move. Didn't blink. This stranger. This imposter with her wrong-colored hair and her wrong-shaped jaw. She read the morning headlines as if she had any right to be there.

He picked up his phone. Called Marcus, his head of security. The man answered on the first ring.

"Where is she?"

A pause. The kind of pause that told him everything.

"Sir, we're still working on..."

"I asked you a question."

Another pause. "The apartment is empty. Cleaned out. Our contact at the building says she left sometime after midnight. No moving trucks. No forwarding address."

Elijah set the phone on the armrest. His hand was steady.

"The station?"

"Her producer says she resigned. Effective last night. No notice. Someone cleaned out her desk before the night crew arrived."

He picked up the remote and turned off the television. The screen went black. His reflection stared back at him. Blue gaze. Pleasant features. The look of a man who built things and attended charity dinners and shook hands with mayors.

"Who moved her?"

"We're looking into..."

"FBI?"

The silence on the other end of the line confirmed it.

He stood. Walked to the window. Manhattan stretched out below him. Forty floors of glass and steel. Eight million people who went about their lives, oblivious to what moved among them.

His assistant, Claire, appeared in the doorway with his morning briefing. She glanced at him and stopped.

"Sir?"

"Cancel my meetings."

"All of them?"

He didn't repeat himself. Claire had worked for him for six years. She'd seen things. Not everything. But enough to know that when Elijah Brooks went quiet, you did what he said and you didn't ask why.

She left. No questions.

Elijah stood at the glass and let the city wake up around him. Taxis threading through the streets below. Steam rising from the grates. A woman walking a dog on the corner of 82nd and Park.

She thought she could disappear.

She thought the FBI could hide her.

She thought new hair and a new name and a town nobody had heard of would be enough to keep her from him.

He almost admired it. Almost. That fire. The refusal to be small or afraid. The girl in the library had carried it too, back when she was seventeen.

But she didn't understand what she was running from. The FBI could give her a new identity. They could move her to a cabin in Wyoming or a suburb in Ohio or a fishing village in Maine.

It didn't matter.

He would find her the way he found all of them. Patient. Systematic. Inevitable.

He poured another scotch. Took a sip. Looked out at the city he owned in every way that mattered.

"Run all you want, Hadley." He said it to the glass. To the skyline. To the woman who was somewhere out there right now, looking over her shoulder, thinking she was safe. "I have all the time in the world."

He took another sip.

He smiled.

The smile didn't reach his eyes.