Chapter 6

Rowan

On our drive home from the courthouse, Luz slept soundly against my shoulder as Camila watched the city go by. Her gaze seemed to be committing every detail to memory, preparing herself for some imaginary emergency that would force her off these streets if necessary.

My phone buzzed once, low, and I checked it without making a show of it.

Plate traced to a shell company. Registered address is a law office downtown. Same firm's done contract work for us before. Could be nothing. Could be someone who knows how we operate. Digging further.

I read it once, filed it, and put the phone away. Someone with knowledge of how Blackwood Holdings ran its own legal affairs had parked outside my building on my wedding day. That wasn't a stranger with a camera. That was someone who knew exactly which doors to watch and when. I'd deal with it later, not in front of a nine-year-old who'd already had enough thrown at her for one day.

I married Camila Reyes for a reason that had nothing to do with concern for anyone's day, hers or her sister's. They weren't my responsibility. They were part of an arrangement, nothing more, dressed up as a family for whoever eventually pointed a camera at us.

I told myself that, and it didn't sit as easily as it used to.

The house had already been briefed. Staff knew a wife and a child were arriving, knew not to ask questions, knew the particular kind of discretion my family has paid for consistently since long before I took over running it. Still, watching them cross the gravel to help with two bags, I felt something I hadn't accounted for.

Camila noticed the car before I wanted her to. I told her it wasn't mine, which was true, and I told her not to worry about it, which wasn't entirely honest. But the way she looked at me afterward told me she had bridged the gap between those two answers even if she didn't have the pieces to name it yet.

Julian took one look at the three of us standing in the entryway, Luz staring up at the chandelier like it owed her an explanation.

"Are you two just going to stand here, or is someone going to give this kid an actual tour of the house she's now living in?" He nodded toward Luz. "Rowan. Go. You live here. Act like it."

I wasn’t in the mood for Julian’s shenanigans, so I went with the tour.

The tour took the better part of an hour. Luz asked more questions per room than I usually field in a quarterly board meeting, whether the library had "any good books or just boring ones," whether the pool was heated, whether the fourth-floor room I skipped past quickly had anything interesting in it. I told her it was storage. That was mostly true. Camilla stayed silent most of the time till I showed her and her sister’s rooms.

Julian intercepted us near the back terrace, crouching to Luz's eye level with the easy confidence he brings to everything.

"I happen to know this house has a garden with a very specific tree that's excellent for climbing, and I also happen to know four card tricks nobody knows." He glanced between Camila and me. "I'm taking Luz with me. You two can finish standing around awkwardly without an audience."

He had her hand and was halfway to the terrace doors before either of us could answer, which left Camila and me alone in a hallway neither of us seemed to know what to do with.

"So...," she studied a painting on the wall like it had suddenly become fascinating. "This is a lot of house."

"It is."

"Do you actually use all of it, or is most of it just… there?"

"Mostly there. I use maybe four rooms with any regularity."

"Hm."

"Hm," I agreed, which wasn't a real answer to anything, and we stood there a beat longer, both apparently out of things to say to a person we'd married a few hours earlier.

Something ugly flickered through me then, quick and unwelcome. A reminder of exactly why she was standing in my hallway at all. Not affection. Not the start of one. I resented, in that moment, how easily the last hour had let me forget it on purpose.

Elsa found us before either of us broke the silence. Nineteen years working for this family, and I'd never once, in my memory, seen her look nervous delivering information to me. She looked nervous now.

"Mr. Blackwood. There's been a small error with the luggage." Hands folded. The posture she reserves for news she'd rather not deliver. "Mrs. Blackwood's bag was brought up to the primary suite. Yours. Staff assumed, given the circumstances of the day, that—"

"That we'd be sharing a room." An easy mistake, for anyone who didn't know the actual terms of this marriage. "It's fine, Elsa. I'll handle it myself."

Relief crossed her face fast enough to tell me, not for the first time, how carefully everyone in this house calibrates around my mood before they've confirmed what it even is. I've never raised my voice at staff, not once, not even in the worst stretch after my father died, when I couldn't have promised that with any real confidence. Somewhere along the way, competence had translated into something closer to fear than respect. I'd stopped correcting that impression years ago. It runs the house efficiently. I've never examined too closely what else it costs.

Camila offered to carry her own bag. I didn't let her. Walked it down the hall myself instead, and only questioned why halfway there.

"You carried my suitcase yourself," she said, arms crossed, something close to amusement in it, once I'd set it down by the foot of her bed. "Seems like a lot of trouble for a man with a houseful of staff."

"Faster to fix it myself than explain exactly how I wanted it fixed."

"Efficient."

"It's usually the more reliable option." I straightened; I should have left it there. "For what it's worth, this wasn't Elsa's fault. I'm telling you so you don't hold it against her."

"I wasn't going to."

"I know. I'm telling you anyway." Why am I even telling her all this? She is no one to me.

She held my gaze a second longer than the moment required, and I found myself doing the same, unable to produce a single reasonable justification for staying in that doorway. Her beautiful whiskey eyes had a golden ring to them that shone. I was mesmerized by staring at her beautiful mole above her lips until Julian's voice carried up from somewhere downstairs announcing that Luz had officially beaten him at cards and wanted witnesses.

Whatever was building in that doorway broke apart at the sound of it. I came back to my senses.

"I should—" she started.

"Yeah," I said, and watched her go. She was still wearing the white dress. It hugged every part of her generous curves. It moved with her down the stairs in a way I hadn't let myself register during the ceremony itself. A contract didn't require me to notice how a dress sat on a woman I'd married out of spite. I noticed anyway, and resented that too.

I went to my office instead of downstairs. Told myself I needed ten minutes to think through the next phase, some piece of a plan I'd been building for a decade around the idea that Marco Reyes's daughter would be an instrument and nothing else. Ten minutes turned into closer to twenty before I made myself stop staring at nothing and walked downstairs.

Julian had commandeered the living room floor by then, tie gone, sleeves rolled, shuffling a deck while Luz watched with the kind of focus most nine-year-olds save for something they've decided matters.

"Pick a card. Any card. Don't show me."

"You're gonna cheat."

"I'm going to perform a miracle, and you're going to accuse me of cheating regardless, so let's get that part out of the way now."

Whatever the car outside meant, whatever sat locked in my desk drawer, whatever this arrangement actually was underneath the paperwork, I knew one thing standing in that doorway. Julian was the single constant in my life I'd never once had reason to question.

Elsa announced dinner at seven. Camila hesitated at the table, unsure which seat was hers.

"Anywhere's fine," I said. "No assigned seating in this house. Yet."

"Yet."

"Luz might have opinions eventually. I'd rather not commit to a system before she weighs in."

The laugh that got out of her was real, short, surprised, gone almost before it landed, like she hadn't fully decided to allow it. It stopped me for half a second longer than it should have. All I could think of was the other laugh, the small sad one from the ceremony room, still lodged somewhere behind my ribs, unexamined. I had no good answer for why either one mattered to me. I shook the thought loose and took my seat at the head of the table while Elsa served the dinner.

Luz ate half her plate and declared the rest "too fancy to finish," which Elsa absorbed with more grace than the comment deserved. Camila barely touched hers, pushing food around more than eating any of it.

"You should eat."

"I'm fine."

"You've moved four peas across that plate in the last five minutes. I counted." I nodded at her fork. "Eat. I'll stop watching if it's making you self-conscious."

She gave me a look somewhere between annoyed and amused, and ate anyway. Julian, uninvited but seated at the far end regardless, smirked through the entire exchange, and I resisted the urge to deck my partner and friend on his mouth.

He left around nine, pausing at the door. "I taught that kid three card tricks and a coin vanish tonight. You're welcome. Try not to brood too loudly once I'm gone; some of us worked hard on making today feel normal for her."

"Noted."

"Say that word one more time, and I'm charging you for it." Still grinning as the door shut behind him.

I told myself I was heading straight to bed. I wasn't. I stopped outside Luz's door first, cracked open, night-light glowing against the wall. Why I needed to see for myself that she'd actually fallen asleep instead of trusting Elsa's word for it, I couldn't say. She wasn't my responsibility. I stood there anyway until I'd confirmed it, small shape under a blanket too big for the bed, that stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm.

Further down the hall, light still burned under Camila's door. I didn't knock. What was I planning to say if I had? That I'd carried her bag myself for reasons I couldn't fully account for. That her laugh had stopped me mid-sentence twice in one evening. That I'd apparently started keeping tabs on a nine-year-old's sleep schedule on the first night either of them had spent under this roof. None of it made sense measured against ten years of certainty about who this family was to me.

I made myself walk back to my own wing before I found an answer I didn't want.

My phone buzzed once more. Marcus.

One more thing. Pulled employment records for that law firm going back ten years, since you asked me to be thorough. There's a name on their old client list I think you'll want to see for yourself before I say it over text. Can we talk in the morning?

I read it twice, the way you read something when part of you already suspects the answer and would rather not have it confirmed in writing.

I told him yes. Morning would have to be soon enough.