Chapter 14 TRAITOR IN THE CAR

Kael's POV

The vehicle moved through the misted streets as I sat with Marcus's message burning on my screen and looked at the back of three heads and tried to breathe normally while my mind ran every possibility at speed.

Someone in this vehicle had been communicating with Victor Kane.

I locked the phone and slid it into my pocket without letting my expression change. That part mattered because the moment whoever it was understood that I knew, the dynamic in this small moving space would shift into something I wasn't equipped to manage yet.

I had no weapons beyond the gun in my waistband, my mother was beside me with an oxygen line and no ability to move quickly and Raven was driving with both hands occupied.

I looked at Selena first.

She was staring out of the window with her arms still folded and her jaw tight, watching the dark streets slide past like she was trying to memorize the route.

She has been with Ethan Kane for six months with access to Victor's household and conversations and networks but she had framed it as intelligence gathering, protection and survival but it could also be called something else entirely.

I looked at Camille.

She sat in the front with her hands folded in her lap and her posture perfectly composed in that managed, deliberate way she carried everything. Twenty-two years in hiding with Alessandro's private networks at her fingertips. She had known about both contracts, had moved precisely and without hesitation the moment Alessandro died, almost like she had been waiting for the signal.

I looked at Raven's eyes in the rearview mirror. She caught me looking and held it for exactly one second before returning to the road.

She had been briefed on both contracts simultaneously, had access to the same encrypted channels the contracts were placed through and had changed her mind about killing me for reasons she still hadn't fully explained.

My jaw tightened. My mother shifted beside me and her hand found my forearm in the dark. She wasn't looking at me but her fingers pressed once, deliberate and specific, and I understood immediately.

She knew I was working something out and she was telling me to be careful.

I covered her hand with mine briefly and then straightened.

"Camille," I called and she turned slightly in the front seat.

"How did you know which hospital my mother was in?"

There was a short pause before she answered,

"I've been monitoring her medical records for two years," she said. "Alessandro asked me to before everything collapsed. He wanted someone watching over her in case the empire became unstable."

"Through what channel?"

"A private medical data network Alessandro maintained."

"Who else had access to that network?"

Camille turned fully, her grey-green eyes steady and reading me with the accuracy of someone who understood exactly what kind of question was actually being asked.

"Several people," she said carefully. "Alessandro's inner circle primarily."

"Including whoever placed the second contract?"

"Maybe."

Raven's eyes hit the mirror again and Selena had gone very still beside me.

I kept my voice at eye level. "Marcus sent me a message twenty minutes ago that someone in our immediate group has been in contact with Victor Kane."

The interior of the vehicle changed temperature by several degrees as nobody moved or protested immediately and that absence of immediate protest told me because innocent people react while guilty people calculate.

So basically, all three of them were calculating.

"Say what you mean directly," Raven said from the front. Her voice was flat and her eyes were on the road.

"I mean that Victor Kane knows things he shouldn't," I said. "About the estate, the contracts and where we are." I looked between them. "Someone has been feeding him information and I am sitting in this vehicle with three people who each have the means and the history to have done it."

Selena turned from the window. Her eyes were bright and her voice came out sharp. "You think it's me."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

"Selena…."

"I spent six months terrified," she said, her voice fracturing at the edges. "I found out I was the heir to a criminal empire and I had nobody to tell and nowhere safe to go. I made bad choices, I know that." Her hands dropped to her lap and she looked at me with something completely unguarded. "But I have never spoken to Victor Kane about any of this, not once."

The silence after that had a specific quality and I believed her which left two suspensions.

Raven pulled the vehicle to a stop at a red light and the city glowed wet and orange around us. She looked in the mirror and when her eyes met mine this time they stayed.

"It wasn't me," she said simply.

"You were briefed on both contracts," I said.

"By the person who placed them, not by anyone connected to Kane."

"Who briefed you?"

The light changed as Raven pulled forward and something crossed her face in the mirror that she controlled before it fully formed.

"That answer is complicated," she said.

"Uncomplicate it."

There was another beat of silence before Camille spoke from the front seat in a voice that was very quiet and very steady.

"It was me," she said.

"I briefed Raven," Camille continued without turning around. "I placed both contracts through Alessandro's channels not to have either of you killed." Her voice remained composed but something underneath it was fraying. "And to find both of you before anyone else did."

I stared at the back of her head.

"You placed a contract on my mother?" I asked.

"I placed a locate and extract order coded as a contract so it would move through the network without being flagged," she said. "The contractor assigned to her had instructions to bring her somewhere safe not to harm her."

"And me?"

She finally turned and her expression was the most honest it had been since I walked through the estate doors.

"Yours was real," she said quietly. "Initially."

My mother's hand tightened on my arm.

"Alessandro asked me to test you," Camille said. "Before he died, he asked me to arrange it." She looked at me without flinching. "He needed to know if you would survive the first night. If you didn't, you weren't ready but if you did…"

"Then I was his weapon," I said and she didn't deny it.

The vehicle kept moving through the dark city as I sat with that truth and felt it settle into the cold space in my chest alongside everything else tonight had put there.

Marcus's name lit up my phone screen and I answered immediately.

His voice came through fast and stripped of its usual composure.

"Kael, listen carefully. Lucien's location just surfaced." A pause that lasted one terrible second. "He's at the hospital."

My blood turned to ice.

"There's nobody there," I said. "My mother is with me."

"I know," Marcus said. "He's not there for your mother."

"Then who??"

"He found Mira."

The name hit me like a door slamming open in a dark room.

Mira was my childhood friend, the one person in this city who had nothing to do with any of this, who knew nothing about empires or heirs or contracts or vaults and who had only ever known me as Kael from the neighborhood.

"He has her," Marcus said. "And he wants the card delivered within the hour.”

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