Six Cars

"Who sent that?" Eliora asked.

"I don't know." Severin set the phone down, his voice controlled but tight. "The number traces to nothing. A burner, wiped after sending."

"Tell me the truth, or we will." Eliora repeated the words out loud, testing their weight. "Someone thinks you're keeping something from me. Are you?"

"I've told you everything I know for certain." His eyes held hers, steady despite the tension in his jaw. "What I don't know, I can't tell you. That's not the same as hiding it."

"It feels the same from where I'm sitting."

Before he could answer, the door opened without a knock. Marco, the head of security, stepped in fast, his face grim.

"We have a problem."

"What kind," Severin said.

"Perimeter cameras just picked up six vehicles coming up the coastal road. Moving fast." Marco's eyes flicked to Eliora, then back to Severin. "It's Caius."

Eliora's stomach dropped. "Caius is here?"

"He shouldn't know where this house is," Severin said, standing.

"He's your son," Marco said. "He's known this address his whole life."

Severin's expression didn't change, but something in the room did — a shift Eliora felt more than saw, like the temperature had dropped.

"Lock the gates," Severin said. "He doesn't come in until I say so."

"Sir, he's already—"

A commotion rose from somewhere downstairs before Marco could finish. Raised voices. A door slamming. Footsteps moving fast across marble floors.

"Too late," Marco said grimly.

Severin moved toward the door. "Eliora, stay here."

"No." She was on her feet before she'd fully decided to be. "If this is about me, I want to be there."

"It's not safe—"

"Neither was last night, and I survived that too." She met his eyes, refusing to back down. "I'm done being told to wait in rooms while other people decide things about my life."

Something flickered across Severin's face, not quite approval, but close to it. He didn't argue further. "Stay behind me, then."

They reached the top of the staircase just as Caius appeared at the bottom of it, six men in dark suits fanned out behind him near the front doors, none of them Severin's.

"Where is she?" Caius shouted up at them. "I know she's here."

"You shouldn't have come," Severin said, his voice carrying easily across the wide entrance hall.

"She's my fiancée."

"She isn't," Eliora said, stepping into view beside Severin before she could stop herself. "I ended that three nights ago. In front of three hundred people, if you'll recall."

Caius's eyes found her, and something in his face shifted, relief, then anger, then something harder to name. "You're coming home."

"I already left."

He started up the stairs. Two of Severin's guards moved to block him, but Severin raised a hand, letting him pass. Eliora didn't understand why until Caius was standing directly in front of her, close enough that she could see the exhaustion under his eyes.

"You're still my fiancée," he said, quieter now, like the audience behind him had briefly stopped existing.

"Not anymore." She held her ground. "You made sure of that yourself."

"I made a mistake. One mistake, after three years, and you're going to let it erase everything?"

"It wasn't one mistake, Caius. It was a decision, made in a room with a closed door, while I was three floors away planning our wedding." Her voice didn't waver, though her hands, tucked behind her back, had begun to shake. "I don't owe you a second chance just because you're finally scared of losing something."

His face hardened. He reached for her wrist, not violently, but firmly enough to stop her from stepping back.

"You're coming with me."

"Let go of her."

Severin's voice cut through the hall, low and absolutely certain. Before Caius could respond, a hand closed around his wrist, stopping the motion entirely. Severin didn't grip hard. He didn't need to. The simple, unshakable authority in the gesture was enough to still the entire room.

Caius's eyes went wide with disbelief. "You're taking her side? Over your own son?"

Severin lowered his son's hand slowly, deliberately, and let go.

"She will leave this house only when she decides to," he said. "Until then, no one touches her. Not you. Not anyone."

The hall went completely silent. Even Caius's own men seemed to hold their breath.

"You're choosing her," Caius said, his voice shaking now, disbelief curdling into something uglier. "Over me."

"I'm choosing what's right," Severin said. "That's not the same thing as choosing against you, though I understand you won't see it that way tonight."

Caius stared at his father for a long moment, something breaking visibly behind his eyes. Then his gaze slid to Eliora, and whatever softness had been there moments earlier was gone completely.

"You'll regret this," he said, quiet enough that only she could fully hear it. "Both of you."

He turned and walked back down the stairs, his men falling into step behind him without a word. The front doors closed a moment later, and the sound of six engines starting up outside filled the sudden silence of the hall.

Eliora let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

"Are you all right?" Severin asked.

"I don't know." Her hands were still shaking. "That felt like it was about more than the two of us."

"It was." Severin's eyes stayed on the closed doors, his jaw tight. "By tomorrow, every family in this world will know what just happened here."

"And what did happen?"

He turned to look at her, something unreadable behind his steel-grey eyes.

"They'll say I chose you over my own son," he said quietly. "They won't understand why. And I'm not sure I can explain it in a way that makes it sound like anything less than exactly what it looked like."

Eliora held his gaze, her heart still pounding from everything that had just happened, the threat, the confrontation, the strange, unshakable calm in his voice when he'd told his son to let her go.

"And what did it look like?" she asked quietly.

Severin didn't answer right away. When he finally did, his voice was low, almost reluctant, like the words cost him something to say out loud.

"Like I have something to protect that matters more to me than keeping the peace in my own family," he said. "And I'm still working out whether that's true."