I didn’t press. There would be time, I thought — and then caught myself thinking it, surprised by the assumption buried in it. Time. As if tonight was the beginning of something instead of the end of an evening I’d never expected to survive.
The SUV took a hard turn onto a gravel drive, and ahead of us, through the rain, a low modern house came into view — glass and steel, entirely unlike the gothic bulk of Blackwood Estate, lit up like it had been waiting for us.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Somewhere Castellano doesn’t know exists,” Damian said, already reaching for the door handle before the car had fully stopped. “My house. The real one. Not the one built for parties and enemies to admire.”
PART 4 — What the Fire Couldn’t Take
The next hour dissolved into motion I only partly remembered afterward — a doctor arriving within minutes, clearly on retainer for exactly these emergencies, ushering Marcus into a room built, I realized with a jolt, like a small private clinic. Stainless counters. A crash cart. The particular antiseptic smell of a place that had done this before.
I stood in the hallway afterward, blood dried tacky on my hands, still in my catering uniform, feeling suddenly, violently aware of every part of my body that had spent the night being useful instead of being watched, judged, minimized. My hands were shaking now that they had nothing to hold onto.
“He’ll live,” Damian said, appearing in the doorway behind me. He’d shed his suit jacket somewhere, his shirt sleeves rolled, and for the first time all night he looked less like the man who controlled a ballroom and more like someone who had simply been awake far too long, running on adrenaline and will. “The bullet missed anything that mattered. Dr. Reyes says a week, maybe ten days, and he’ll be back to coaching soccer.”
“Good,” I said, and my voice cracked, just slightly, on the word, and that was the moment — not the gunfire, not the fire eating the house behind us, not even the sixty seconds in the library — that was the moment I finally started to shake in earnest, adrenaline draining out of me all at once and leaving something raw and frightened in its place.
