Chapter 6
2249words
Maxim Thorne’s Estate
Late Night
The library smelled of cedar, old paper, and the faint smoke of Maxim’s cigar. Rain tapped faintly on the tall windows as Harold walked in without waiting for permission, something only a few men in the world could do.
“You sent a girl,” Harold said without preamble. “No one briefed me on this Raven until she was already inside my grandson’s quarters.”
Maxim didn’t look up from the book he wasn’t really reading. “She’s not just a girl.”
“She’s not built like someone who should be leading a security team. She’s small and looks fragile!”
“She’s not part of the team,” Maxim said, setting the book aside. “She leads it. Because she’s better than all of them.”
Harold let out a dry laugh, but there was no humor in it. “You’d trust her with Lucian’s life?”
“Yes.” The answer was so steady and immediate it cut off whatever Harold had meant to say next. “Without hesitation.”
Harold blinked once, slowly. “You’re not just saying that because you’re trying to make a point, are you?”
“No,” Maxim said, leaning back. “I don’t waste time trying to make points. I make decisions. And I stand by them.”
“Then who is she?” Harold asked. “Why her? Why now?”
There was a long pause.
Maxim swirled the amber in his glass, then looked up. “She’s the girl I brought home. Kristina. Seventeen years later, she’s still here—but not the same.”
Harold froze. His mouth opened slightly, but nothing came out. The name landed like a weight between them, as if it reached backward through time and yanked him into a memory he hadn’t meant to revisit. A flicker of disbelief crossed his features—faint, but visible to someone like Maxim, who had known him long enough to see past the silences. He sat down slowly, not out of fatigue, but out of necessity—like standing upright with that revelation still hanging in the air had become too difficult, too exposed.
“She’s changed,” Maxim said, not unkindly. “The years changed her. But I know who she is. And I know what I saw.”
Harold narrowed his eyes. “What exactly did you see?”
“The first day I brought her home from the crash,” Maxim began, slowly, “she wouldn’t come down. She stayed in her room, and wouldn’t eat with us. You remember that.”
“I do. Lucian asked about her.”
“Yes,” Maxim nodded. “And then he brought her food himself. I didn’t tell him to. I just let him go.”
“And?” Harold asked.
“And I followed. Quietly. Stood just down the hall, behind the stone archway. I saw him place the tray outside the door. And just before he turned to leave, the door cracked open the slightest bit. I saw her peek through the gap. Just for a moment.”
Harold frowned. “And?”
“She looked at him like he was something warm in a world that had always been cold.”
Harold said nothing. The fire popped softly behind them.
Maxim’s voice dropped lower. “After that, she spoke even less. To anyone. Even me, though she tried. But a few days later, when you came back with Lucian to talk about that Geneva project—”
“Right,” Harold nodded slowly. “Lucian had the blueprints.”
“You were in the garden,” Maxim continued. “And I came out to find her. She wasn’t in her room. I found her crouched behind the broadleaf myrtles, just out of sight, watching you. Watching him.”
He paused.
“And for a moment, her face—she looked…alive. Not just surviving. Not just shut away. She was full of something I hadn’t seen in her before. Something good.”
Harold looked over, quietly taking this in. His eyes narrowed, curious now in a different way.
“She doesn’t call it love. She never has,” Maxim said. “But I saw it.”
Harold cleared his throat. “And she’s never spoken of him since?”
“Never. Not directly.”
“But you think sending her to him now will—what, change her?”
Maxim’s voice was soft, but certain. “I didn’t just send her to keep Lucian alive, Harold. I sent her because this is the only way she might remember that she is.”
Sunday | June 27, 2010
Lucian Sinclair’s Estate | North Courtyard Garden
Raven felt it the moment she stepped into her suite—an almost imperceptible shift in air pressure, the way dust unsettles when a door opens too long. Her bag had been moved half an inch. Her weapons case was closed with a click too deliberate. And on the nightstand, a single sheet of printed paper rested—her updated security clearance protocols, newly annotated.
She stared at it for a long time.
Then she walked out.
Down the hall, past the inner security checkpoints, she moved with surgical speed. Not storming—never that. Just enough to make Vex, standing near the control desk, straighten immediately.
“Where is he?” she asked.
Vex blinked. “Lucian? North courtyard garden.”
She turned on her heel before he could finish. Vex watched her go, but didn’t follow. He knew this wasn’t a conversation meant for anyone else.
The stone path was still damp from the night’s rain, the smell of wet leaves and iron-rich soil grounding her as she walked.
The garden stretched out like something plucked from a storybook—walled in with sculpted hedges and crawling ivy, dotted with manicured trees that stood like sentinels around beds of white hellebore, evening primrose, and pale violet wisteria. A curved stone bridge arched over the koi pond, and the water beneath glimmered like tinted glass. Everything was precise. Pruned. Controlled. Like Lucian himself.
Raven moved quietly, each step chosen. The air here was sharper, cleaner, but no less charged. This was not a garden for reflection. It was a garden of control—of performance. Even the wildness had been tamed. Just like everyone who entered.
Lucian stood beneath a sculpted arbor, back turned, cigarette between two fingers, the thin trail of smoke rising like incense toward a sky the color of steel.
Raven crossed the flagstone walk without sound, but he knew she was there.
He always did.
“Something on your mind?” he asked, not turning, the question delivered with that effortless lilt he reserved for people he already knew would answer.
“You sent someone into my room,” she said, each word sharp, measured—not raised, but honed. “Without request. Without permission.”
Lucian glanced at her over his shoulder, cigarette still burning between his fingers, the curve of his mouth unreadable—too casual to be harmless. “Security clearance update. Routine.”
“Routine doesn’t touch my weapons case,” Raven replied, stepping closer now, not enough to breach his space, but enough that the pressure changed. “Routine doesn’t move my things.”
Lucian turned fully to face her, gaze narrowing, not with anger but with the kind of practiced interest reserved for people who had just become more useful or more dangerous. He considered her, the way a man might consider a blade someone left unsheathed on his dining table.
“Do you always assume the worst?” he asked, quiet and smooth.
“I assume intentions,” she said. “And yours were invasive.”
His smile twitched, not kindly. “You’re in my house. My people have access.”
“I’m not your people,” she said.
There was a silence then—brief, but thick, taut like a drawn wire. The koi stirred again, the wind nudged the hem of her coat. Raven’s hands remained at her sides, loose, but her mind flicked through possibilities, through angles and exits and damage control. Not from him, not yet—but from what she might have to do if he kept pulling.
Lucian watched her closely now, head tilted just enough to suggest curiosity, not yet offense. “You think I’m trying to control you.”
“I think you don’t know the difference between owning something and trusting it,” she said, and this time, she didn’t soften the words, didn’t coat them in diplomacy or restraint. “And if you don’t learn that difference, someone like me will teach it to you.”
That stopped him. Not entirely, but enough that the silence between them took on a different shape—one less about ego, more about edge. He took a drag from the cigarette, slow, and exhaled a plume of smoke that drifted sideways between them like a ghost neither wanted to acknowledge.
“You speak like someone who’s been betrayed,” he said finally, almost softly.
Raven looked past him, toward the high stone wall at the edge of the garden, where ivy grew over iron like scars grown over old bone. “I speak like someone who understands the cost of being watched too closely. Especially by men who pretend it’s a compliment.”
That made something flicker in his expression—not anger, not quite. Something older, maybe. Something like memory, barely tolerated. He let the cigarette fall, crushed it under a polished shoe.
“You’re not what Maxim said you’d be,” Lucian murmured.
“And you’re exactly what I was warned about.”
His smile returned then, slower, darker this time—laced with a grudging kind of admiration. “You’re colder than I expected.”
Raven’s eyes slid to him at last, calm and steady. “I’m not cold,” she said. “I’m calculating. And I’m done being touched without consent.”
Lucian stepped forward—not all the way, just a half-step that was more statement than movement. “Not everything is an attack.”
“No,” she said. “But everything leaves evidence.”
He didn’t speak for a long moment after that. Just looked at her. As if trying to decipher whether the steel in her was forged or embedded, whether it had been built by discipline or by something far messier, something that broke and never quite healed straight.
And Raven—though she stood still—felt something shift behind her ribcage, not emotion, not memory, but something like caution meeting recognition. She hadn’t meant to reveal that much. And yet here they were.
“I didn’t think you’d let me get to you,” Lucian said, and this time, the edge was gone from his voice. It was quieter. Slower. Realer.
Not a jab, not a test—just truth, raw around the edges. The way he said it wasn’t laced with his usual charm or bite. It landed differently, as though he hadn’t meant to say it aloud, as though the words surprised him even as they left his mouth. There was something in his gaze now—curiosity pulled inward, not just toward her, but toward himself. As if realizing, for the first time, that some part of her had slipped past his guard… and some part of him had let it.
“You didn’t,” she said. “You just reminded me I still have walls.”
But she didn’t like how close that had come to sounding like a confession.
“And you expect me to respect them?”
“I expect you to remember that I’m here to keep you alive,” she said. “Not comfortable.”
His gaze lingered on her, but he didn’t reply. Didn’t smirk. Didn’t posture. For once, there was no mask, no performance—only stillness, threaded with a depth that said more than words ever could. His silence wasn’t empty. It held shape, held weight. Something unspoken passed between them, not surrender, but recognition. Then he turned to leave—not sharply, not in defeat—but with the careful deliberation of someone who had heard more than he expected and knew better than to press further. It wasn’t retreat.
It was acknowledgment.
“Not comfortable,” Lucian murmured to himself as he walked away. “Noted.”
The boundaries had been drawn. And for now, he would stay on his side.
Raven didn’t move right away. The echo of his footsteps faded, but the words lingered.
She looked again at the ivy crawling over the stone wall—unruly despite the gardener’s effort, stubborn despite being watched. Nature, refusing to stay manicured. Contained. Tamed. It didn’t matter how often someone tried to shape it. It always found a way to reclaim what was its own.
Her breath came slow, deliberate.
It always leaves something behind, even when no one’s watching. A memory. A smell. A shift in the air. A hesitation too clean to be accidental. Or a pair of eyes that weren’t supposed to be there the day the car went off the road.
She was nine.
And even then, she'd known something was wrong.
The brakes hadn’t failed. The light hadn’t changed. Her father’s hands had been steady on the wheel, her mother humming under her breath in the front seat. But something had shifted. A glint in the rearview mirror—sharp and brief, but too deliberate. Too controlled. Like a signal. Or a goodbye.
A watcher. A hunter. Or worse—an architect.
No proof. No photos. Just fragments. A broken rhythm in the hum of the engine. The silence that followed the crash. The clean reports that never quite added up. People called it an accident, but Raven had never believed in coincidences that neat.
She had never spoken of it. Not to Maxim. Not even to herself. Not really. But she had spent seventeen years chasing that feeling. The scent of smoke. The sound of crushed metal. The look of a plan too smooth to be chance.
Not everything is an attack.
But everything leaves evidence.
And Raven had become fluent in it—had built herself out of it. A girl raised by ghosts, trained in shadows, reading signs no one else noticed. That was her armor. That was her edge. The only thing that had ever kept her alive.
And maybe the only thing that would keep him alive, too.
Some truths don’t shatter when spoken—they fracture long before, and leave her learning to survive the cracks.
—To be continued.
