CHAPTER 21

Sophia's POV

Richard Black was smiling.

That was the detail that broke something open in the room. Not the threat. Not Mrs. Park standing beside Diana with the calm of someone who had finished a job well. The smile.

A man whose sons believed he had been controlled, manipulated, removed from his own life by a woman he had never stopped loving. Standing there. Smiling for the camera.

I looked at Damien's face.

He was looking at the photograph the way you look at a wound you didn't know you had until someone pointed at it.

"He's not a hostage," Dominic said quietly. "He's a participant."

"Maybe he's performing," Remy said. "Maybe she's making him smile."

"Look at his eyes," Zane said. He had already enhanced the image on his screen, sharpened it, pulled it apart pixel by pixel the way he did everything. "Nobody forces that. That's relief."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Bring the girl," Dominic read again. "Come alone."

He looked at me.

"No," Damien said before anyone else could speak.

"Damien—" Dominic started.

"No," he said again. Flat and absolute. "She's not walking into that alone."

"They didn't ask for you," Dominic said. "They asked for her. If you go, it changes the equation, and they'll know we're not following the terms."

"I don't care about their terms."

"You need to," Dominic said. "Because their terms are the only leverage we currently understand."

I put my hand on Damien's arm.

"I'll go," I said.

"Sophia—"

"I'll go," I said again. "But not alone in the way they mean. Just not visibly with you." I looked at Zane. "Can you get a signal into that address. Audio. Something that lets you hear what's happening without anyone knowing."

"Yes," Zane said. "Twenty minutes."

"Then we have twenty minutes," I said.

Damien was looking at me with an expression that was somewhere between fury and fear and something underneath both of those that didn't have a category yet.

"You don't have to do this," he said quietly.

"Yes, I do," I said. "They have your father. They have evidence I need to see destroyed, not just collected. And Damien." I held his gaze. "I'm done being the person things happen to. I want to be the person who decides what happens next."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he exhaled slowly and nodded once, the nod of someone agreeing to something he hated completely.

"I'm in the car outside," he said. "The entire time."

"Okay," I said.

"And if anything goes wrong—"

"I know," I said. "I'll get out."

He looked unconvinced, but he didn't push it further.

Zane worked fast. A small earpiece, nearly invisible, fitted under my hair. A microphone disguised as a button on my jacket. By the time he finished, it was three forty, and the city outside was still dark in the particular way that meant dawn was still hours off.

We drove in near silence.

Damien held my hand the entire way, his thumb moving slowly over my knuckles, the only sign that he wasn't as composed as his face suggested.

"Sophia," he said as we pulled two streets away from the address.

"Yes."

"Whatever happens in there." He paused. "I already landed. I told you that. It's still true. It's going to stay true no matter what's in that room."

I looked at him.

"I know," I said softly. "Don't make this sound like a goodbye."

"It's not," he said. "It's a promise."

I kissed him once, brief and certain, and got out of the car.

The address was a townhouse. Unremarkable from the outside. Lights on in two windows. The door opened before I reached it.

Mrs. Park stood there with the same calm, efficient expression she wore every morning serving breakfast at the estate.

"Sophia," she said. Like she was welcoming me home from a trip.

I walked in.

The living room was sparse and modern. Diana sat in a chair near the window, perfectly composed, exactly as she had been outside the gate hours earlier. Richard stood near the fireplace.

He wasn't restrained. Wasn't guarded. Wasn't a prisoner in any sense the photograph had suggested.

He was simply there.

"You came alone," Diana said.

"I did," I said.

"Where's my son?"

"Outside," I said. "Where you knew he'd be. You didn't actually expect me to come without him being somewhere close. You're smarter than that."

Something flickered across Diana's face. Approval, maybe. Or recalculation.

"Sit," she said.

"I'll stand."

She smiled slightly. "You really are different."

"You keep saying that," I said. "I'm starting to think it bothers you."

Richard moved slightly by the fireplace. I looked at him properly for the first time.

"You don't look like a hostage," I said.

"I'm not," he said quietly. His voice was rougher than I expected. Tired in the way Damien's voice got when he hadn't slept. "I haven't been for a long time."

"Then what are you?"

He looked at Diana. Something passed between them that was complicated and old.

"I'm someone who made a mistake twenty-one years ago," he said. "And spent every year since trying to fix it in ways that just made it worse."

"By leaving your sons with a woman who funded an empire off their backs," I said.

"By trying to protect them from what I knew was coming," he said. His voice cracked slightly. "Diana didn't take me away from them. She offered me a way to keep them safe from something far worse than abandonment."

I looked at Diana.

"What's worse than abandonment?" I said.

Diana looked at me steadily.

"There was a sixth person in this family once," she said quietly. "Before Damien. A child who died before any of you were born. The circumstances were." She paused. Looked at Richard. "Not natural."

The room went very quiet.

"Someone targeted this family before any of you were old enough to remember," Diana said. "I have spent twenty-one years making sure it never happened again. Including at a price none of you will ever understand or forgive me for."

I stood very still.

My earpiece was silent. Which meant Damien had heard every word.

"That's why you left," I said slowly.

"That's why I left," Diana said.

"And the assets. The will clause. The Vale connection. Eleven years inside their household." I looked at her. "That wasn't protection. That was a war."

"It became one," Diana said. "Because the people who took my sixth child are the same people who built the Vale family fortune." She looked at me steadily. "Victoria's grandfather. The woman in the portrait you walked past tonight."

My blood went cold.

"And the evidence your mother found," Diana said quietly. "About the offshore accounts and the fraud. That wasn't the only thing she found."

I stared at her.

"She found out what happened to my child," Diana said. "Eight years ago. Before she died." She paused. "That's why they killed her."