Chapter Seven : The Message

                  Sophie Steele

"Read it again," I said to myself. "Make sure you're not imagining it."

So I did.

“I know about the boy. Better leave quietly or everyone finds out what you two are to each other. And mind you, you have just 24 hours.” 

Third time, same words the with the same cold precision.

I set the phone face down on my knee and sat very still on the edge of the bed, the white roses on the dresser sitting there unbothered, soft and pale in the morning light like nothing in this room had any business being soft right now.

My first instinct was Miriam. Call her, move Ethan, move him now, today, somewhere Gerald or whoever this was could not reach. My hand was already moving toward the phone before I stopped it.

I looked at the walls. I looked at the door.

I did not know this house anymore. Seven changes a house the same way it changes a person, quietly and completely, until the version you thought you knew is just a memory wearing familiar clothes. I did not know whose ears were pressed against what walls. I did not know which member of staff smiled at you in the corridor and reported your movements to someone else before the smile had even finished.

Calling from inside this house felt like screaming into a room where someone was already listening.

So I sat with it. I breathed. I let my wolf settle into the alertness it had shifted into the moment I read the message, because it was not restless anymore. Restless was last night, pacing and whining and reacting to Dominic's presence like a compass near a magnet. This was different, this was the particular stillness of an animal that had located a threat and was now deciding how to respond to it.

Protective, precise and patient.

I got up…

I moved to the window first and looked at the grounds below. The estate was already preparing itself for the day, staff crossing the courtyard in black, the marquee from yesterday still standing near the east lawn. Everything looked exactly as it should. That was the problem with threats like this one. They didn't announce themselves with disorder. They sat inside ordinary mornings and waited.

I went to the bathroom and turned the tap on. Let the water run while I stood in front of the mirror, just to have some sound in the room that wasn't my own thinking.

"Who knows?” I said quietly to my own reflection. My reflection did not have a helpful answer.

I thought it through. The guests at yesterday's reception, over two hundred people I barely recognised. The staff, some of whom I remembered vaguely from seven years ago and some of whom were entirely new fAn extendedtended family who had watched me walk in with the mild curiosity of people placing a face they couldn't quite locate in memory.

None of them would know about Ethan just from seeing me. Ethan was in Los Angeles. I had come alone. I had told no one where I was going except Miriam, and Miriam would swallow her own tongue before she gave my information to a stranger.

So whoever sent this message did not learn about Ethan from this trip.

They already knew before I arrived. They had known and they had waited, and when I walked through those gates yesterday they had simply confirmed that I was here and pulled the trigger on information they had been sitting on.

That was worse than a spontaneous threat. That was a prepared one.

I turned the tap off. Dried my hands and went back to the room and opened my bag.

I got dressed the way I usually get dressed when everything in my body wants to do something drastic and the only correct response is to do nothing drastic. Black dress, same as yesterday, same as everyone else in this house today. I did each button like it required my full attention. I pulled my hair back without looking in the mirror again because I already knew what I would see and I did not need it looking back at me while I was trying to hold my face together.

Then I picked up my phone.

I went to the message. Then I took a screenshot, watched it save to my camera roll. Then I pressed delete and watched the message disappear.

Good.

It existed on my terms now, not the sender's.

I tucked the phone into my bag and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed again. The room was quiet. Outside the window I could hear the low murmur of the villa beginning its day, voices and movement and the particular formal grief of a house preparing to bury someone.

I thought about Ethan waking up this morning in the apartment, padding into the kitchen in his socks, telling Miriam with complete authority that he needed waffles. I thought about the way he always pressed his face into my shoulder when I hugged him, the small warm weight of him. The grey eyes.

My throat pulled tight. I pressed my palm flat on my sternum and breathed through it.

He was safe. He was in Los Angeles… He was fine.

And I was going to keep him that way. Whatever that cost, whatever decision I had to make in the next twenty-four hours, that was the one fixed point everything else moved around.

I stood up.

Straightened my dress.

Picked up my bag.

And then I made the mistake, if you could call it that, of glancing at the mirror on the way out.

I stopped.

The woman standing there looked like me in the technical sense. Same face, same dark hair pulled back, same careful posture. But there was something in the eyes that hadn't been there yesterday. Something that had settled in overnight and was now simply part of the expression, permanent and unannounced.

I recognised it after a moment. I had worn it before. At nineteen, in this same house, learning in real time that the world did not particularly adjust itself to accommodate your feelings.

I had thought I left that version of myself behind when I left this place. Built a whole new woman on top of her, layered her over with success and independence and a career and a life and a son, until the nineteen-year-old was just a story I told occasionally, distant and harmless.

She was looking back at me from the mirror right now with a very specific expression that said: “I told you this place wasn't finished with you.”

The difference, I thought.

The only difference between her and me was that this time I was not alone in what I was protecting.

I held my own gaze for one more second. Then I turned away from the mirror, opened the door, and walked out into the corridor.

The house opened around me, grand and cold and full of people in black, and the burial of Richard Steele was beginning, and somewhere in this building was a person who had sent me a message before sunrise wtwenty-four-hourr hour countdown.

And somewhere in Los Angeles, I was sure my son was asking Miriam for waffles. 

I kept walking.

My wolf kept its eyes open.

And in my bag, my phone buzzed once with a new notification.

I did not stop walking. But my hand closed around the phone through the fabric of the bag.

Unknown number again.

The clock is running, Sophie. Have you decided?