He doesn't pause, his posture rigid.
"The night she died... she orchestrated it. She had her brother attack our home to hold us hostage, thinking if she threatened Maeve, I’d finally fold and sign over the business. It was supposed to be a leverage play. But it went sideways."
He stops for a second, his throat bobbing.
"Silas got tired of the back-and-forth. When I wouldn't budge, Elara panicked, she actually took a knife to Maeve’s throat, holding her own daughter hostage to force my hand. I would have agreed. God help me, I would have signed everything over to save the girl. But Silas... he was impatient. He realized she was failing. He grabbed her hand to pull her aside and finish the job himself. He was going to slit Maeve’s throat, and Elara was just in the way."
Lorcan’s hands clench into fists at his sides, his knuckles white in the dim light.
"I didn't think. I didn't feel. I shot them both. Two for her, one for him. I ran to Maeve and covered her eyes so she wouldn't see her mother bleeding out on the floor. I thought Silas was dead. I watched the life drain out of him, too."
He goes very still. The air in the room is tight.
"I let her haunt me for five years because I thought I’d killed the woman I loved," he whispers, his voice cracking for the first time. "I didn't realize I’d just executed a plant. I carried that guilt like a stone, and all the while, Silas was out there, laughing."
"You’ve been using this for five years," I continue, my voice steady, unsoftened by pity. "You’ve been letting Silas hold this over your head, not because you’re weak, but because you think you deserve to be haunted. You think that by feeling this, you’re paying a debt. But you’re not paying a debt to Elara. You’re just letting him use her to break you, over and over again."
He doesn't look away. I hold his gaze. I don't blink. I don't offer him a hand. I just give him the truth, raw and unvarnished, because he’s spent five years surrounding himself with people who are too terrified to tell him what he is.
"You aren't the villain in that story, Lorcan," I say. "You were the victim. He’s the villain. And as long as you act like he’s the one who won, he is."
His jaw tightens. His shoulders bunch up. He looks like he’s vibrating on the edge of a breakdown, or a rage, or a breakthrough.
"You don't know what you're talking about," he says, though his voice lacks its previous conviction.
"I know exactly what I’m talking about," I say. "You’re a man who hates himself for surviving. But Maeve survived too. And she doesn't need a father who’s half-dead. She needs the man who runs the city. She needs the man who can actually protect her."
He goes very still. The last of the tension seems to bleed out of his frame. He leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes.
We sit in the dark.
The silence isn't the cold, empty silence of before. It’s dense, complicated, and entirely new. I don't move. I don't speak. I just sit there, breathing, waiting for him to decide what he wants to do with the truth.
He doesn't say anything else. He doesn't move.
But after a long time, he reaches out his hand, his fingers hesitating, and then he rests his palm against the floor, right next to mine.
He doesn't touch me. He just leaves his hand there.
I leave mine right where it is.
The room is dark, the only light coming from the faint, blue pulse of the screens on the desk.
Something has settled between us. It isn't peace, and it isn't forgiveness. But it’s something new. Something solid. Something that feels a hell of a lot like the beginning of the end.
And we sit there, in the dark, together.
22
Lorcan
The sub-basement War Room smells of cold coffee and dust. It's where we run the logistics of an empire that operates mostly in the dark, no windows, low light, quiet.
I sit at the head of the table, staring at shipping manifests that won't add up. My head has been pounding since the skirmish at the North Pass.
"The northern hub is hemorrhaging," Kieran says, his voice grating against the quiet. He leans against the map console, his arms crossed over his chest, looking as tired as I feel. "We’re losing stock by the hour, and the logistics software is showing gaps in the inventory that shouldn't exist."
"It’s not the software," I say, rubbing the back of my neck. "It’s the entry points. Someone is feeding Silas my protocols in real-time."
