Chapter 5

I stepped back from the window.

My heart was beating so loud I could hear it in my ears.

That man knew which window was mine. He had my phone number. And he was standing at the gate of the most secured estate in Halcrest smiling up at me like none of that was strange at all.

I looked down at my phone again.

Come outside, Sera.

Three words. No name. No explanation. Just three words that felt less like an invitation and more like a hand wrapping around my wrist.

I stood in the middle of that guest room and thought very carefully.

Roland had sent these men before sunrise. Before most of the city was even awake. That meant he had known about Damien waking up before I did. Which meant someone inside this estate had called him last night and told him.

Someone in this house was reporting back to Roland.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands flat on my knees and breathed slowly the way my mother used to tell me to breathe when I was small and frightened and the world felt too big. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Again.

Okay.

Okay, Sera. Think.

Roland needed me outside those gates. That much was clear. Whatever he had planned, it required my cooperation or at least my presence somewhere he could control. As long as I was inside the Voss estate he could not touch me. The moment I stepped outside I would no longer be Damien Voss's problem to protect. I would just be a girl with no money, no allies and a stepfather who had been three steps ahead of her for six years.

I was not going outside.

But I needed to know what he wanted.

I looked at my phone for a long moment. Then I typed back.

What do you want Roland.

I did not put a question mark. I was done making my words sound polite.

The reply came in less than ten seconds.

Your mother is asking for you. She had a bad night. I thought you would want to know.

I read it three times.

My mother.

My hands tightened around the phone. I thought about her voice on the phone the last time we spoke, thin and careful and trying so hard to sound okay. I thought about the surgery she needed. I thought about whether Roland had actually arranged to pay for it or whether that had been a lie too, another piece of a plan I was only just beginning to understand the shape of.

He knew exactly what he was doing using her name. He had always known exactly which door to knock on to make me open up.

I stood up and walked back to Damien's room.

I knocked.

"Come in."

He was sitting up against the headboard with the tablet in his lap and a cup of coffee on the nightstand that someone had brought him, probably Petra, who seemed to appear with exactly what was needed before anyone thought to ask. He looked at me when I came in and something in his face shifted slightly, the way it did every time I walked into a room, like he was recalibrating something.

I held my phone out and showed him the messages.

He read them. His expression did not change but his eyes went very still.

"He is using your mother to get you out of the house," he said.

"I know that," I said. "But what if she actually had a bad night? What if she actually needs me and I am standing here doing nothing?"

Damien set the tablet aside. "I told you I would have someone check on her."

"That was an hour ago."

"Sera."

Something about the way he said my name made me stop. Not sharp. Not impatient. Just steady. Like he was trying to hand me something solid to hold onto.

"I already sent someone," he said. "I sent someone the moment you left this room this morning. I am waiting on the call."

I stared at him. "You already did it."

"I said I would."

I stood there feeling slightly wrong footed. I was so used to people saying things and then not doing them that the idea of someone just quietly doing what they said they would do, without announcement, without asking for anything in return, sat strangely in my chest.

"Thank you," I said.

He picked up his tablet again. "Do not go near the windows that face the gate."

"Too late," I said. "One of them already had my number. He texted me."

The tablet went down again.

"Show me."

I handed him the phone. He looked at the message. Then he looked at me with an expression I had not seen on his face before. Not anger exactly. Something colder and more focused than anger.

"He has had your number this entire time," Damien said slowly. "You did not give it to him this morning."

"No," I said. "He already had it."

"Which means Roland did not send these men in response to my waking up." He paused. "He sent them as part of a plan that was already in motion before last night."

The room felt very quiet.

"He was never going to let you stay," Damien said. "Waking up just accelerated his timeline."

His phone rang.

He answered it immediately. "Talk to me."

I watched his face while he listened. He gave nothing away, not a flinch, not a blink, just that same focused stillness. Then he said "Keep someone there" and hung up.

He looked at me.

"Your mother is stable," he said. "She had a difficult night but she is resting now and her condition has not changed. The medical team says she is not in any immediate danger."

The breath I had been holding for the past twenty minutes came out all at once.

I sat down in the chair without being asked.

"He lied," I said. "He used her and she is not even worse."

"Yes," Damien said simply.

I looked at my phone in my hands. That smiling man at the gate with his three word message. Your mother is asking for you. Said so easily. Said knowing it would work. Said by a man who had watched me my entire life and learned exactly which strings to pull.

Something shifted in me right then.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet internal click, like a lock turning over.

I was done.

I was done being the person Roland Quinn could predict. Done being the girl whose buttons he knew by heart. Done being so afraid of losing people that I handed that fear to anyone who asked for it.

I looked up at Damien.

"I want to help," I said. "With whatever you are doing to find out what he is really after. I have been watching Roland for six years and I know things about him that no investigator would find just by looking at his finances."

Damien studied me for a moment.

"What kind of things," he said.

"The way he thinks," I said. "He never moves directly toward what he wants. He always comes at things from the side. Always through someone else. He has never in his life done anything that could be traced back to him in a straight line." I paused. "Which means somewhere in this whole arrangement there is a person he is moving through. Someone we have not looked at yet."

Damien was quiet for a long moment.

Then he said, "Jace."

My stomach dropped.

"Jace Whitmore," Damien said, watching my face carefully. "Your former boyfriend. He is not just Roland's acquaintance, Sera. According to what Marcus sent me this morning, Jace has been on Roland's payroll for the past three years."

Three years.

Jace and I had been together for two of them.

I thought about all the times Jace had asked me about my mother. About Roland. About what Roland did for work. I had always thought he was just making conversation. Being interested. Being the kind of boyfriend who paid attention.

He was reporting back.

Every single conversation.

"He was there to watch me," I said quietly. "The whole time."

"And to make sure you did what Roland needed you to do," Damien said.

I looked at the window. Then at my phone. Then at Damien.

"So the man at the gate," I said slowly. "The one who texted me."

Damien nodded once like he had already put it together.

"It is Jace," I said.

"Look again," Damien said quietly. "Look at the gate and look carefully."

I went to the window. I stood to the side so I could not be seen clearly and looked down.

The man who had been looking up at my window was still there.

He had turned slightly and I could see his face properly now in the full morning light.

My phone slipped out of my hand and hit the floor.

It was not Jace.

It was someone I had not seen in four years. Someone I had never expected to see again. Someone who was supposed to have nothing to do with any of this.

It was my mother's doctor.