Chapter Eleven: Letters In The Dark

VOSS ESTATE 

The lake lay black and endless beyond the tall windows, a sheet of quiet that mirrored the night sky.

Amara Voss—once Elara, always mother—sat at a mahogany desk facing that darkness, a single lamp haloing her in warm light.

The house slept around her: guards at their stations, cameras humming, Kaylee’s precise footsteps faded into silence hours ago.

Only the scratch of her fountain pen broke the hush.

Each night she wrote to Milo.

Not emails—never something that could be hacked or forwarded—but letters on heavy cream paper, the kind that smelled faintly of linen and rain.

She wrote as though the boy still breathed, as though his laughter still ricocheted through mountain air instead of echoing inside her skull.

Tonight the ink bled darker than usual, a storm pressed into script.

~ My son,

The world thinks you’re gone.

They don’t know that every breath I take is for you.

Tonight I walked into the serpent’s den.

Sienna smiled with the same mouth that cursed you, but her eyes—oh, her eyes flinched.

I wanted to carve her name into the marble floor with my nails.

I didn’t.

Not yet.

Soon, love.

Soon.~

Her hand trembled once, a quick betrayal. She set the pen down, flexed her fingers.

The letters were not therapy. They were war journals dressed as lullabies.

The phone on the desk buzzed soft and insistent.

Damien.

Of course.

She let it ring twice, three times, before answering. “Yes?”

His voice, low and velvet-edged, poured through the line. “You left Kaylee to give me nothing. I assume that means the evening was… satisfactory?”

“I don’t send reports,” she said, staring at the black window where her own reflection hovered like a ghost. “If you want details, ask someone you own.”

“I asked you.”

“And I said no.”

A pause, the sound of a match striking. She pictured him in some Italian hideaway, smoke curling around a face she could pin down. Damien could be anyone—a financier, a criminal, a phantom stitched from old bloodlines. She knew only his eyes, cold and impossible, and the wealth he wielded like a scalpel.

“You don’t trust me,” he said finally.

“You’re very perceptive.”

Another small silence, then a chuckle—quiet, dark. “Good. Don’t trust me. Ever.”

The admission landed like a coin dropped into deep water. “Then why help me?” she asked, softer now but no less sharp. “You bankroll an estate, an identity, a company—why?”

“You’re asking the wrong question.”

“There’s only one that matters.”

“You should be asking why I chose you.”

Her grip tightened on the phone. “Then answer that.”

“I have my reasons,” he said, voice lowering to a near-purr. “Motivations are currency. You don’t spend yours all at once.”

“You sound like Ethan.”

A faint laugh, amused and dangerous. “I am nothing like Ethan Cade.”

“Maybe,” she allowed, “but you both think greed is a leash.”

“Greed is a mirror,” Damien corrected. “Hold it up and men hang themselves. Tell me Elara..." she flinched at the name "Does Ethan look tempted yet?”

She pictured the gala again: Ethan’s calculating stare, the way his hand tightened around the glass whenever she smiled.

“Oh, he’s already leaning over the edge,” she said. “If he believes I’m naïve new money, he won’t be able to stop himself. He’ll want to own me. Or bleed me.”

“Good,” Damien murmured. “That’s when he’s weakest.”

Her pen hovered above the letter. “And if I decide I’m tired of being your piece on the board?”

“You were never mine,” he said. “But you are what the game requires.”

The words chilled her more than any threat. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’ll get tonight.”

The line crackled—then went dead.

Amara lowered the phone slowly, pulse steady despite the sudden emptiness on the other end.

Of course he’d hung up. Damien always ended things on his own terms, carving silence into a weapon.

She leaned back, eyes tracing the ceiling beams.

What did he gain by funding her resurrection?

Access to Ethan’s empire?

Retribution of his own?

Or something darker—a vendetta that made hers look small?

Her reflection in the glass stared back, unfamiliar and flawless.

A surgeon’s masterpiece, a stranger’s face.

But the eyes were still hers: storm-dark and unsurrendered.

She turned to the letter once more.

~ Milo,

Tonight the man who remade me finally spoke a truth:

I should not trust him.

I won’t.

But I will use him.

For you.

For every scream Sienna buried beneath her silk.

Sleep, my boy.

Your mother is coming.~

She sealed the envelope with wax the color of dried blood and placed it in the wooden box where all her letters waited.

Not for delivery—never that.

For remembrance.

For the day she would place them beside the justice she intended to carve.

A knock at the door broke the silence.

Kaylee’s voice, low but urgent: “Perimeter sweep complete. Nothing unusual. But we picked up a faint signal near the south gate—burner phone, gone before we could trace it.”

Amara smiled without humor. “Let them come.”

Kaylee hesitated. “The text?”

“Still anonymous.”

“And Damien?”

Amara slid the box of letters shut with a quiet click. “Damien is an enigma with a wallet. He doesn’t own me.”

Kaylee studied her for a heartbeat, something unreadable in her gaze. “Then who does?”

“No one,” Amara said, standing. “And that terrifies them more than anything.”

Outside, the lake lay unbroken until a sudden breeze stirred the surface into ripples, as though the night itself had exhaled.

Amara watched the water shiver and felt the same tremor run through her veins.

The clock had started.

And she was already moving.

Maybe Damien Rhys taught her too well.

She thought as she looked at the text she received from the unknown number. She wouldn't stab him in the back per se but she needed leverage. 

She knew she was playing with fire but she's been burned before. She knew the pain all too well. She wouldn't be burned twice or used as a pawn again.

Neither by Damien,

Ethan 

Or whoever this unknown person was.