Chapter 7
Victor knows I’ve seen the transfer records, Catherine had written. He’s asked Elena to stay late tonight, alone, to go through the archive with him. I don’t like it. I’m going to be there too. If anything happens to either of us, our children are to be kept apart from this family until they’re old enough to protect themselves. Elena’s daughter most of all. She was born three weeks ago. She was in the room the night everything started. She doesn’t know it yet. She may never need to.
Adrian’s hands went cold around the page.
“Three weeks old,” he said. “The night she wrote this.”
Nora’s chest rose and fell, slow and careful, like she was trying to hold herself together by breathing correctly.
“I was born in October,” she said. “The crash was in November.”
“You were there,” Adrian said. “The night my mother died. You were in this house.”
It wasn’t an accusation. It barely sounded like a sentence at all — more like a man rebuilding a house that had been standing wrong his entire life, brick by brick, in real time.
Elena hadn’t just worked for the Vale family. She’d been in the archive that night with Catherine, the two of them going through records that proved Victor had been siphoning shipping accounts for years to fund a takeover no one else in the family knew was coming. Someone had cut the brake line on the car meant to carry them both away from the house that night — Catherine driving, Elena in the passenger seat, infant Nora wrapped and sleeping in the back.
Elena had survived by throwing herself and the baby clear of the wreck at the last curve before the ravine. Catherine hadn’t made it far enough to jump.
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Nora had grown up believing her mother left Vale House quietly, for reasons never fully explained. She had never known she’d been carried out of a burning car three weeks after she was born, saved by the same woman whose death Adrian had spent twenty years grieving without ever understanding why.
She wasn’t an outsider who’d stumbled into someone else’s tragedy.
