Chapter 27: Still Married

"Say it," Elara said.

Priya Nair stood in the operating theatre with her charcoal coat creased and her face drained of color. She did not look at the monitors or the man on the table. She looked at Elara, and her voice, when it came, was a thread.

"Augustin hired me nine years ago." She swallowed. "He did not tell me why. He gave me one assignment. Find the daughter of Lucille Quinn. I searched for eight years. I found you in Paris, married to Julian Hart, a month before the old man's will took effect."

"And you said nothing."

"I was sworn to silence. If Conrad learned you were the heir, you would not have lived a week." Priya's eyes were wet. "I watched you for eight months. I wanted to speak. Every night I wanted to. I did not know how to tell a woman that her life had been a lie."

"It was a lie." Elara's voice shook. "Everyone in it was."

"Elara—"

"Don't."

She turned. She could not stand in that room, with its beeping machines and its old man and its three Calloways, every one of whom had known some piece of the truth.

Rhys stood by the gurney, utterly still. She searched his face.

She could not smell him.

It was the single cruelest thing about him. All her life, she had read people the way other women read faces. Scent told her what words hid. She had stood in the interrogation room and breathed in the nothing that surrounded him, and she had trusted him anyway. She had trusted him in a cellar, in a car, on a quay.

"I can't tell," she said, very quietly. "If you are lying. I can't tell, and I have never in my life not been able to tell."

"I know."

"So how do I know?"

He was silent. Then, slowly, he held out both hands.

They were trembling. Not much. A fine, unstoppable tremor that ran from his wrists to his fingertips.

"I cannot give you a scent," Rhys said. "I have never been able to give anyone one. But my hands have not been steady since you said my name in that chapel. Watch them, Elara. They are the only thing about me that I cannot make lie."

She stared at them for a long, silent moment.

Then she looked away, because her throat had closed.

"The stairs," Tobias said sharply from the doorway. He had his pistol out. "Voices. A dozen men at least. We have one minute."

Edmund moved first. He crossed to the gurney with his good arm and began unlocking the wheels. "The service lift," he said. "Third door on the left. It goes to the loading dock."

"You know the building?" Rhys said.

"I have been inside it seventeen times in the last year," said Edmund dryly. "Visiting a sick father in disguise. One learns the corridors."

They wheeled Augustin out into the dim hall, Tobias covering the rear, Priya clutching a medical drip stand with white knuckles. Elara walked beside the gurney with the opened cobalt bottle in her coat and her own heart beating like a trapped bird.

The lift doors opened on a cold steel box. They crowded in. Rhys pressed the button. The doors slid shut on the sound of boots in the corridor.

The lift began to descend.

Elara leaned her forehead against the cool wall.

"I would have asked you," Rhys said quietly, from somewhere behind her. "If I had known. I would have asked you to marry me anyway."

She did not answer.

Priya's phone buzzed.

In the narrow lift, the sound was sharp as a slap. Priya glanced at the screen. Her face went slack.

"What is it?" Rhys said.

"Mr. Okonkwo." Priya's voice was barely audible. "Urgent. He is—" She stopped. Swallowed. Read again. "He says Julian Hart filed an affidavit with the civil registry an hour ago."

"Filed what?"

Priya looked up. Her eyes found Elara, and what was in them made Elara's blood run cold.

"That his marriage to Elara Quinn was never dissolved," Priya said. "He has the original certificate. Under French law, your marriage to Rhys is void, because you were never legally free to marry him."

The lift hummed.

"The trust cannot vest," Priya whispered. "The will's thirty-day clause is not met. Rhys has no wife. And Conrad Hart holds the shares."

Elara stared at her.

She thought of the morning in the interrogation room. The pen in her hand. The signature in thick black ink. She had signed her own name and not once thought to ask whether she was free to sign.

"Then," she said slowly, "I am still Julian's wife."

Beside her, Rhys had gone very white.

The lift stopped.

The doors slid open on the loading dock.

And there, in the cold gray light, with a silver cane in one hand and the other laid gently on Julian Hart's shoulder, stood Conrad.

"Welcome home, Mrs. Hart," he said.