Chapter Ten

Elena's POV

The thing about burning something down is that you have to be patient.

You can't rush it. You can't be sloppy. You have to be methodical, you have to think three steps ahead, and most importantly you have to look like you weren't even near the fire when it started. Elena Voss had learned that lesson a long time ago — not literally, not yet, but in every other arena of her life. In boardrooms. In bedrooms. In the careful, quiet work of making herself indispensable to men who didn't yet know they needed her.

She poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the window of her Midtown apartment on the fourteenth floor and watched the city below her do what cities did at two in the morning: move, pulse, forget.

The call had come two hours ago. Derek Paulsen, doing what she'd paid him to do. The tip had been made. The girl's name was in the system. By morning, Julia Rose Arthur would be sitting in a holding cell in a small Montana county building trying to understand what had just happened to her life.

Elena took a slow sip.

She felt nothing. That was the thing people always got wrong about women like her — they assumed there was heat underneath it, some roiling, seething jealousy that drove them to terrible things. But Elena didn't operate from heat. She operated from clarity. The situation had been assessed. The threat had been identified. The action had been taken. It was as simple as that.

Julia Arthur was a threat.

Not because she was beautiful — she was, in a very wholesome, untailored kind of way, the kind of beautiful that didn't know it was beautiful, which was frankly its own irritation — but because of what she meant to Adam. Elena had spent fourteen months with Adam Casey. She knew his face the way a jeweler knew a stone — every facet, every flaw, every angle where the light hit wrong. And she had never, not once in fourteen months, seen his face do what it did the night he opened that photograph on his phone.

She had watched him look at the image of Julia's face and she had watched something open up in him. Something she hadn't known was closed.

That was the moment she understood. Not I want her back. Not I still think about her. But something older and more dangerous than either of those things. Recognition. The look of a man who sees the thing he let go of and finally understands its actual value.

She'd moved quickly after that.

Henry Shepherd — the man who'd provided the photographs — had been remarkably easy. A former farmhand, pathetically besotted with a girl who barely knew he existed, bitter in the particular way of men who believe they deserved something and were cheated out of it. Elena had found him through a contact who knew Fairview, had met him twice in as many weeks, had listened to his story with careful, attentive sympathy.

She hadn't needed to ask him to manipulate the photographs. He'd already done it — had spent months constructing the fiction himself, nursing it, waiting for the right moment to deploy it. All she had done was suggest the recipient. All she had done was time it.

And Adam, brilliant, controlled, impossible Adam, had believed it completely.

Because that was the other thing about men: even the sharpest ones had a seam. A place where logic failed and emotion flooded in. For Adam, that seam was Julia. It had always been Julia. And when you found a man's seam, you cut along it cleanly, and then you made yourself the one who held him together after.

She had done that too. She had been there. She had been kind and steady and present, and she had watched him fold himself back into something that worked, something functional, something that looked a great deal like he was moving forward.

He had moved forward with her.

But then Julia had come to the city. And Adam had sent her away — yes, good, correct — but not before something in his face had shifted in that hallway. Elena had been watching from the bedroom doorway. She had seen it. He hadn't looked angry. He had looked destroyed. Men who felt nothing did not look destroyed.

She deleted the text from the jail. That was easy. Routine, almost.

The fire was slightly less routine. But Derek had been reliable, and the farmhand had been greedy, and the old woman — well. Elena pressed her lips together. She hadn't intended the old woman. That had been a variable she hadn't controlled as tightly as she should have. She pressed it down into the same place she pressed everything inconvenient. Smooth. Gone.

She topped up her wine.

The important thing now was Adam. The important thing was to be there — warm, familiar, necessary — for whatever came next. He was shaken. He was grieving something, even if he didn't fully understand what. He needed someone to hand him a coffee and ask nothing of him and simply exist at his side until the noise in his head subsided.

She was very good at that.

Her phone lit up on the cushion beside her. A text from Adam.

Coming home late. Don't wait up.

She looked at it. She thought about the photograph Henry had given her — the original, not the doctored version, the real one: Julia laughing in a field with sunlight in her hair, looking like someone who had never once thought about strategy, never once calculated the value of a smile or timed an entrance.

Looking like someone who had simply, stupidly, loved him.

Elena turned the phone face down.

She's gone now, she thought. It's done.

She finished her wine.

She went to bed.