Chapter Three — The Heir and the Scandal

The city didn’t sleep so much as blink. By morning the headlines had sharpened their teeth. The photographs looked cleaner, the captions crueler, the TV anchors smoother. Every hour brought a new angle, a new expert, a new rumor delivered in the patient voice of authority.

Evelyn poured coffee and forgot to drink it. The cup cooled beside a stack of documents Helena’s office had sent overnight—addenda, clarifications, language like glass. Mutual. Temporary. Privacy. Words stacked into a box.

Her phone face down on the table buzzed once, then again. She didn’t look until the third vibration threaded itself too neatly into her nerves.

Unknown Number: You weren’t the first.
Unknown Number: If you want to know what the mark can do, start with the archives at Elaris General. Sublevel 2. Ask for Case Gray.

She stared at the screen. The coffee went from warm to cold without being touched.

“Bad news?” Clara leaned against the kitchen doorway as if she’d just remembered she lived here, silk robe tied with a careless bow, hair perfect in the way that said a stylist had done it. Her smile was soft as a napkin. “Or the usual circus?”

“Both,” Evelyn said.

Clara drifted closer, peeking at the phone like this was a game they played. “Anonymous threats? Congratulations. You’re a celebrity.”

“Helpful,” Evelyn said.

Clara made a sympathetic noise that never reached her eyes. “You always wanted to matter.”

“No,” Evelyn said. “I always wanted to breathe.”

“Same thing, here.” Clara glanced at the documents, thin nails tapping the table. “Helena’s team is fast. You should be grateful. They’re better at saving reputations than ours.”

“Maybe they’re not saving mine,” Evelyn said.

Clara’s smile widened. “Maybe you don’t have one to save.”

It landed the way she meant it to. Evelyn closed the folder and stood. “Don’t practice cruelty until it fits.”

“I’m not cruel,” Clara said, hurt and innocence arranged neatly. “I’m realistic.”

Evelyn moved past her to the hall. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Clara’s voice followed, sweet and light. “I can’t smell it.”

Evelyn didn’t stop.

The Valehart tower had floors that belonged to the public and floors that belonged to the family, and then there were the ones even their own guards avoided. Lucien took the private elevator down two levels, past a scanner, past a door that recognized his palm, into a room that had no windows and didn’t need them.

Four people waited at a round table. The elders. Not in the old sense—their spines were too straight, their clothes too tailored—but in the way the room bent toward them.

“Lucien,” said August Valehart, voice smooth as a blade’s flat. “Sit.”

Lucien did. The chair was colder than it looked.

August steepled his fingers. “Our position is simple. Control the narrative. Limit exposure. Avoid… rituals.”

“We don’t do rituals,” said a woman to his right without looking up from her tablet.

“We don’t call them that,” August corrected mildly. He slid a file toward Lucien. On top, a still frame: Evelyn beside him in the press room, chin lifted, eyes not flinching from the lens.

“She refused a set of approved answers,” August said. “She has her own mouth. This complicates things.”

“Or clarifies them,” Lucien said.

Silence rebalanced itself around the table.

“You are the heir,” August said eventually. “You are not the moon. We do not answer to tides.”

Lucien didn’t look at the file again. He could feel the bond under his skin tighten a fraction when he thought of Evelyn’s voice: The rest belongs to me. Something in him had steadied at that, even as the room had vibrated with pushback.

“We announce what we must,” August said. “We protect the family. We do not indulge instincts.”

Lucien’s mouth tipped, humorless. “We are instincts.”

“Only if you fail,” the woman said, still not looking up.

He left the room with the temperature in his bones a degree lower and the hum under his ribs a degree louder. Control had always meant making the wolf sit. Today it meant admitting the leash had a second hand on it.

He didn’t like that.

He wasn’t sure he hated it.

The message about Case Gray followed Evelyn into the car, into the lobby, into the elevator that carried her to the city hospital with its bland posters and tired orchids. The receptionist wore the expression of someone who had been paid to be helpful and then told not to be.

“Records,” Evelyn said. “Sublevel two.”

“Appointment?”

“Family,” Evelyn said, and discovered it opened more doors than truth.

The archives smelled like old paper and dust scrubbed too often. Fluorescent lights flattened everything to a single shade. A woman with a tight bun and a badge that said Maris looked up from her desk and the expression on her face changed in stages—recognition, curiosity, pity, calculation.

“You’re the Cross girl,” Maris said. “The moon one.”

Evelyn considered correcting that and didn’t. “I was told to ask for Case Gray.”

Maris’s fingers paused above the keyboard. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn said. “I’d like to.”

Maris looked at her a long, assessing moment. “Gray’s old. Half the notes aren’t digital. You sure you want to see them?”

“No,” Evelyn said. “Yes.”

Maris exhaled through her nose like the start of a laugh and got up. “Come on.”

They passed shelves that smelled like water damage and anger. Maris stopped at a labeled drawer, slid it open, rifled through folders, and pulled a thick one with a faded sticker that read GRAY—CONFIDENTIAL in a bored hand.

“Don’t steal,” Maris said, dropping it on the table. “I signed for it.”

“Thank you,” Evelyn said.

Maris’s gaze softened a fraction. “You want water?”

“I’ll forget to drink it,” Evelyn said. “Thank you.”

Maris disappeared and the room settled into the hum of lights. Evelyn opened the folder.

Photocopies. Notes in three different hands. A photograph in black and white: a woman in a hospital bed, eyes shut, a bruise shadowing her throat like a necklace. Subject: H. No last name.

Below it, a line of typing: Non-consensual mark suspected. Subject exhibits physiologic dependency without psychological bond. Recommendations: separation, suppression, oversight.

Evelyn read it twice without feeling the words. The third time, they found places to stick.

Another note: Marked by Alpha heir. Outcome: failure to stabilize. Secondary subject showed aggression, disorientation. Incident terminated by fire.

Fire. The page blurred. She blinked it back into shape and turned another, and another. A list of names, half-redacted. A signature she didn’t recognize. A date that made the back of her neck go cold.

“Find what you need?” Maris asked from the doorway, gentler now.

Evelyn closed the folder slowly, palms flat on the paper. “Who brought this case?”

Maris shrugged like the question was too small for the answer. “People with money. People who think no one bleeds if the carpet’s nice enough.”

“Do you remember the subject?” Evelyn asked. “H?”

Maris considered. “I remember the family. Not kind. Not patient. The girl was pretty. The kind of pretty that makes the world assume it can take. She smiled like she owed us for looking.” A pause. “She died.”

“How?” Evelyn asked, though the page had already told her.

“Fire,” Maris said. “The kind that decides for you.”

The room tilted, slow and soundless. Evelyn kept her hands on the table until it steadied.

“Thank you,” she said. “For trusting me.”

Maris’s mouth quirked. “I didn’t say I do. But I don’t not.”

On her way out, her phone buzzed again.

Unknown Number: You’re in the right place. She was promised protection. She got a cover-up. Don’t let them promise you the same.

Evelyn typed Who are you and didn’t send it. She typed What do you want and deleted it. She slipped the phone into her pocket and stepped into the elevator. The doors slid shut on the smell of paper and old bleach and something like regret.

By afternoon, the scandal had taught itself to walk. It followed her to the sidewalk, to the car, to the lobby of the Valehart tower where she arrived at Helena’s request for a “brief strategy session.” Cameras craned discreetly. Security kept its hands where people could see them. The city watched and pretended not to.

Adrian was waiting near the bank of elevators, jacket off, sleeves rolled, an easy grin tucked onto his mouth like a bandage. He lifted a hand. “Here,” he said, as if she were the one who’d called him.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking useful,” he said. “Grandmother likes it when I look useful. Also you texted me a hospital room number and then didn’t answer your phone for an hour.”

“I was researching.”

“I gathered,” he said, and the joke skated over the surface of something hard. “How do you feel?”

“Like someone replaced the air with carbon copy paper.”

“Dry,” he said. “Powdery.”

“Unforgiving,” she added, and that pulled one real smile out of him.

They stepped into the elevator together. The doors whispered shut and the floor climbed. The mirrored paneling turned them into a set of neat reflections. Adrian watched her in none of them directly, a trick he’d learned in rooms where looking was a weapon.

“Helena will push,” he said quietly. “If you give an inch, she’ll make lace out of you.”

“I brought scissors,” Evelyn said.

“Good,” he said, and the elevator opened.

The strategy session lasted twenty minutes and felt like twenty miles. Helena spun the story into a shape the market could adopt without choking. Lawyers smoothed the edges. PR placed soft phrases like pillows along the floor where the press would fall. Through it all, Lucien stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, as if the view of the city could be folded into a new solution if he looked at it long enough.

When they were released—no other word fit—Adrian guided Evelyn toward a side corridor. “Come on,” he said. “There’s an exit the cameras haven’t found yet.”

They turned the corner and ran directly into a cluster of reporters who had found it.

“Miss Cross!” The first voice hit like a thrown object. “Do you confirm a mark?”

“Is the engagement a cover?”

“Mr. Valehart—”

Lucien stepped into frame so cleanly it looked choreographed. “We’re finished,” he said, and the tone in his voice made three people step back without meaning to.

Flashes stung. Someone moved too close. The corridor shrank. The heat of bodies and equipment made the bond under Evelyn’s skin lift its head. The air lost oxygen all at once. She didn’t see the stumble so much as feel it—her heel catching, gravity tugging—and then a hand at her waist, firm and hot, catching her before she fell.

Lucien.

The contact was brief, reflexive, necessary. It lit the connection between them like a struck match. Heat slid up her spine, her breath jerked, the world went bright and tight. He steadied her, fingers biting a fraction harder than they needed to, then let go like the touch had burned him. The cameras caught all of it in a burst of light.

“Back,” he said. Not loud. Final.

Security moved. The crowd rolled away like a wave hitting a wall. Adrian took Evelyn’s elbow with a gentleness that said he’d watched that the way a cliff watches the tide, worried it would learn to climb.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “No. Yes.”

Lucien’s gaze flicked to Adrian’s hand on her arm. Something sharp crossed his face and vanished. “Use the east stair,” he said to his head of security. “Clear it.”

He didn’t look at Evelyn when he said, “Miss Cross.”

She didn’t look when she said, “Mr. Valehart.”

Something invisible and stubborn tightened between them as they moved through the thinning corridor, like a wire being pulled through two walls at once.

Outside, the air snapped cleaner. Clouds tore; sun struck glass. The city blinked in surprise and then went on watching.

In the car, Adrian let out a low breath. “That touch will be in slow motion by dinner.”

“I didn’t ask for it,” Evelyn said.

“I know,” he said, and stared out the window at the street as if it might bark at him. “He didn’t either.”

She didn’t answer. The heat of Lucien’s palm faded from her waist slowly, like a bruise deciding whether to form.

Her phone buzzed. The unknown number again.

Unknown Number: Sublevel 2 has cameras too. Check who accessed Case Gray last month. Your answer starts there.

She typed, Who are you? and hit send.

No reply.

“Bad idea,” Adrian said gently without looking at the screen.

“I’m out of good ones,” she said.

“Then we’ll make new ones,” he said.

Lucien watched the footage three hours later on a screen built to make markets look smaller. The camera’s angle made the corridor seem narrow enough to choke on. In the frame he saw himself reach, not quite a full second early, as if he’d known the fall before it began. He saw his hand close on Evelyn’s waist. He saw the flare of light in her face, the way her breath caught like a bird in a net, his own mouth go hard.

He stopped the video. The office hummed around him, patient and expensive.

“Sir?” His head of security stood in the doorway, immaculate and unreadable.

“Find me the access logs for Elaris General,” Lucien said. “Archives. Sublevel 2. The last six months.”

A fractional pause. “Yes, sir.”

“And I want the name attached to Case Gray,” Lucien added. “All of them.”

The guard hesitated again, just long enough for trust to acknowledge itself. “May I ask why?”

“Because someone is moving pieces in a room I’m meant to own,” Lucien said, turning back to the city, “and I hate surprises.”

When he was alone, he let his breath out, slow. He pressed his thumb into the tendon at his wrist until pain sharpened the edges of the day. He closed his eyes and the scent of her slid in underneath the door he’d tried to shut in his head. He opened them again and the city was still there, bright and full of teeth.

He had learned to make the wolf sit. He had never learned what to do when it wanted to lay its head in someone else’s hands.

He didn’t like that either.

Night came dressed as evening and took the day without asking. The press conference clips looped on building sides. The city collectively decided that the hand at Evelyn’s waist was romantic or predatory depending on which channel owned the ad space. Moonbound trended again. The florist added a second heart.

Evelyn stood at her window with the documents unsigned on her desk and the hospital folder stamped into her memory. The moon wasn’t full. It didn’t matter. The bond didn’t care about calendars. It hummed when the air cooled and quieted when the heat lifted and a thousand tiny, ordinary sounds filtered in from outside—wheels on wet pavement, a dog’s bark, someone laughing too loud on a balcony.

Her phone lit where she’d left it on the bed. A new message from the unknown number.

Unknown Number: He’ll look for you in the wrong places. Look for yourself in the right ones. Ask Maris who signed Gray’s final report.

She typed back: Why help me?

This time, a reply.

Unknown Number: Because I couldn’t help her.

She stared until the screen dimmed. When she set the phone down, her mind had already written tomorrow: go back to the archives, ask Maris, find the name.

The door to her room cracked open. Her mother’s voice slid in like perfume. “We need to finalize your schedule for next week.”

“I’m not a campaign,” Evelyn said.

“You’re a Cross,” her mother said as if that meant both less and more. “These are the days you’ll attend with the Valeharts. These are the days you’ll stay visible. These are the days you’ll rest—don’t argue, it photographs badly.”

“Why do you care how I look?” Evelyn asked quietly.

Her mother blinked, as if she’d been asked to explain oxygen. “Because you reflect on us.”

Evelyn looked past her, at the city. “No,” she said. “I reflect on me.”

Her mother held the schedule out like a treaty. Evelyn didn’t take it.

“Be careful what you refuse,” her mother said, smile never cracking. “The city feeds on girls who think ‘no’ is a magic word.”

“It is to me,” Evelyn said.

Her mother left with the quiet satisfaction of someone who believed she’d still gotten her way.

When Evelyn finally slept, it was restless and thin. She dreamed of a corridor of silver and a door that opened and closed to the rhythm of two heartbeats, one half a beat behind the other.

Across the river, Lucien slept like he fought—too hard, too still—until a noise in his mind wasn’t a noise at all but the sense of someone standing on a roof that had no railing. He woke with his breath already high in his chest and crossed to the window before he could stop himself.

The city held its breath, then exhaled. Somewhere far below, a siren screamed and cut off, like a joke told wrong.

He should have called the guard back about the hospital logs. He should have ignored the way the air changed when he thought her name. He should have done a hundred disciplined things.

Instead, he said out loud to an empty room, “Don’t run,” and hated himself for the way it sounded—not like a command, but a hope.

The next morning started with rain like pins and a knock at Evelyn’s door. She opened it to find a small package on the mat, no return address, paper clean and unassuming. Inside: a thin flash drive in a black sleeve and a single square of paper with two words written in a careful hand.

For proof.

Her pulse jerked. She looked down the hall. No one.

She shut the door and slid the drive into her laptop with a caution that felt ceremonial. A folder opened: S2_CAMERA_07 – 04/— an incomplete date, a grainy timestamp. The footage was a stretch of corridor under too-bright lights. Maris crossed the frame, then a man in a dark coat whose face the angle refused to show, then a second file—S2_CAMERA_07 – 04/— (late)—and a figure Evelyn recognized instantly even with the cap pulled low.

Helena Valehart.

Helena paused at the same door where Maris had paused, looked left, right, and used a keycard that didn’t exist on any inventory Evelyn had seen to let herself in.

The file ended.

Evelyn sat very still while her heart counted the seconds back to calm.

Across the city, Lucien’s head of security walked in with a slim folder and a face that had learned to be expressionless under bad news.

“Sublevel logs,” he said. “Last six months. And the name attached to Case Gray’s final report.”

Lucien took the paper. Read once. Read again to make sure the letters hadn’t arranged themselves into a trick.

Final Authorizing Signature: H. Valehart.
Helena Valehart.

The hum under his ribs wasn’t a hum now. It was a line pulled tight enough to cut.

He set the page down with care. “Thank you,” he said to a room that had gone very quiet. “No one moves on this until I say.”

“Understood,” the guard said.

When the door closed, Lucien stood alone with a past he hadn’t known he owned and a present that refused to behave. Outside, the rain made the glass tremble. Inside, something steadier than rain drew him toward a woman the city had decided to call his bride.

He didn’t want a bride. He wanted—he didn’t know the word for it. Maybe there wasn’t one.

He picked up the page again and looked at the signature until it blurred. He imagined the training room, the bag, the practice of hitting until everything else fell away. Instead, he reached for his phone.

He didn’t call Helena.

He dialed Evelyn.

She didn’t answer. A second later, a text.

Evelyn: Busy. Later.

He typed: We need to talk. Deleted it. Typed: Stay clear of the hospital for now. Deleted that too. Typed nothing and put the phone down because there were moments when control meant not touching what you most wanted to reach.

He turned back to the window because it offered the only honest thing left: a city that changed and kept changing while pretending it didn’t.

The moon would be fuller in a few nights. The tide in their bodies would rise whether they wanted it to or not. Between now and then there were decisions to make, and secrets to drag into light, and a line between them that would keep tugging until one or both of them cut it or learned how to carry it without bleeding.

Outside, the rain slackened. The city blinked. The day began again.

And somewhere below street level, in a room no one named out loud, a door with a scrubbed keycard lock waited for the next hand that thought it owned it.