"What changed?"
"You opened your mouth and didn't stop talking."
A ghost of an expression flickers across her face. The faintest ripple in the ice.
"You asked questions no one asks me. You pushed buttons no one pushes. You looked at my garden and went quiet for three seconds and then started demanding to know about the roses. It didn’t take me long to realize you asked questions because you cared." I shake my head, the memory settling warm in my chest despite everything. "I've terrified men who run empires and you made fun of my cooking."
"It wasn't an insult. The eggs were actually good."
"I know. That's why it worked." I pause. Gather myself. The next words are harder, pulled from a place I've kept locked for decades. "You stopped being an asset somewhere around the second day. You became someone I wanted to know. And simply wanted. But not for information or some strategy. Just wanted."
I watch her absorb this information. Her fingers tighten and loosen on the mug.
"And my mother?" Her voice cracks wide open on the word. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn’t realize you didn't know, little flame." My gut churns and knots until I feel sick to my stomach. "About your mother or your grandmother, I assume. Believe me when I say I had no idea you didn’t know."
"No one ever told me." Her jaw trembles, the muscles fighting to hold steady and losing. "Not my father. Not my uncle. Not a single person cared enough to answer my questions. I had to piece everything together on my own and well, I was dead wrong about everything." Her eyes hold mine and the devastation in them guts me.
"I thought you knew. At least some of it." My voice is raw. Honest. No defense behind it. "You investigated your family and you told me your mother was killed by trusting the wrong man. I assumed you understood what that meant."
"I thought it meant she died of a broken heart because my father didn't love her enough and put the family needs before her." The tears fall now, cutting clean tracks down her cheeks. "I didn't know Seamus systematically destroyed her. I didn't know my father sanctioned it."
She pauses and inhales slowly, her chest shaking. It breaks my fucking heart in two not to be able to reach out and hold her, but I know she needs her space.
For now.
"I kept reading after you sat down outside my door." She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand, the gesture rough, impatient with her own tears.
"The autopsy report says natural causes. Cardiac event in her sleep." Her jaw sets, the journalist surfacing through the grief. "But the toxicology panel Luca dug up tells a different story. Sleeping pills. Enough to stop her heart. The same medication Seamus had been controlling for months."
Her voice drops to a whisper.
"Did he give her enough to kill her, or did she take them herself because he made living unbearable? Either way, my uncle murdered my mother. And my father signed off on covering it up."
The words hang in the kitchen between us. The coffee grows cold. The morning light feels obscene, too bright, too warm for the truth filling this room.
"I should have given you that file the second you walked through my door."
The words taste like sand over my tongue. "And I was selfish enough to want more time before it destroyed what we were building."
"That wasn't your choice to make."
"No. It wasn't." I hold her gaze without flinching. "I'm sorry, Onyx."
The word hangs between us on the kitchen table, settling beside the folder and the cooling coffee. I'm not a man who apologizes on a regular basis. The weight of the word registers in her eyes, a slight widening, a subtle shift in the flat blue.
Silence stretches. She's thinking. Processing. Running every word through the relentless machinery of her journalist's brain, cross-referencing, testing for inconsistencies, deciding.
She opens the folder and pulls out a specific page, the medical records, Catherine's decline documented in clinical language that makes horror look bureaucratic.
"This evidence. About Seamus. About what he did to my mother."
I know what she is asking. "It's solid. Enough to bury him."
"I couldn't have found this on my own. I've been investigating for what feels like forever and I never got close."
"No. You wouldn't have. Seamus buried it deep, but Luca's network is extensive."
