Chapter 7

Chapter 7

ELENA

His thumb kept moving on the phone. His face did not change. It was like I had not spoken at all. Like I was a fly buzzing in the car, and he had decided not to swat it.

I looked at Luca. He was staring straight ahead. His hands were folded on his knee. But I saw his jaw move, like he was holding something in.

"Luca?" I said. "You'll tell me. Won't you?"

"It's safer this way," Luca said quietly. "That's all."

"Safer from what?"

"Luca." Damien's voice again. Just the name. Nothing else.

Luca said nothing more.

I sat back in my seat and pressed my hand flat over the bag on my lap, over the folder hidden inside it. I thought of the guard at the hospital with the black badge. The whole empty floor. The nurses who shook when they almost said his name. The young one who said, "He wouldn't like me talking about this."

I had thought they were afraid because he was rich. Because he was powerful.

Now I looked at the men with guns, and I was not so sure it was only that.

The house came into view.

It was not a house. It was bigger than any house I had ever seen, or at least any house I could remember. Pale stone, three floors high, with tall windows that shone in the sun. Wide steps went up to a big front door made of dark wood. There was a fountain in the middle of the round drive, water falling into a stone bowl. There were roses along the front, red and white, cut so neat they did not look real.

It was beautiful. It was also cold, the same way Damien was. Like something you were allowed to look at but not touch.

"I live here?" I said. It came out as a whisper.

"We live here," Damien said.

It was the first thing he had said the whole ride that almost sounded like it meant something. But when I looked at him, he was still on the phone.

The car went around the fountain and slowed down in front of the steps. My hands were wet. I wiped them on my knees. I did not know what I expected. Maybe that I would see the house and it would all come back. Maybe that my feet would know the steps. Maybe that the door would open and something inside me would say, yes, this is home.

But nothing came. Just the same empty space where three years should have been.

Marcus got out of the car in front of us. He must have been riding in the other car behind. He walked to my door and opened it and held out his hand to help me.

I took it. His hand was big and warm and very steady. When I stood up, the world tilted a little, and he did not let go until I was standing straight.

"Alright?" he asked, very low, so only I could hear.

It was the first time anyone had asked me that and sounded like they cared about the answer.

"I don't know," I said.

He nodded, like that was a fair answer. Then he let go and stepped back, and his face went blank again, the way guards' faces do.

Damien got out on the other side. He finally put his phone in his pocket. He walked around the back of the car, not fast, not slow, and stopped next to me. He did not touch me. He did not offer me his arm. He just stood there, looking up at the house like he owned it, because he did.

That was when I saw her.

The front door was already open. And standing at the top of the steps, like she had been waiting there for a long time, was Maria.

She wore a soft cream dress this time, not the sharp black suit from the hospital. Her hair was down. Her feet were bare on the stone, like she had just come from somewhere warm inside. Like she had been walking around this house barefoot all morning. Like it was hers.

There was a faint mark on her cheek. Makeup covered most of it. But I could still see it, a little pink under the powder, right where my hand had landed.

And she was smiling.

Not the thin, cruel smile from the hospital. A big, warm, welcoming smile. The kind of smile a woman gives when she opens the door of her own home.

"You're back," she said. She was not looking at me. She was looking at Damien. "I had them make your coffee. It's in the study."

"Thank you," Damien said.

Just that. Thank you. Easy and normal, like they had said it to each other a thousand times before.

Then her eyes moved to me. Slowly. The smile stayed on her mouth, but it did not reach her eyes at all.

"Welcome home, Elena," she said. "I hope you don't mind. I've been taking care of things while you were gone."

I stood at the bottom of the steps with my bag held tight against me, the folder inside it pressing into my ribs. Behind me the fountain was running. Somewhere on the wall a man with a gun was walking. Beside me my husband was not looking at me.

And up at the top of the stairs, in the doorway of a house I could not remember, a woman who wanted me dead stood barefoot like the lady of the house.

"What things?" I asked.

Maria's smile got wider.

From somewhere deep inside the house, I heard small feet running on marble. Fast and light and more than one pair. And then a little voice, high and happy, calling out a word that turned my blood to ice.

"Mommy!"

It was not calling for me.