Chapter Five

My hand would not stop shaking.

I noticed it the way you notice something happening to someone else, distant and clinical, watching my own fingers tremble against the stem of a champagne glass I did not remember picking up, standing in a corner of the ballroom while my father worked the room like nothing had happened, like a man named Foster had not just stood on our terrace and told me, quietly and pleasantly, that curiosity has consequences.

Damian stood a foot away, close enough to touch, far enough to look professional to anyone glancing our direction, and I understood without being told that the distance was deliberate, that whatever had happened between us on that terrace, his hands folded around mine, my name spoken like a question, had been filed away the moment Marcus's voice cut through his earpiece.

"You did well back there," he said, low enough that only I could hear it.

"I didn't do anything. You did all the talking."

"You didn't fall apart. That matters more than you think."

I wanted to tell him that I had, in fact, fallen apart, just quietly, just internally, in the two minutes since Foster's smile had disappeared back through the terrace doors. But something about admitting that felt like handing him one more piece of myself he had not asked for and I was not sure I was ready to give.

My father found us twenty minutes later, flushed with the particular relief of a man who believed the worst of the evening had already passed. He did not know about Foster. Damian had made that decision quickly and quietly while Marcus ran interference with the board, and I had not argued, mostly because I did not have the strength left to manage my father's fear on top of my own tonight.

"You look pale," my father said, cupping my face the way he used to when I was small and had a fever. "Are you unwell?"

"Just tired," I said. "It's been a long week."

He did not push, distracted almost immediately by an investor calling his name from across the room, and I watched him go with the strange, hollow feeling of loving someone you were beginning to realize you might not fully know.

We left through the front entrance this time, Damian's hand steady at my back, Marcus trailing three steps behind scanning the crowd with the kind of vigilance that made my skin prickle even though I understood, logically, that it existed entirely for my benefit. The car ride home passed in silence, Damian in the front seat again, his eyes on the mirrors more than the road, and I sat in the back watching the city blur past the window and tried to understand what I had actually learned tonight beyond the fact that Nathaniel Cross knew exactly what I had found in those financial disclosures, and was willing to send a man to threaten me quietly on a terrace to make sure I understood the cost of continuing to look.

The house was dark and silent when we arrived, and something about walking back through my own front door after everything that had happened made my chest go tight and strange, the specific vertigo of a place that was supposed to feel safe no longer feeling like anything at all.

"I'm going to do a full sweep before you go up," Damian said. "Standard procedure after tonight."

"I know."

"You should eat something. You barely touched anything at the gala."

"I'm not hungry."

He studied me for a moment, something careful and assessing behind his eyes, and then, instead of arguing, he simply walked into the kitchen and started opening cabinets, and I found myself following him without deciding to, drawn by something I did not have a name for yet, some magnetic pull that had been building since the moment his hands closed around mine on that terrace.

"You don't have to do this," I said, watching him crack eggs into a bowl with quiet, efficient movements that seemed strangely at odds with the controlled violence I had watched him threaten Foster with less than an hour ago.

"I know I don't have to."

"Then why."

He did not answer right away, focused on the pan in front of him, and when he finally spoke his voice had lost some of its careful professional edge, something rawer underneath it. "Because you nearly got threatened tonight in a room full of people who were supposed to keep you safe, and the only thing I know how to offer you right now that isn't a security protocol is a meal."

Something in my chest cracked open at that, small and quiet, and I sat down at the counter and watched him cook in a silence that felt less empty than any silence had all night. He moved with the same economy he brought to everything, no wasted motion, and somewhere in the middle of watching him I realized I had stopped shaking.

"Can I ask you something," I said.

"You can ask."

"Foster said I already learned my lesson once this week. He meant the car accident. Which means whoever ordered that attack and whoever sent Foster tonight are the same people."

"Yes."

"Which means Nathaniel Cross tried to kill me."

Damian's hands stilled over the pan for just a moment before he continued plating the food, and when he looked at me his expression had gone carefully neutral in a way I was starting to recognize as the look he wore whenever the truth was worse than he wanted to tell me.

"We don't have proof it was Cross directly," he said. "But everything points that direction, yes."

I sat with that for a long moment, the man who had taught me to sail, who had cried at my mother's funeral, who had watched me grow up at every holiday for over two decades, apparently willing to have me run off the road and threatened on a terrace to protect whatever he was hiding. Something in me wanted to cry and something else in me, something harder and colder that I did not entirely recognize, wanted instead to find every last piece of evidence buried in those financial records and drag it into daylight myself.

"I want to keep digging," I said. "Into the accounts. I don't care what Foster said."

"I know you do."

"You're not going to tell me it's too dangerous?"

"It is too dangerous," Damian said, setting a plate in front of me with more care than the gesture strictly required. "But I've spent the last two days watching you make good decisions under pressure that most people twice your age couldn't make. I'm not going to insult you by pretending you can't handle knowing what you're walking into. I am going to insist that whatever you find, you bring to me first, before you do anything with it."

Something warm and unfamiliar moved through my chest at that, the specific relief of being trusted rather than managed, and I ate the meal he had made in a silence that felt, for the first time all night, almost peaceful.

It did not last.

My phone buzzed against the counter, a message from an unknown number, no name attached, no context, just three words that made the peaceful silence collapse instantly into something cold and sharp.

I SEE YOU BOTH.

I do not know how long I stared at those three words before Damian took the phone gently out of my hand, his own expression shifting through something I had not seen from him before, a flicker of real alarm before the careful control clamped back down over it.

"Sera, look at me."

I looked at him. My hands had started shaking again, worse than before, and some distant part of me registered that I was cold despite the kitchen being perfectly warm, the specific chill that comes from adrenaline rather than temperature.

"This could mean several things," he said, his voice deliberately even, the same tone he had used on the terrace to slow my breathing back down. "It could mean someone at the gala photographed us together and this is Cross trying to rattle you. It could mean someone is watching the house right now. I need you to stay calm while I figure out which."

"How am I supposed to stay calm," I said, my voice cracking despite my best effort to hold it steady. "Someone knows you're here. Someone knows exactly who is standing in this kitchen with me right now."

"Then we treat it as though they do," he said, already moving toward the window, drawing the curtain closed with one economical motion before doing the same to the second window over the sink. "Which means no lights in rooms with exterior visibility until Marcus confirms whether there's actually a physical presence outside the property or whether this is coming from information alone."

He was already dialing Marcus as he spoke, and I stood frozen in the middle of my own kitchen watching him move through the space with a controlled urgency that somehow made the fear worse rather than better, because some part of me had started to believe, foolishly, that being near him meant nothing could actually touch me. Watching him take this threat seriously enough to kill the lights reminded me, brutally, that belief had never been more than a comfort I allowed myself, not a fact.

Marcus picked up on the second ring, and I listened to half a conversation that told me everything I needed to know from Damian's tone alone, sharp, focused, entirely professional, asking about camera feeds and motion sensors and whether the new perimeter system Titan had installed that morning had picked up anything unusual in the last hour.

"Nothing on the feeds," Damian said finally, lowering the phone. "No unfamiliar vehicles on the road, no motion outside the fence line. Marcus is going to run a deeper check on the number itself, but this reads more like a message meant to unsettle you than an active physical threat tonight."

"Meant to unsettle me," I repeated. "It worked."

"I know." Something in his face softened, just slightly, the professional focus giving way for a moment to something gentler. "I'm not going to pretend that message isn't frightening. It is. But frightening and dangerous are not always the same thing, and right now, tonight, I believe this is the first."

I wanted to believe him. I wanted, badly, to let his certainty become my own, the way it had on the terrace when his hands had folded around mine and something in me had simply trusted that he would not let anything happen. But three words on a phone screen had just told me that whatever safety I thought I had built around myself in the last few days, however fragile, had a crack running straight through it, and I did not know yet how deep that crack went.

Marcus arrived at the house within the hour, jogging up the front steps with a laptop bag slung over his shoulder and an expression far more serious than the easy grin I had come to expect from him, and something about seeing his usual humor stripped away entirely made the danger feel more real than the message itself had.

"Nothing on any of the traffic cameras within a two mile radius," he said, setting the laptop down on the kitchen counter and pulling up a grid of grainy black and white footage. "I pulled everything from the last six hours. No unfamiliar vehicles idling near the property, no foot traffic that doesn't match a delivery or a neighbor walking a dog."

"So how did they know," I asked. "If nobody was watching the house."

"That's the part I don't love," Marcus admitted, glancing at Damian before continuing. "It's possible someone at the gala recognized the two of you leaving together and passed that information along. It's also possible someone inside Titan's own systems has been compromised, which would explain how they knew Kane was staying here tonight specifically rather than in the guest house."

The word compromised landed heavy in the room, and I watched something tighten behind Damian's eyes, some old vigilance sharpening into something colder.

"You think someone on our own team is feeding information to Cross," he said.

"I think it's worth considering," Marcus said carefully. "I'm not accusing anyone specific. But we brought in extra personnel for tonight's gala, people outside our usual core team. If there's a leak, that's the most likely place it started."

Damian was quiet for a long moment, something working behind his expression that I could not fully read, some private calculation involving people and loyalties I had no context for. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone flat and hard in a way I had not heard from him before.

"Pull everyone's access logs from tonight. Every device, every login, every door badge swipe. If there's a leak, I want it found before Cross's flight leaves the ground, whenever that ends up being."

Marcus nodded once and returned to his laptop, and I stood in my own kitchen watching two men who had built their careers on protecting people quietly reckon with the possibility that the danger might already be inside the walls they had built to keep it out, and something in my chest went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the earlier fear and everything to do with a new, quieter kind of dread, the understanding that trust, in this house, had just become something that needed to be earned all over again.