The Ghost of Kilsyth

Malia's POV

We didn't open it. Not then.

I know that sounds mad. We'd bled for that file. Eleven people had died from it. But when the chime sounded, and the white screen bloomed in the dark tent, every muscle in my body locked, and Jarrah's hand closed over mine without a word, and neither of us reached for the keyboard.

"It's done," Wren whispered. She'd woken at the sound, blinking, her braid half undone. "It's all there. Fourteen thousand documents. I haven't looked at any of them."

"Don't," I said.

"Malia"

"Not yet. Give me an hour." I heard how strange it sounded. "I need to wash my face. I need to eat something. I need to be a person for an hour before I find out what kind."

Nobody argued. Jarrah only said, "An hour," and squeezed my hand once before letting it go. I loved him for it so fiercely that I had to look away.

I went out into the grey dawn and stood at the edge of the dock with a cup of tea going cold in my fist. The harbour looked innocent in the early light, flat and pearl-coloured, gulls wheeling over the cranes. A cleanup crew was already working along the yard, men in rubber boots dragging tarps. Nobody spoke. I watched them for a long time and tried to find the feeling I was supposed to have. Victory. Relief. All I found was a wide, silent tiredness, like a field after a flood.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

I almost didn't look. Nobody had this number. Jarrah had given it to me three weeks ago, a burner with exactly four contacts, and every one of them was in the tent behind me.

The screen showed an unknown sender, and a single attachment.

I opened it standing very still, with the wind in my face.

It was a text file. Short. A column of numbers, a column of letters, and a line at the top that made every hair on my arms stand up.

KILSYTH ESTATE. NORTH GATE. WEDNESDAY 03:00. NO CAMERAS. NO GUARDS. DO NOT TELL HIM.

Below it, the codes. Six of them. Gate, perimeter, the stables, the east wing, the study, the vault. I knew the format. I'd typed codes like these into those doors a thousand times, a child running through the halls in her socks.

At the very bottom, one more line. Four words.

Your mother's room, Malia.

I dropped the cup. It hit the wet planks and rolled, spilling tea in a thin brown ribbon down the grain. I didn't pick it up. I couldn't feel my hands.

Nobody called me that. Not Malia, not like that. In my father's house I'd been the girl, Miss Kilsyth, Alastair's daughter. Only one person ever said my name with that exact weight, the weight of a secret held for years and finally set down. Only one person knew about the room.

My mother had been dead for nineteen years. Nobody had opened her door since.

"Malia?"

I turned. Jarrah stood behind me, hair wet, a clean shirt buttoned wrong. He took one look at my face and crossed the dock in four strides.

"What is it?"

I held out the phone. He read the screen once, then again, slower. His expression didn't shift. He's too disciplined for that. But I watched his shoulders square, the way a man's do when he's bracing for a storm he can see coming.

"Who has this number?"

"No one. You. Pike. Wren. Dez."

"Then someone inside my crew."

"Or someone inside my father's house who found a way to reach me." I heard the thin edge in my voice. "It's his handwriting. The way he formats codes. Six lines, no spaces."

"Your father's?"

"Not his. His system. The way he trained every man in the house to write." I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. "Anyone could copy it. Anyone who's been in that house."

"It's bait."

"Of course it's bait."

"It's a trap, Malia. It's the oldest one there is. Leave a door open, leave a name on the other side of it, wait for the daughter to walk through." He was speaking quickly now, low, controlled. "He couldn't take the terminal. He couldn't break us on the dock. So he's turning to the one thing he still knows how to use."

"Me."

"You."

I lowered my hands. We stared at each other. Wind pulled at his collar, at my hair, and underneath the wind I could hear the whole harbour holding its breath.

"I know," I said. "That's what makes it so good."

"Then you don't go."

"I didn't say I was going."

"You didn't say you weren't."

I laughed. It came out ragged. "No. I didn't."

We sat on an overturned container with the phone between us, and I took him through it line by line, the way my father taught me to take apart a threat. The date was wrong for a trap. Wednesday was my father's night at the Collins Street club, three hours, always, since I was a child, and an assassin laying bait would never put it on a night when the target was out. The phrase do not tell him was too obvious, a hook for a woman who already felt guilty for keeping secrets. The codes were current. I'd have bet my life on it. Nobody changes a gate code on a Kilsyth estate without sending a memo to every staff member.

"So it's real," Jarrah said.

"The codes are real." I rubbed my temples. "Whether the person who sent them is on my side is something else."

"And the line about your mother."

I couldn't look at him. "I don't know."

"Malia."

"Nobody knows about her room." My voice dropped to a murmur. "After she died, my father locked it. He had the key melted down. I found a way in once, through the window, when I was eleven. I never told him. I never told anyone. There's a box under the bed, and a letter in the box, and I never opened it, because I was frightened of what I'd learn."

He said nothing. He just waited.

"Whoever sent this knows I went in. Which means they've been watching me for a very long time." I swallowed. "Or they're someone I told."

"Who did you tell?"

"No one." I shut my eyes. "That's what frightens me."

The gulls screamed over the cranes. A truck ground by on the far side of the yard, loud and ordinary.

When Jarrah spoke again, it wasn't the voice of the man who'd run a dock for eleven years. It was lower, rougher, a voice I'd heard only once before, in the dark of the tent, when I'd laid my head on his shoulder.

"Listen to me," he said. "I'm going to say this once, and then I'm going to help you, because it's your choice and I won't take it from you."

"All right."

"If you go into that house and your father hurts you again. If he so much as raises his voice. If you come back with so much as a bruise." He took a breath. "I'll tear Kilsyth down to the foundations. Every wall. Every stable. Every tree he planted. I won't ask permission. I won't care about the consequences. I'll do it with my bare hands if I have to, and I'll sleep like a child afterward."

I'd never heard him say anything like it. It was ugly and true, and absolutely without drama, a man stating a fact about the weather. My heart gave a slow, painful lurch.

"That's a terrible thing to promise," I said.

"It's not a promise. It's a warning." His eyes held mine. "To you. So you'll know what it costs me when you're not careful."

"You can't afford to love me that much."

"No," he said. "I can't."

The words hung between us in the pale light, and neither of us dared pick them up. Something in my chest shifted, a stone turning over in deep water. I understood then that the hour I'd asked for in the tent was gone, that the file was still waiting, that my father's trap was still open. And that none of it mattered as much as this, a man sitting on a container in the rain, telling me the truth.

"I'll think about it," I whispered.

"That's all I'm asking."

"I'm not saying yes."

"I know."

"And I'm not telling you no." I put my hand on his jaw, and he turned his face into my palm for a heartbeat, eyes closed, as though it were the only place he'd ever been safe. "Come on. Let's go look at what we bled for."

Inside, Wren had set up two laptops and a projector, and the tent walls glowed with a grid of file names. Pike stood at the back with his arms folded, silent as a stone. Dez, the quiet lieutenant who never spoke unless he had to, had pulled a chair beside the cart. All of them looked up as we came in. Nobody said a word.

I sat. Jarrah sat beside me. Wren's fingers hovered over the keys.

"Where do I start?"

"The top folder," I said. "The oldest date."

She clicked. A directory opened, then another, then a single document sitting alone at the bottom of the screen. It was small. Four lines of text, no title. The date at the head was twenty-one years old.

I read the first line.

I read it again.

Behind me, I heard Jarrah's breath stop. The tent grew very quiet. Out on the water, a ship's horn sounded, long and low and mournful, and somewhere beneath it the dock shifted and settled like a creature turning in its sleep.

It was in my mother's handwriting.

It was addressed to me.

And the last line of it read: If you are reading this, Malia, then your father is not who you think he is. Do not go home.

I stared at the screen until the letters blurred, and then I looked at the phone in my hand, with its invitation to a house I'd been told never to return to, and I understood that someone had set both messages in front of me on purpose.

I just didn't know which one was the lie.