Chapter Three :The Quiet That Worried Him

Ruth's voice was still ringing in my ears when I pulled back onto the main road, driving faster than I should have, the flashbulbs from the estate still ghosted across my vision every time I blinked.

St. Agatha's was quieter at almost one in the morning. Ruth met me halfway down the hall.

"She's stable," Ruth said quickly. "Her heart rate spiked. We got it under control. I'm sorry if I scared you, but she was asking for you so insistently."

"Can I see her?"

"Not tonight. The doctor wants her to rest. Whatever she needs to tell you, it's going to have to wait until morning."

It will have to wait.

I stood there for a long moment, feeling the whole weight of the night pressing down at once, the ballroom, the eviction, the cameras, and now this, another closed door.

"Call me the second anything changes," I said.

"I will."

I drove to Marcus's apartment because I no longer had anywhere else that qualified as mine.He opened the door before I even knocked. "I saw the coverage. The estate, the reporters outside the gate. I've been calling you for two hours."

"I turned my phone to silent."

Marcus studied me in the doorway for a long moment, looking for cracks and not finding any, and something about that seemed to worry him more than if he had.

"You should be falling apart right now," he said, closing the door behind me. "Any normal person would be."

"I don't have time to fall apart tonight." I set my bag down on his counter, next to two mugs of cold tea he'd apparently poured hours ago and never touched. "There's something else going on. Something bigger than the divorce."

"Bigger than the divorce." He repeated it slowly. "You were just evicted from your own home on camera. What could possibly be bigger than that?"

"Agnes is dying," I said. "I couldn't even see her tonight, they wouldn't let me past the hallway. But the message that pulled me out of the gala said she needed to tell me something before it was too late. Urgent, that was the word they used." I nodded toward the box on the counter. "She's been holding onto something a long time, Marcus. I don't know what yet. I only know it frightened her enough to interrupt my divorce."

Marcus went very still. "You don't know what it is."

"Not yet. But I intend to find out."

"Do you?" He crossed his arms. "It sounds like you're about to walk into something that could destroy an entire family. On the word of a woman who is, forgive me, dying and medicated."

"She was lucid enough to interrupt a divorce," I said, sharper than I meant to. "Agnes doesn't do things without reason. Whatever this is, it's real."

He studied me for a long moment, something in his expression shifting from concern into unease.

"You're too calm," he said quietly. "You were divorced publicly tonight, evicted two hours later with cameras waiting outside the gate, and now you're standing in my kitchen talking about a secret that could destroy a corporation, and you look like you're already three steps ahead of all of it."

"Someone has to be."

"That's not an answer, Elena. That's a deflection." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I've seen you go quiet like this exactly once before, right before you did something none of us saw coming. Tell me right now that whatever this is, it isn't that."

I thought about the box still sitting untouched in my bag, whatever answers it might still be holding, and everything Agnes had almost told me before the monitor went off.

"I can't promise you that," I said. "Not tonight."

Marcus's face went pale in the low kitchen light.

"Elena," he said slowly. "What exactly is in that box you've been carrying since you walked in here."