Chapter Five

Celeste's Pov

I watched the light for twenty minutes before I made a decision, not the corridor this time. Not standing at a gap in a door listening to half a conversation. I wanted to see clearly and I wanted to do it without being caught which meant I needed a reason to be moving through the house at ten thirty at night that wasn't suspicious.

I went to the kitchen. If anyone stopped me I was getting water. Simple.

Nobody stopped me.

The kitchen was empty and dark and I moved through it to the window that faced the back structure. From this angle I could see the entrance. The door was closed but the light was coming through the side window in a way that meant whoever was inside was toward the back of the room not the front.

Then the door opened.

A man stepped out. Tall. Same build as Nico. He pulled the door shut behind him and stood in the dark for a moment doing something with his phone. The outside light caught his face for exactly three seconds before he turned and walked in the opposite direction from the main house.

Three seconds was enough.

Same jaw. Same line of the nose. Same everything.

Except the way he moved. Nico moved like a man who was always arriving somewhere with purpose. This man moved like he had nowhere to be and wasn't bothered by it.

I stood at the kitchen window until he disappeared into the dark.

Then I stood there a while longer.

I didn't sleep. I lay in bed and put everything in order. The shifting moods I had catalogued as inconsistency. The coffee made right on a morning he had no reason to know my preference. The laugh through the door. The ease between two men who stood like they had grown up in the same skin. The scar that appeared and disappeared.

I wasn't losing my mind. There were two of them.

The question was whether Nico knew I was starting to see it.

He was in the kitchen again in the morning. That version of him, loose and unhurried with the coffee already made. I walked in and looked at him and thought about the man I had watched through the window eight hours earlier and tried to find the difference in the light of day.

It was there. Subtle but there. Something behind the eyes that was warmer. Less calculated.

I sat down and accepted the coffee.

"Did you sleep," he asked.

"Not well."

"The bed—"

"The bed is fine." I wrapped my hands around the mug. "I've just had a lot to think about."

He nodded like that was reasonable and didn't push it. Nico always pushed it. Gently but consistently, like a man who needed to account for every variable. This one let it sit.

I filed that away and drank my coffee.

***************

Sera called mid morning. I took it in my room with the door closed.

"Dominic told me he came," she said before I could speak.

"He did."

"Are you angry with me for telling him where you were."

"I haven't decided yet." I sat down. "Sera, what did Dante find out about you. The thing you were going to tell me before Iris interrupted."

Silence.

"Sera."

"It's complicated."

"Everything is complicated. Tell me."

She exhaled. "Dante found out that I had been passing information to one of the other families. Before the engagement. I was approached and I was stupid and I needed money Papa didn't know about and I said yes. It was twice. Small things. But Dante found out and he was going to use it to own me for the rest of my life."

I pressed two fingers to my temple. "Which family."

She was quiet for too long.

"Sera. Which family did you pass information to."

"The Voss family," she said quietly. "Someone who worked for them approached me. I didn't know who they were at the time, I swear I didn't know—"

"Someone who worked for them." I stood up slowly. "Do you have a name."

"He never gave me a real one. He just said to call him V."

The room felt smaller suddenly. V. Viktor. Viktor Voss who had sat in this house yesterday for a meeting that ran long. Viktor who Nico watched without mentioning.

"Celeste, are you there."

"I'm here." I kept my voice even. "Don't tell anyone else what you just told me. Not Dominic, not Papa. Nobody."

"You're scaring me."

"Good. Be scared. It'll keep you careful." I paused. "I'll call you tomorrow."

I hung up and sat with the information for a long moment.

Viktor had used Sera to get information on the Mori family. Then someone had made sure Dante found out about Sera's involvement, which forced Sera to destroy the engagement, which put me in this house. It was too clean to be coincidence. Someone had built this path and I had walked down it without seeing the walls.

The only question was whether Nico was at the beginning of that chain or as far from it as I was.

I found Iris in the east wing just before lunch. She was carrying a folder and moving with purpose and she slowed when she saw my face.

"Mrs. Voss—"

"I need five minutes," I said.

She looked at me carefully. "This isn't a good time."

"It's not a question." I held her gaze. "Five minutes. Somewhere private."

Something shifted in her expression. Calculation. She was deciding how much I knew and how much that changed her position. I kept my face still and let her calculate.

"The study," she said finally. "Give me ten minutes."

I nodded and watched her walk away and thought about the folder in her hands and the careful blankness she wore like armor.

She knew something. She had always known something. And the fact that she agreed to meet me instead of deflecting meant she had decided I was no longer someone she could manage by omission.

That was either very good or very dangerous.

I was in the study in ten minutes. She walked in two minutes after me, closed the door, and looked at me with an expression that had dropped the careful blankness entirely.

"How much do you know," she said.

I looked at her steadily. "Enough. But I want to hear it from you."

She set the folder down on the desk between us and opened it.

"Then sit down," she said quietly. "Because this is going to change everything you think you understand about this house."