Chapter 13 THE GIRL I LOVED

Kael's POV

Nobody moved.

The candlelight shifted in the draught from the open doorway and threw unsteady shadows across Selena's face, and I sat on the edge of my mother's bed with both hands still wrapped around hers and stared at the girl I had loved for three years like she was something my brain was manufacturing out of exhaustion and blood loss.

But she was real and was standing in the doorway of Alessandro Varez's abandoned estate with Camille's hand on her shoulder and an expression on her face I had never seen there before in all the time I had known her. Not the warm calculated charm or the social intelligence that always knew exactly what a room needed from her or even the guilt I had watched flicker across her face outside Lumière hours ago when she stood beside Ethan Kane and chose not to look at me.

This was something stripped of all of that, she looked terrified.

I stood up slowly.

My mother's hands released mine and I heard her exhale behind me, soft and careful, the sound of someone who has been holding a breath for a very long time.

"Kael," Selena said. Her voice came out wrong and too thin, the way voices go when the body is managing something the mind hasn't finished processing.

I didn't answer.

I looked at her and at Camille's hand resting on her shoulder and at the grey-green eyes that connected them across twenty-two years of absence and I felt something inside my chest move in a way I had no framework for.

"How long have you known?" I asked.

Selena's jaw tightened. "Kael…"

"I said how long?"

She flinched at the second command and her arms crossed over her chest, hands gripping her own elbows, and I recognized that gesture because I had seen it a thousand times. She did it when she was frightened and trying to make herself smaller without appearing to.

"Six months," she said.

I turned away from her, pressed my fist against my mouth and stood there looking at the wall because the alternative was saying something I couldn't take back.

She had known for six months that she was Alessandro Varez's heir and she had known while we were still together.

While I was working midnight deliveries to pay hospital bills and she was telling me she loved me in the dark of our shared mornings, she had known and said nothing and then she had left me for Ethan Kane, Victor Kane's son.

The pieces assembled themselves with a horrible, mechanical clarity that made my stomach turn.

I turned back around.

"Ethan Kane," I said.

Something crossed Selena's face so quickly she almost contained it.

"Victor Kane has been trying to access Alessandro's vault for years," I continued. My voice was coming out very quiet and very flat and I could hear both of those things happening and couldn't stop them. "He's on the list of Alessandro's insurance policy. His name is in that vault and if it's exposed, everything he's built is finished." I looked at her steadily. "And six months ago, someone told you who you are and shortly after that, you ended up on the arm of the one man in this city whose father needs that vault to stay sealed."

"It wasn't like that," she said, her eyes bright.

"Then tell me what it was like."

"I was scared." Her voice cracked on the last word. She pressed her lips together hard and looked at the ceiling briefly before coming back to me. "I found out and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know who to trust and I didn't know if you were safe to tell."

"I was your boyfriend."

"But you were also a target," she said sharply. "I didn't know that then but I knew something was wrong. Camille told me to be careful about who I stayed close to. She said the closer someone stood to Alessandro's blood, the more dangerous it became for everyone around them."

I looked at Camille.

She met my gaze without apology. "I told her the truth," she said simply. "I left the choice of what to do with it entirely to her."

"So she chose Ethan Kane?" I asked.

"She chose survival," Camille said. "Which is something I understand better than most people in this room."

The words landed with more weight than she'd perhaps intended because standing in the estate of a dead man surrounded by the consequences of his choices, surrounded by people who had all been surviving his world in different ways, it was difficult to argue with the premise.

I looked back at Selena.

She was watching me with those hazel eyes and the tears she was refusing to let fall were doing something complicated to her expression, pulling it in directions it didn't usually go, and beneath all the fear and the guilt and the three years of history between us, I saw the same exhaustion I felt.

The specific kind that comes from carrying something too large for too long without anywhere safe to put it down.

I walked toward her slowly. She held her ground, barely, her knuckles whitening against her own arms.

I stopped a few feet away.

"Are you with Ethan genuinely?" I asked.

Her chin lifted. "No."

"Does he know who you are?"

"No. Victor suspected Alessandro had another hidden heir but he didn't know it was me and Ethan doesn't know anything about any of this."

"Then why stay close to him?"

She exhaled shakily. "Because Victor Kane has resources, information networks and if anyone was going to find out what Alessandro left behind before the succession war started, it was him. I thought if I was near enough to the source I could know what was coming before it arrived." She looked at me raw and direct. "I was trying to protect myself, Kael. I know how that sounds."

"It sounds like something I would have done," I said and that surprised her.

The tears she'd been managing spilled over one at a time and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth quickly.

Behind me, Raven's voice came from the doorway where she had positioned herself in characteristic silence sometime during the conversation.

"This is a touching reunion," she said, not unkindly for her, "but we have a timeline problem."

I turned around and Raven was looking at her phone with her jaw set.

"The second contractor," I said.

"I've been running traces while you were talking." She looked up. "They've left the hospital area. They're moving east."

Camille straightened immediately. "How long?"

"Forty minutes. Maybe thirty if they know this district well."

My mother made a sound behind me and I turned to find her trying to push herself upright, one hand pressed flat against the mattress.

"Mom, don't."

"Don't tell me not to." Her voice was thin but the stubbornness in it was completely intact and I felt something loosen slightly in my chest at the familiarity of it. "If we need to move, we move."

"You have a portable oxygen unit."

"I've carried more."

Camille crossed the room with quiet efficiency and began checking the equipment with the practiced movements of someone who had done this before.

I looked at Selena.

She was still standing near the doorway, slightly separate from the room's activity, watching everything with wide eyes and the particular stillness of someone who has spent six months being careful and has just realized that being careful is no longer available as an option.

"You have the key?" I asked Camille.

"Yes."

"And I have the card." I looked between them both. "Alessandro designed the vault to need both which means neither of us can do this without the other."

"That was his intention," Camille confirmed.

"Then we're not enemies," I said.

Camille looked at me for a long moment.

"We never were," she said. "Alessandro made sure of that too."

I thought about a man I had never met who had arranged the entire architecture of this night from beyond his own death who had hidden two heirs in different kinds of poverty, split the key to his empire between them and set the world on fire to see which of them would find each other.

I didn't know yet whether to be furious or impressed, possibly both.

"We need to move everyone to a secondary location," Raven said from the doorway. She was already scanning the hallway beyond. "This estate is compromised now that we're here."

"I have somewhere," Camille said.

"Of course you always do," I said and amusement moved across her face quickly.

I moved to my mother's bedside and helped her sit fully upright. She let me without arguing, which told me more about how she was feeling than any honest answer would have. Her hands were cold again and her breathing was audible even with the oxygen line in place.

"I'm alright," she said preemptively.

"I know."

"Stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm already gone."

I held her gaze and something in my chest tightened to the point of real pain.

"You're not going anywhere," I said quietly.

She searched my face for a moment and then covered my hand with hers.

"Neither are you," she said firmly.

Raven appeared fully in the doorway. "We need to leave in the next five minutes."

I straightened and looked around the room. My mother is on the bed, Camille preparing the portable equipment and Selena standing slightly apart with her arms still crossed and her eyes moving between all of us like she was trying to locate her place in a situation that kept rewriting itself.

I walked over to her.

She looked up at me and didn't pretend she wasn't nervous.

"I need to know something," I said.

"Okay."

"Victor Kane, how much does he actually know about the vault's location?"

Selena's expression shifted into concentration, the social intelligence replacing the fear as she moved into territory she understood.

"He knows it exists," she said. "And he knows Alessandro had a central archive of leverage material. He's been trying to locate it for at least two years based on conversations I've overheard." She paused. "He doesn't know about the card and key mechanism but he thinks it's a physical location that can be found through property records."

"Which means he's looking in the wrong place."

"For now, yes."

"How long before he figures out the right one?"

Selena held my gaze.

"He has people inside the city's property registry, inside the police department and inside at least two of Alessandro's former captains' organizations." She exhaled. "So, it won't take long."

I nodded once.

Raven said from the door, "Kael."

I turned and looked at my mother, Camille, Selena, the key, the card and everything Alessandro had set in motion from the grave.

"Let's go," I said and we moved.

The five of us navigated the estate's lower corridor in candlelight and emerged through a side exit into the grounds. Rain had softened to a steady mist and the city beyond the walls hummed its usual indifferent note.

Camille led us along a path through the overgrown garden that she clearly knew from memory, moving without hesitation through the dark.

My mother walked slowly beside me with her hand through my arm and the portable oxygen unit rolling on its small wheels across uneven stone and every few steps I felt the slight change in her weight that told me the effort was significant but she didn't complain once.

We reached a section of the boundary wall where the vines grew thickest and Camille pressed against a specific section of stone. A narrow door, invisible from either side until it was moving, swung inward silently.

Beyond it was a side street and a dark vehicle parked tight against the wall.

Raven checked the perimeter with three quick sweeps of her eyes.

"It's clear," she said.

We moved through the door.

I helped my mother into the back of the vehicle and settled her against the seat and checked her oxygen line and she tolerated all of it with quiet dignity that made my throat ache.

Selena climbed in from the other side and for a moment the three of us occupied the same small space and the weight of everything that had happened in the last several hours sat between us like a physical presence.

My mother looked at Selena, Selena looked back and something passed between them that I didn't fully catch, some specific understanding that existed in the register of people who had both been carrying the same secret from different distances.

Camille slid into the front, Raven took the wheel and we pulled away from the Varez estate into the dark streets of the lower eastern district.

I looked through the rear window as the estate walls disappeared into the mist.

My phone buzzed. I looked at the screen and saw a message from Marcus.

“Lucien is moving. He's not heading for the warehouse, his location is unknown. Take no calls from unknown numbers, someone inside our group has been communicating with Kane.*

I read it twice and I looked around the vehicle.

At Camille, who had survived twenty-two years in the shadows, at Raven, who had been briefed on both contracts, then at Selena, who had spent six months embedded beside Victor Kane's son.

Someone in this vehicle had been talking to the most dangerous corrupt politician in Blackthorn City and I had no idea which one of them it was.