CHAPTER FOUR

KAI

For a long moment nobody in the study moved.

My hand had gone, without my conscious decision, to the edge of the desk, close to the folder, close enough to sweep it out of sight if I needed to, an instinct that horrified me even as my body obeyed it, because it meant some part of me had already decided my aunt was a threat before my mind caught up to admit it.

"Leave what alone, exactly?" I kept my voice level with an effort that cost me. "You'll have to be more specific, Renata. There's quite a lot on this desk you've apparently known about and never mentioned."

Her gaze flicked to Elias, cool and assessing, the way a woman might look at an unwanted stray that had somehow gotten into the house. "You brought him here. Into your father's study, with the family's private files spread out on the desk." Her mouth curved, thin and unamused. "Nineteen years of care, Kai, and you undo it in an afternoon because a pretty face with a sad story walked into your boathouse."

"Don't," I said, sharper than I meant to, and hated the way Elias's shoulders went tight beside me at the word, like he expected the sentence to end with him being thrown out. "Don't do that. Don't make this about him. Make it about the manifest with Adrian's name on a shipment that officially never happened. Make it about the fact that someone tore apart Salvatore Marchetti's house last night looking for something he claims he no longer has, the same night I told exactly one person, you, that I was reopening my brother's case."

Something moved behind her composure, fast, controlled, but real. Fear, again, the same flicker I'd caught over the phone the night before, except now I was close enough to watch it happen and couldn't pretend it away.

"You think I sent someone to that house." Her voice had gone very quiet.

"I think," I said, "that you've spent nineteen years telling me a very simple story about a very complicated night, and every time I get close to the complicated parts, you appear to make sure I stop looking. I think that's not a coincidence anymore, Renata. I think that's a pattern."

"I have protected this family since the day your father put a gun in his mouth over grief he couldn't survive," she said, and her voice cracked, just slightly, at the edges, the first crack I'd ever heard in it in nineteen years. "I have carried this family on my back while you played soldier out west and told yourself it was strategy. Everything I have done, I have done to keep what's left of us alive. If you think for one second I'm going to stand here and let a Marchetti walk back into this house and unravel."

"Unravel what?" Elias's voice, quiet but steady, cut through the study for the first time, and both of us turned to him like we'd forgotten, briefly, that he was capable of speaking at all. "What exactly is it you're afraid gets unraveled, Mrs. Cassano? Because from where I'm standing, it sounds like you already know my father didn't kill Adrian. It sounds like you've known for nineteen years."

The silence that followed was total.

Renata's composure didn't crack this time. It shattered, quick, violent, gone in an instant, replaced by something cold and clear eyed I had never seen on my aunt's face in my entire life, and that frightened me considerably more than her anger ever had.

"You have no idea," she said softly, "what that night actually cost. What it's still costing. And you have no idea what I am prepared to do to make sure it stays buried."

She reached into the pocket of her tailored jacket, and for one suspended, unbearable second my whole body went cold, certain, genuinely, terribly certain, that my own aunt was about to pull a weapon on us both in my father's study.

What she pulled out instead was a phone, and she held it up, screen turned toward us, already dialing.

"Marco," she said into it, her eyes never leaving my face, "we have a problem. The boy found the manifest. Kai's with him now, in Adrian's study, and he's asking questions I can't answer for him anymore." A pause, listening, her jaw tightening at whatever came back through the line. "Yes. Both of them. I think it's time we finished what should have been finished nineteen years ago."

She ended the call and slid the phone back into her pocket, and smiled at me, actually smiled, thin and terrible, and said, in a voice gone suddenly, chillingly gentle:

"I am so sorry it has to be this way, darling. I truly am. But you were never supposed to bring him into this house."

Behind her, the study door opened again, and this time it wasn't a servant.

I recognized the man filling the doorway, knew his face from a hundred family dinners, a hundred years of unquestioned presence at my aunt's side, a man I'd called by his first name since I was a child and never once, not for a single second in nineteen years, thought to be afraid of.

Marco Reyes stepped into the study with his hands loose and easy at his sides, the posture of a man who had done this exact thing, walked into a room to end something, more times than I wanted to imagine, and said, almost kindly, "Should've listened to your aunt, Kai. She's the only reason you're still breathing after this. Now, the both of you, quietly, out the back. Let's not make this any harder than it needs to be."