Chapter 10
Thomas knew where Margaret was.
That nearly broke my patience with him, but only nearly. By then I understood too clearly how many people around Elena had learned to survive by keeping pieces of truth hidden from one another.
“Sofia made me promise,” he said.
I looked at him for a long moment. “If your silence ever becomes part of the danger again, I will consider it betrayal.”
He accepted that without flinching. “Understood.”
Margaret was at the old Vale lake house, a property nobody in the family had used openly in years. Vivian went white when she heard the name.
That alone told me she had searched there before.
We left Elena with Thomas, Dominic, and two women Sofia had trusted. I doubled the guard ring around the ballroom before I went. If Vivian had one last move, it wouldn’t be with my daughter in reach.
The lake house was not empty.
It was recently lived in. A kettle still warm. Fresh sheets. A child’s drawing on the kitchen table. Elena in a silver dress, a big dark-haired man with tattoos on his arms standing beside her.
Me.
Margaret had been keeping up with Elena from a distance.
Then Thomas found a second note under the drawing.
SHE KNOWS NOW.
I followed the tracks outside with two men and found Margaret in the old boathouse.
She was alive.
So was someone I hadn’t seen in twelve years.
My uncle Gabriel Vale.
Former consigliere. Exiled by my father after a private split no one ever explained to me when I was young enough to matter but not old enough to question.
He looked at me and said, “Sofia told me Vivian would eventually get impatient.”
I stared at him. “You’ve been protecting Margaret?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He nodded toward a sealed metal case on the floor. “Because Sofia didn’t trust the list with a nanny. She trusted it with me.”
That meant everything I had believed about Gabriel’s disappearance was incomplete too.
He handed me the case but did not let go immediately.
“You should know before you open it,” he said, “that Sofia was not only protecting Elena from Vivian.”
I frowned. “From who else?”
Gabriel’s expression hardened.
May you like
“From the methods your father taught this house before Vivian ever learned how to use them.”
And suddenly my wife’s faction looked less like an infection and more like a younger version of an older disease.
