CHAPTER 6

Amelia didn't sleep.

She sat curled in the window seat of the study, exactly where Adrian had left her, watching the empty driveway long after the headlights had gone still and the front doors had swallowed both men whole. An hour had already passed. The house held its breath around her, servants nowhere in sight, as though the entire Villa had been trained to disappear the moment a Kingston conversation required privacy.

It was well past midnight when Adrian finally returned, his tie loosened, his composure fraying at the edges in a way she hadn't seen from him before, not even the night of the wedding.

“What did he want?” Amelia asked, rising from the window seat.

Adrian didn't answer right away. He crossed to the drink cart in the corner, poured two fingers of something amber, and drank half of it before he spoke.

“He knows.”

“Know what?” She asked.

“About my mother and the questions I've been asking. “My father doesn't guess, Amelia. He confirms.”

“What did he say?”

“He offered a deal. Drop it, and Olivia stays safe. Keep digging and…” Adrian stopped.

“And what?”

Adrian looked at her, and for the first time since she'd met him, she saw something that looked almost like fear behind his control.

“He didn't finish that sentence,” Adrian said quietly. “He didn't have to.”

Amelia sank onto the arm of the nearest chair, the weight of it settling over her. “So we do nothing. We just pretend none of this happened, the way everyone in this family has been pretending for twenty-five years.

“I didn't say that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Adrian set his glass down, crossing the room until he stood directly in front of her, closer than he'd ever allowed himself to stand before. “I’m saying my father just confirmed, without meaning to, that he knows exactly where the danger is coming from. Which means he knows exactly where Olivia is, or at least how to find her. A man doesn't offer to guarantee someone's safety unless he already has the power to end it.

For a moment, Amelia couldn't make sense of what she’d heard. “You think he knows where she is.”

“I think,” Adrian said, “that my father has spent twenty-five years controlling exactly how much truth this family is allowed to survive on. And I am done letting him decide that for me.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke, the distance between them collapsed to almost nothing, something unspoken passing back and forth that had nothing to do with the dander circling both their families.

Amelia opened her mouth to argue when her phone buzzed on the table.

She froze.

“Amelia?”

She grabbed it. One unknown number. One photo, no words. Her hands shook.

“That's Olivia,” She whispered.

Adrian was beside her in a second. He went still, staring at the screen.

Olivia. Thinner. Hair chopped short and uneven. Holding up a newspaper, today’s date printed clearly across the top.

“She's alive.” Amelia's voice cracked. “She’s alive, Adrian, look…”

“That's not a message from Olivia,” he said slowly. “Look at her hands.”

Amelia looked at Olivia’s wrists closely, a thin red line circled each wrist. Fresh and recent.

“She’s not hiding,” Adrian said quietly. “She’s being held.”

Amelia stared at the photograph until the image blurred, her sister’s face swimming in front of her, close enough to touch and impossibly far away all at once. “We have to call someone. The police, a private investigator, someone….”

“And tell them what?” Adrian's voice wasn't unkind but it was hard. “That my father may or may not know where your sister is, based on a conversation with no witness? That we received a photo from an unknown number that could have come from anywhere?” He shook his head. “The moment we involve outside authority, we lose whatever thin control we still have over how this plays out. Whoever sent this wants us reacting. Not thinking.”

“Then what do we do? Just wait? Let your father decide her fate the same way he apparently decided your mother’s?”

The words landed harder than she'd meant them to. Adrian flinched, and for a moment Amelia regretted the cruelty of it, and then didn't, because it was true, and someone in this family needed to say it out loud.

“No,” Adrian said finally. “We don't wait. But we don't act blindly either. My father showed his hands tonight, whether he meant to or not. He's afraid of what happens if the truth gets out. We find out exactly what my mother discovered twenty-five years ago, and we make it impossible for him to bury it a second time.”

Amelia looked back down at the photograph, at her sister’s careful, deliberate stillness, the kind of stillness that came from someone trying very hard not to give her captors a reason to hurt her further.

“Promise me something,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“Promise me that whatever we find, we use it to bring her home. Not just to win whatever war your family’s been fighting with mine for twenty-five years.”

“I promise,” he said. “Olivia comes home. Whatever it costs.”

Outside, the city blinked on beyond the window, indifferent to the two people standing in the study at nearly two in the morning, bound together now by more than a marriage neither of them had chosen, bound by a photograph, a warning, and a promise that neither of them yet knew how they were going to keep.