CHAPTER 15

Sophia's POV

The Vale mansion looked exactly the same.

That was the thing that hit me first. I had been gone for six days. Six days that had dismantled and rebuilt everything I thought I knew about my life and the people in it and myself. Six days that felt like six months from the inside.

And the mansion looked exactly the same.

Same iron gates. Same gravel path. Same lights in the upper windows casting the same yellow glow onto the same perfect lawn. Like nothing had happened here. Like I hadn't stood on that porch in the rain with a cracked suitcase and nothing else while the door slammed behind me.

I walked up to the front entrance and rang the bell.

Thirty seconds.

The door opened.

Not a guard. Not Victoria. Not anyone I had been expecting.

Carter Moss.

I had seen one photograph of him, pulled from Zane's files this afternoon. Mid forties, sandy haired, the kind of face that looked trustworthy because it had been practicing for a long time.

He looked at me with an expression that was almost apologetic.

Almost.

"Sophia," he said. "Thank you for coming."

"Where is Remy," I said.

"Safe," he said. "Come in."

I came in.

The entrance hall was exactly as I remembered. Marble floors, high ceilings, the portrait of Victoria's grandmother on the left wall that had always looked like it was judging everyone who walked beneath it.

Tonight I looked back at it.

Carter led me through the main hall and I walked and counted doors and noted positions the way Damien had taught me without knowing he was teaching me, just by being someone who paid attention to exits.

"Victoria isn't here," Carter said as we walked. "In case you were wondering."

"I wasn't," I said.

"She's been detained," he said. "Legally. Elijah Black moves fast when he wants to."

I kept walking. Kept my face neutral.

"You're not surprised," Carter said.

"Should I be?"

He glanced at me sideways. "Most people in your position would be scared right now."

"Most people in my position haven't spent the last six days with the Black brothers," I said.

He almost smiled. "Fair."

He stopped outside the door to Victoria's private study. Not the meeting room. The study.

Which meant either the blueprint information had been wrong or someone had changed the plan.

Or Carter had never intended to take me to the meeting room at all.

"In here," he said.

I didn't move immediately. "Remy first."

Carter looked at me for a moment. Then he opened the study door and stepped back.

I looked inside.

Remy was there. Sitting in a chair, not zip tied, not unconscious, holding a glass of water and looking at me with an expression that was somewhere between relieved and deeply embarrassed.

"I'm fine," he said immediately. "I want to say that first. I'm completely fine."

"You have blood on your sleeve," I said.

"I cut my hand on the window latch," he said. "Getting out of my room in a hurry. It looked worse than it was."

I looked at Carter.

"He came willingly," Carter said. "Once I explained."

"Explained what," I said.

Carter closed the study door behind us and stood with his back against it and looked at me with that almost apologetic expression again.

"Sit down Sophia," he said.

"I'll stand."

He nodded like he expected that.

"I was the one sending the texts," he said.

The study was very quiet.

"I know," I said.

Remy looked up sharply. Carter looked at me with something that was genuine surprise underneath the practiced calm.

"You knew," Carter said.

"I had a theory," I said. "From chapter twelve." I said it like that, plainly, because there was no point dressing it up. "You were the only person who had enough access to know what we were finding and when. You left four years ago which is exactly when Diana connected with Victoria. You knew about Remy's accounts because you built the original financial structure. And you kept pointing us toward the truth instead of away from it which meant you weren't on their side even if it looked like you were."

Carter looked at me for a long moment.

"Dominic always said he had good instincts about people," he said quietly. "He was wrong about me for fifteen years. Turns out he just needed to find the right person."

"Why," I said. "Why any of this. Why leave. Why help them and then help us."

Carter sat down heavily in the chair across from Remy.

"I didn't help them," he said. "I let them think I was helping them. There's a difference." He looked at his hands. "Diana contacted me four years ago. She knew about my access to the Black estate accounts. She told me if I helped her she would tell me where their father was."

The room was quiet.

"Richard," Remy said softly. More to himself than us.

"I wanted to find him," Carter said. "For Dominic. For all of you. I thought if I could find Richard I could give Dominic the one thing he had never let himself want." He paused. "So I said yes. And then I spent four years feeding Diana just enough to keep her talking while I built the case against her from the inside."

"The texts," I said.

"I needed you to find it yourselves," he said. "If I came forward directly Diana would have known immediately. She had people watching me." He looked at me. "You were the variable she didn't account for. She planned for the brothers. She didn't plan for someone who would walk in from outside and see the whole thing clearly because she had no history with any of it."

I sat down.

Not because I was tired. Because I needed to think and thinking worked better when I wasn't performing composure at a standing height.

"Did you find him," I said. "Richard."

Carter looked at me.

Then he reached into his jacket and put a piece of paper on the desk between us.

An address. Handwritten. Monaco.

"He's alive," Carter said. "He has been the whole time. He left because Diana told him to. She had something on him, something old, something he was terrified of coming out. She used it to move him out of the picture so she could work on the estate from the outside without him interfering."

"She removed her own husband," Remy said quietly.

"She removed an obstacle," Carter said. "That's who Diana Black is."

I looked at the address on the desk.

Then my phone buzzed.

Damien.

I picked it up before it finished the first ring.

"I'm fine," I said immediately. "It's not a trap. Carter is with me. Remy is here. Everyone is safe."

Silence on the other end for two seconds.

Then a breath that told me everything about what those two seconds had cost him.

"Sophia," he said. His voice was low and different from his usual voice. Stripped of the controlled layer.

"I'm fine Damien," I said softly.

"I'm coming in," he said.

"I know," I said. "Come in."

He came in three minutes later through the front door that Remy had unlocked from the inside and he walked into the study and looked at me first. Not Carter. Not Remy. Me.

He crossed the room and put both hands on my face and looked at me the way you looked at something you had been scared of losing and hadn't lost and didn't yet have the words for the relief of that.

"I told you to get out if anything felt wrong," he said quietly.

"Nothing felt wrong," I said.

"I didn't know that," he said. "I thought—" He stopped.

"I know what you thought," I said softly.

He kissed me.

Right there in Victoria Vale's private study with Carter watching and Remy making a sound that was probably surprise and the portrait of Victoria's grandmother judging everyone in the room.

He kissed me like the roof had been interrupted and this was the continuation of it. Slow and certain and completely without apology.

I kissed him back the same way.

When we pulled back Remy was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone giving two people privacy they couldn't actually have in a room with other people in it.

Carter was looking at us with something that was quiet and genuine and a little sad in a way I didn't fully understand yet.

"Dominic is going to have a lot to say," Remy said to the ceiling.

"Dominic can wait," Damien said. He was still looking at me.

"He's outside," Remy said.

"He can keep waiting," Damien said.

I looked at him. This man in his black hoodie in his enemy's house holding my face like I was something he had decided about completely and permanently.

"The address," I said softly. "Carter found your father."

Something moved in his face.

I picked up the piece of paper from the desk and put it in his hand and watched him read it and watched something shift behind his eyes that was complicated and old and not yet ready to be anything simple.

His hand tightened around mine.

Then his phone rang.

Zane.

He picked up.

I watched his face as he listened and I knew from the specific way his jaw set that whatever Zane was saying was not something any of us had seen coming.

He hung up and looked at me.

Then at Carter.

"Diana," he said. "She's gone. Zane had eyes on her location and she just disappeared. Phone dead, car abandoned, the Zurich firm wiped clean in the last twenty minutes."

Carter stood up slowly.

"She knew," Carter said. "She must have had a trigger set up. Something that told her the moment the filing was accessed or the account trail was pulled." He looked at Damien. "She's been running this for four years. She had an exit built in from the beginning."

"Where does she go," I said.

Everyone looked at Carter.

He looked at the address still in Damien's hand.

And said the thing that made the floor shift under all of us.

"She goes to Richard," he said quietly. "She always goes back to Richard. He's not just someone she controlled. He's someone she never stopped loving. That's what made him so easy to use."

Damien looked at the address.

Then at me.

And I looked back at him and thought about love being the thing that made you easiest to destroy and thought that we needed to be very careful.

Both of us.

Starting now.

Then Remy's phone buzzed on the desk.

He looked at it and went completely pale in a way I had never seen on him before.

He turned the screen toward us without speaking.

It was a photograph.

Diana and Richard Black. Together. Alive. Standing outside a building I recognised immediately because I had seen it on every screen in the Black estate for the last six days.

They were standing outside the Black estate.

Right now.