CHAPTER 14

Damien's POV

The Vale mansion.

I stared at the photograph for ten seconds. Then I forwarded it to Zane and called him before Sophia could say anything.

He picked up immediately.

"The window in the background," I said. "Vale mansion. East wing by the look of it."

"I see it," Zane said. He had already received it. Of course he had. "Give me four minutes."

I hung up and looked at Sophia.

She was looking at the photograph on her phone with the expression she got when she was processing something methodically. Not panicking. Just working through it in that quiet focused way that I had stopped being surprised by and started relying on without meaning to.

"You lived there," I said.

"Three years," she said. "I know that building better than they think I do." She looked up. "The east wing is where Victoria keeps her private meetings. Away from staff. Away from cameras." She paused. "She always said it was for privacy. I thought she meant from the press."

"She meant from evidence," I said.

"Yes."

I looked at the time on my phone. Ten forty three. Midnight was seventy seven minutes away and the Vale mansion was twenty minutes from here on a clear night and tonight the city was never clear.

"We need Dominic," I said.

"Yes," she said. "But Damien." She stopped me with a hand on my arm. "The note said bring us the girl. If we go in with all five brothers it becomes a war and Remy is in the middle of it."

I looked at her.

"I know what you're thinking," I said.

"Then tell me I'm wrong," she said.

I couldn't tell her she was wrong because she wasn't.

One person going in was cleaner. One person they were expecting. One person they had planned for. Walking in with the Black brothers behind me turned a hostage situation into a siege and Remy paid for sieges with time he might not have.

"You're not going alone," I said.

"I'm not suggesting alone," she said. "I'm suggesting smart."

We went downstairs.

Dominic was in the main room with Zane and Elijah, all three of them around the central screen with the Vale mansion blueprints already pulled up because Zane moved at a speed that made the rest of the world feel slow.

Elijah looked at us when we walked in. Then at Damien's face. Then at Sophia. His expression shifted slightly in the way of someone updating information they had already partially filed.

Later problem. Still.

"East wing," Dominic said without preamble. "Victoria's private meeting room. No staff access, private entrance from the garden side, three cameras that I'm told," he looked at Sophia, "can be bypassed from a panel in the kitchen corridor."

Everyone looked at Sophia.

"Maintenance panel," she said without hesitation. "Behind the third cabinet from the left. Marcus showed me once when the system went down during dinner. He thought it was funny." She paused. "I filed it away."

"Of course you did," Elijah said quietly. Not sarcastically. Something closer to respect.

"We have seventy three minutes," I said. "What's the plan?"

Dominic looked at the blueprint. "Sophia goes in through the front. Expected. Visible. Gives them what they think they want." He pointed at the screen. "Zane goes in through the garden side and kills the cameras from the kitchen panel. Elijah is on the legal line ready to move the moment we have eyes on Remy. I coordinate from outside."

"And me," I said.

Dominic looked at me.

"You're not coordinating from outside," I said. Not a question.

"No," he said. "I'm not." He looked at the screen. "There's a service entrance on the north side that doesn't appear on the official blueprints. It was added during the east wing renovation four years ago." He paused. "Carter helped file those renovation permits."

"Which means he knows about it," I said.

"Which means he expects us to find it," Dominic said. "So we don't use it." He pointed at a different part of the blueprint. "We use this."

I looked at where he was pointing.

A maintenance shaft. Running the length of the east wing. Accessible from the exterior utility box on the south corner.

Tight. Uncomfortable. Completely off any plan Carter could have built because it wasn't on any document he would have seen.

"That works," I said.

"It works if you don't mind small spaces," Zane said.

"I mind them," I said. "I'll survive."

Sophia was looking at the blueprint with focused eyes. "The meeting room has two doors. Main entrance and a connecting door to Victoria's private study. If they're holding Remy in the meeting room they'll have someone on the main entrance. The connecting door is usually locked from the study side."

"Usually," Dominic said.

"Victoria keeps the key on a hook inside the study fireplace," Sophia said. "She thought nobody knew. I found it by accident two years ago when she asked me to light the fire."

The room was quiet for a second.

"You spent three years in that house," Elijah said.

"Yes," Sophia said.

"And you just kept everything."

"Everything," she said simply.

Dominic looked at her for a moment with an expression I had only seen him use for things he considered genuinely valuable.

Then he looked at me.

Something passed between us that was fifteen years of brotherhood compressed into two seconds. He saw everything. He always saw everything. He just chose what to act on and when.

Later, his eyes said.

I know, mine said back.

"Sixty eight minutes," Zane said.

We moved.

The drive to the Vale mansion took eighteen minutes. Nobody talked much. Sophia sat beside me in the back of Zane's car and looked at the city going past and I watched her profile and thought about a rooftop and a kiss and a woman who had arrived at our door with a cracked suitcase and was now sitting in the dark memorising the approach to her former home like she had been doing this her whole life.

She hadn't been. I knew that.

She was just someone who adapted completely and without complaint to whatever the situation required.

I reached over and put my hand over hers in the dark.

She turned her palm up and held it without looking at me.

We stopped two blocks from the mansion.

Zane and Elijah went left toward the garden side. Dominic moved to his position.

Which left me and Sophia at the corner.

She was going to walk up to the front entrance of the house that had thrown her out in the rain six days ago. She was going to walk in alone and face whatever was waiting because that was the plan and the plan was right and I still hated every part of it.

"Sophia," I said.

She looked at me.

"If anything feels wrong," I said. "Anything at all. You get out. You don't wait for Remy, you don't wait for a signal. You just get out."

"Damien…"

"Promise me," I said.

She looked at me for a moment.

"Promise me," I said again. Quieter.

"I promise," she said.

I pulled her toward me and kissed her once, fast and certain, and she kissed me back and then she stepped back and straightened and looked at the Vale mansion at the end of the road.

The girl they had thrown out in the rain.

Walking back in on her own terms.

"Go," I said.

She went.

I watched her walk toward the entrance and then I moved toward the south corner utility box and the maintenance shaft and I counted her steps in my head until she was out of sight.

My phone buzzed.

Zane.

One word.

Cameras are down.

Then a second message ten seconds later that made me stop moving completely.

Damien. Remy isn't in the east wing.

He never was.

It's a trap and Sophia just walked into it.