Chapter 6

Chapter 6

ELENA

The car was long and black and so quiet that I could hear my own breathing.

The older guard, the one who had pulled Maria out of my room, opened the back door for me. He did not smile, but he waited until I was all the way inside before he closed it, gentle, like the door might hurt me.

"Thank you," I said.

He gave a small nod. "Marcus, ma'am. I'll be with you from now on."

"With me? Like a guard?"

"Something like that." And he shut the door before I could ask him more.

Damien got in on the other side. He did not look at me. He had his phone out before he even sat down, his thumb moving fast over the screen. A man sat in the front passenger seat, dark hair, a sharp jaw, a gold watch that caught the light. He turned halfway around and gave me a quick look. Not cold. Just careful.

"Morning, Elena," he said.

"Do I know you?"

Something moved across his face. It was gone fast. "Luca," he said. "You know me. You just don't remember."

"Luca." Damien's voice was low. He still did not look up from the phone. "Face front."

Luca turned back around without another word.

The car pulled away from the hospital. I held my bag close on my lap. There was not much inside it. A hairbrush, the gown they gave me, and the folder I had taken from the closet. I had pushed it down to the very bottom and put the gown over it. I had not had one minute alone to read it. Not one. Every time I touched it, someone walked in.

Now it sat on my lap like a hot stone. Damien was right next to me. I did not dare open the bag.

The city went past the window. Tall glass buildings. Busy roads. Street food carts with steam rising off them. People laughing at a bus stop. A big bridge over dark green water.

None of it meant anything to me.

I kept waiting for something to feel familiar. A shop sign. A park. A street corner where I had once stood. But it was like watching a movie about someone else's life. I had lived here for three years, maybe longer, and the city did not know me any more than I knew it.

I looked at Damien. His face was calm and closed. The light from his phone made his eyes look even colder.

"Where do we live?" I asked.

"Outside the city."

"Is it far?"

"Forty minutes."

He answered like a machine. No extra words. No looking up.

I tried again. "What happened to me? The accident. Nobody told me anything. Was I driving? Was someone else in the car?"

His thumb stopped on the screen. Just for a second. Then it moved again.

"Not now," he said.

"Then when?"

"When I say."

I bit down on my tongue so hard I tasted blood. I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to grab the phone out of his hand and throw it out of the window. But then I thought about that memory. The one that came to me in the hospital. My own voice, laughing, drunk on champagne, saying I would marry him no matter what it took.

What if I really had done something terrible to get him?

What if this cold man beside me was not cruel at all? What if he was just a man who had been trapped?

The thought made my stomach turn. I looked down at my hands. At the pale scar. At my bare ring finger.

"Maria tells me you hit her," Damien said.

He still did not look at me. He said it the same way you would say it looks like rain.

My back went stiff. "She told me it would have been better if I didn't wake up."

"Maria says a lot of things."

"So you believe her, and not me?"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't say anything."

"Exactly." He typed something, sent it, and started on the next message. "Don't do it again."

"Then tell her not to say things like that to me again."

Luca made a small sound in the front seat. It might have been a cough. It might have been a laugh he swallowed. Damien's eyes flicked up to the back of Luca's head for half a second. Then down again.

After that nobody talked.

The city got smaller behind us. The glass buildings turned into houses, and the houses turned into trees. Tall, thick trees on both sides of the road, so close together that the light came through them in thin gold lines. We drove for a long time on a road with no other cars.

Then I saw the wall.

It was high and gray, stone at the bottom and black iron at the top. It went on and on, following the road, and there was no end to it that I could see. Then the car turned, and there were the gates.

They were huge. Black iron, with sharp points on top like spears. Two men stood in front of them. They wore dark clothes. And they held guns. Not small ones hidden under a jacket. Big ones. Rifles, held across their chests like they were ready to use them.

My heart started to pound.

The gates opened slowly without anyone touching them. The car rolled through. I turned in my seat and looked back. More men. One on top of the wall, walking along it. Another one by a small stone hut beside the gate, talking into something on his shoulder. All of them had guns.

I looked up ahead. There was a long drive lined with neat trees. And far down it, near a row of hedges, two more men with rifles, walking side by side like they were on patrol.

"Damien."

He did not answer.

"Damien, there are men with guns on the walls."

"I know."

"Why?"

Nothing.

"What kind of businessman needs guns on his fences?" I asked. My voice came out higher than I wanted. "What kind of business are you in?"