CHAPTER 16

Sophia's POV

They were outside.

I stared at the photograph on Remy's screen and felt my brain do that thing it did when information arrived faster than it could be processed. A kind of white static behind the eyes that lasted exactly two seconds before everything sharpened.

Two seconds.

Then I was moving.

"How old is this photo?" I said, taking Remy's phone.

"Timestamp says four minutes ago," Remy said.

Four minutes. Which meant while we were standing in Victoria's study feeling like we had won something, Diana and Richard Black had driven up to the front of the estate we had just left and were currently standing outside it like they owned it.

Which technically, if the will clause went unchallenged, they might.

"Zane," Damien said into his phone. He had made the call before I finished my second sentence. "Lock down the estate. Full perimeter. Nobody gets through that gate." A pause. "I don't care how they got there. Don't let them in."

He hung up and looked at me.

"We need to go back," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"Right now."

"Yes Sophia, I know."

"I'm just saying because you're looking at me like you want to have a conversation and this is not a conversation moment this is a moving moment."

Something shifted in his face. Quick and almost surprised.

I was getting her back out.

"She's right," Remy said, already heading for the door. "Let's go."

Carter stood up. "I'm coming."

"You absolutely are not," Damien said.

"Damien, I have spent four years building a case against Diana from the inside," Carter said. "I know how she thinks, how she moves, what she does when she feels cornered. You need me."

Damien looked at him for a long moment.

"If you are even slightly not what you say you are," Damien said quietly, "I will personally make sure you regret every decision that led to this moment."

"I know," Carter said. "I'd expect nothing less."

"Great," I said. "Wonderful. Very threatening. Can we please go now."

We went.

The drive back was eighteen minutes of collective tension compressed into a car that suddenly felt very small. Remy sat in the front and kept refreshing his phone for updates from Zane. Carter sat behind him and looked out the window with the expression of someone mentally preparing for something. Damien sat beside me and his knee was against mine and his jaw was doing the tight thing and I could feel him thinking from three inches away.

"Say it," I said quietly.

He looked at me. "Say what?"

"Whatever you're working through. You think louder than you know."

He looked at the window. "She had an exit built in from the beginning. Four years of planning and she had a trigger that wiped everything the moment the account trail was accessed." He paused. "That's not someone who was planning to run. That's someone who was planning to pivot."

I looked at him. "She's not running to Richard."

"No," he said. "She's running the next phase."

"Which is."

"I don't know yet," he said. "That's what's loud."

I thought about it.

Diana Black. A woman who had removed her own husband from the picture to work the estate from the outside. Who had spent four years building a relationship with Victoria Vale. Who had filed a legal guardianship claim designed to make noise rather than win.

All of it designed to move pieces into position.

"She doesn't want the assets," I said slowly.

Damien looked at me.

"I mean she does," I said. "But that's not the point. If she wanted the assets, she had four years to make a cleaner move. The will clause, the guardianship filing, showing up outside the estate tonight with Richard." I looked at him. "She wants you to see her. She wants you to know she's there."

"Why," Remy said from the front. He had been listening.

"Because she wants a meeting," I said. "On her terms. She's been engineering a situation where you have no choice but to sit across from her."

The car was quiet for a moment.

"She wants to negotiate," Carter said from behind me. Quiet and certain. "That's what she always wanted. She doesn't want to destroy the estate. She wants a seat at it."

"She left five boys alone in a house on a Tuesday," Damien said. His voice was completely flat. "She doesn't get a seat."

"Damien—" Carter started.

"She doesn't get a seat," he said again.

I put my hand over his on the seat between us. He looked down at it. Then he turned his hand over and held mine and looked back at the window and didn't say anything else.

We pulled up to the estate at eleven forty.

The gates were closed. Zane was standing outside them which meant whatever was happening was happening on the pavement because Zane did not stand outside in the cold for anything less than something that required his physical presence.

We got out of the car.

Diana and Richard Black were standing ten feet from the gate.

I had seen photographs of both of them. Photographs did not cover it.

Diana was smaller than I expected. Elegant and precise in the way of someone who had spent decades deciding exactly what impression they wanted to make and had perfected it. She looked at her sons with an expression that was trying very hard to be maternal and landing somewhere slightly to the left of it.

Richard looked tired. Old in a way that had nothing to do with age. He looked like a man who had been making a specific wrong decision for a very long time and had started to understand that.

Dominic was already there. Standing between his brothers and his parents like a wall that had been standing for twenty one years and wasn't planning to move.

He looked at us when we arrived.

Then his eyes went to Carter and something moved in his face that was complicated and old and not ready to be simple yet.

"Carter," he said.

"Dom," Carter said quietly.

One word each. Fifteen years of friendship and four years of silence and whatever came next compressed into two syllables exchanged on a pavement outside an estate at midnight.

I felt Damien's hand tighten around mine.

Diana's eyes found us. Found our joined hands. Something moved across her face that I catalogued immediately and didn't like.

"Damien," she said. Her voice was careful and warm in a practiced way. "You look like your father."

"Don't," Damien said. One word. Quiet and absolute.

She looked at me.

"You must be Sophia," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"I've heard a great deal about you," she said.

"I've heard a great deal about you too," I said. "None of it was good."

Remy made a small sound beside me.

Diana looked at me for a moment with an expression that recalibrated slightly. Like she had been expecting something softer and was updating her approach in real time.

Good. Let her update.

"We should talk," Diana said. Looking at Dominic now. "All of us. Inside."

"We should," Dominic said. "But not tonight."

Diana looked at him.

"Tonight you stand outside this gate," Dominic said. "Tomorrow my lawyer will contact yours and we will arrange a time and a place that is on our terms not yours." He looked at her steadily. "You gave up the right to walk through that gate twenty one years ago. You don't get it back in one night."

Diana looked at her sons one by one.

Dominic. Immovable.

Damien. Looking at her with grey eyes that gave her nothing.

Remy. Looking at the ground.

Then at Richard.

Richard looked at Dominic and opened his mouth and closed it again like a man who had rehearsed something and lost it on the night.

"Richard," Dominic said quietly. "Whatever she told you to say. Don't."

Richard closed his mouth.

Diana looked at me one more time. That recalibrating look again. Longer this time.

"You're not what I expected," she said.

"Nobody ever is," I said. "That's usually their first mistake."

Damien squeezed my hand.

Diana looked at our joined hands one more time. Then she turned and walked back toward the car idling at the curb and Richard followed her and the car pulled away and the gate stayed closed and the five Black brothers stood on the pavement in the cold night air and watched their parents leave.

Again.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Remy said "I need a drink" and Zane said "agreed" and even Elijah who had appeared from somewhere during the standoff without anyone noticing said "second" and they all started moving toward the gate.

Dominic stopped beside me and Damien.

He looked at our hands. Then at Damien. Then at me.

"Later problem," Damien said.

"Much later," I agreed.

Dominic looked at us for one more second.

Then something happened that I had not seen on Dominic Black's face once in the ten days I had known him.

He almost smiled.

"Inside," he said. And walked through the gate.

I looked at Damien.

He looked at me with that expression that still made the space between us feel smaller than it was.

"She said you're not what she expected," he said quietly.

"I know," I said.

"She's right," he said. "You're not what anyone expected." He looked at me steadily. "Especially me."

I opened my mouth.

Then his phone buzzed.

We both looked at it.

Zane. A forwarded email. Sent from Diana's wiped Zurich account thirty seconds before it went dark.

Sent not to Dominic. Not to Damien. Not to any of the brothers.

Sent to Marcus Vale.

Subject line: The girl knows where the evidence is. Get it before they use it.

I stared at the screen.

Then I looked up at Damien.

And thought about evidence and the thing I had been carrying since my parents died and hadn't known I was carrying.

And understood for the first time that the war wasn't over.

It had just changed hands.