CHAPTER 5 The Man in the Snow

Julian POV

I had been watching Eva Brooks for four years, and she had never once seen my face.

That was the arrangement. I stayed in the background and kept her safe, and I never told her why. I knew which mornings she walked the garden alone, which evenings she ate in the kitchen because the dining room was too quiet, and which nights the light in her window stayed on long after the estate had gone dark.

Tonight her light had come on at an hour that was wrong.

I was parked at the bend in the road a quarter mile from the Brooks gates when she walked out of them alone, one bag on her shoulder, snow settling in her hair. She walked like a woman who had stopped waiting for anyone to stop her. I should have gone after her. I should have broken four years of silence right there in the cold. Instead I stayed in the car, because I did not know how to explain myself without telling her everything.

I have not forgiven myself for that.

Then I saw the second car.

It sat dark at the far end of the road, engine off, no headlights, half hidden by the trees. I would not have noticed it if the snow had not caught the edge of its roofline. Someone else was out here tonight, waiting, the same way I was.

My hand was already reaching for my phone when I heard the engine behind me. It was coming from the estate, and it was very fast.

I did not decide to move. I was simply driving.

The headlights swung wide across the road, sweeping the snowbanks, and I saw her at the edge of the shoulder with her bag fallen at her feet, too stunned to move. I pressed the horn. I screamed her name through the glass, though she could not possibly have heard it.

Then the car hit her.

The sound of it will stay with me for the rest of my life.

It spun off the road and slammed against the guardrail, steam pouring from its hood. I left my own door hanging open and ran, my boots skidding on the ice, and dropped to my knees beside her. She lay too still. Blood ran from her hairline, her left sleeve was pushed back, and on her wrist was a small crescent shaped birthmark I had seen once, years ago, in a file I was never supposed to open.

I pressed two fingers to her throat.

Nothing.

My whole world narrowed to that one silence.

Then, faint as a thread, a pulse fluttered under my fingertips.

The breath I let out nearly broke me.

"Eva," I said, and her name felt strange in my mouth after so many years of keeping it to myself. "Stay with me. Please."

Her eyes opened for a second as her hand moved weakly to her stomach.

"My baby," she whispered.

"I have you," I said. "I have both of you."

She slipped away again, and behind me a car door groaned open. I turned. Richard was climbing out of the wreck, blood streaking down the side of his face, and he stood there swaying in the headlights, staring at her. He said her name once, then again, in a voice I had never heard from him in four years of watching. It sounded almost like fear.

He had not seen me yet.

I could have stood up. I could have shouted for him to call an ambulance, and he would have, and the Brooks family would have carried her back into the same house that had spent four years teaching her she was nothing. And I knew what kind of man had been behind that wheel. He had chased her down a frozen road in anger instead of concern, and he had very nearly killed her for it.

Then I looked up the road, and the dark car was gone.

No engine. No lights. Just tire tracks in the fresh snow, already filling in.

Whoever had been waiting there had watched everything, and they had not come to help.

My blood ran cold. A woman does not simply end up alone on an empty road at the exact moment a car comes flying toward her. If someone had wanted this to happen, they would want to be certain of the result. A hospital bed under the Brooks name would be the first place they looked, and the easiest place to finish it.

Eva did not know who she was. She did not know what her blood meant, or who had spent years wishing it gone. She only knew she had been thrown away, and I could not let that be the last thing she believed.

Richard took a step toward us. His eyes found mine across the snow.

"You," he said. "Who are you? What are you doing with her?"

I did not answer him. I slid one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her shoulders, kept her head tucked against my chest, and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing.

"Put her down," he said, his voice cracking. "Put her down, I will call someone."

That was exactly what I was afraid of.

I carried her to my car and laid her across the back seat with my coat over her. Richard was stumbling after me, shouting now, but he was dizzy and bleeding but slow, and I was already behind the wheel.

I knew a quiet house far outside the city, held in no name but mine, where no one would think to search. It is going to be enough.

I drove away before the first siren cut through the dark.

Somewhere behind me, Richard was still screaming her name. I did not turn around.

She would be declared dead by morning, and I would let the world believe it. It was the only way I knew to keep her alive.