ALEC'S POV
I did not know, the night they took me, that I had already been marked for months. Men had been watching my apartment, tracking my routines, waiting for a quiet enough opportunity not to draw attention.
At the time, I did not understand why Celeste's people watched me with such particular attention. It was different from the ordinary caution one might expect from captors. It was closer to the watchfulness you'd give something valuable rather than something merely useful.
I understood it fully the night someone tried to kill me in my own bed.
I woke to a hand over my mouth, and a blade already at my throat, and the only reason I am alive to write this account at all is that Claire had taken to checking the north wing herself most nights since the mole, restless in a way she never fully explained to me, and heard the wrong kind of silence coming from my room instead of the right kind.
She came through that door faster than I have ever seen another human being move, and what happened in the ninety seconds after that is a blur of noise and blood that ended with a stranger's body on my floor and Claire's hands, shaking for the first time since I'd known her, checking every inch of me for a wound that hadn't quite landed.
"You're not hurt," she said, more to herself than to me, running her palms down my arms like she needed the physical proof of it. "You're not hurt. I need you to say something, so I know you're not hurt."
"I'm not hurt," I told her, and meant it, though my voice came out considerably less steady than I intended.
She sat with me the rest of that night, neither of us saying much, her shoulder pressed against mine in a silence that felt like the truest conversation we'd had since I arrived. I understood, sitting there, that whatever danger had followed me into that house was no longer an abstract fact I carried alone. It had a face now, and a knife, and a woman who'd put herself between it and me without a half-second's hesitation.
"You didn't ask for any of this," she told me, once the shaking in her hands had finally settled. "None of it is your fault. Not your father's choices, not Dario Voss's greed, not the danger that followed you here without your permission."
"But it did follow me here," I said. "That's the part I can't get past. Whatever comes next, whatever Dario Voss eventually decides to do about this, it's going to land on this house because of me."
"Alec, Dario Voss was our enemy long before you came here."
I looked at her.
"He's angry because we took you from him," she continued. "We disrupted something he wanted, and he doesn't particularly enjoy being told no. But don't mistake that for the reason this started. Celeste has been dealing with him for a long time. He would have come after us eventually, with or without you."
"You don't know that."
"I do." Her voice was firmer now. "You haven't brought this danger into our house. You were caught in the middle of something that was already happening. There's a difference."
She paused, looking towards the door. "If anything, I'm surprised he waited this long to make a move."
"Dario Voss doesn't need a reason to be dangerous. He simply is one. This is our problem too, Alec. You don't have to take responsibility for every consequence of something you never chose to be part of."
I remember precisely when my understanding of Claire changed. She was no longer simply the woman responsible for my safety. She had become something considerably more dangerous to my composure than any knife had ever been.
~
My father and I had not spoken in three years by the time he died. I did not mourn him the way a son is supposed to mourn a father, mostly because our relationship had curdled long before his death into something neither of us knew how to repair. He worked in numbers his whole life, careful, quiet, endlessly cautious in ways that used to embarrass me as a teenager, back when I still believed caution was the same thing as cowardice.
I did not know it during that first month in Celeste and Claire's house, but his caution had finally run out before he died. The numbers he'd spent decades quietly managing belonged to men considerably more dangerous than the private clients he always claimed to work for.
He sent me a letter a month before he died. I never fully read it. I skimmed half of it before putting it back in a drawer, never reading beyond the second paragraph.
Claire found me a few nights after the attempt on my life, sitting on the edge of my bed with that letter finally open in my hands, unable to make myself read past the first line. She didn't ask what it said. She sat beside me instead, quiet, and let me decide in my own time whether I wanted company or simply presence.
"I keep thinking," I told her eventually, "that if I read it, whatever's in it becomes real. Right now, it's just a possibility. A letter I could still choose not to know."
"You don't have to read it tonight," she said. "You don't have to read it at all, if you're not ready. I'll still be here whenever you are."
I read half of it that night, with her beside me, and stopped again at the part where my father's careful, cramped handwriting finally admitted, in writing, exactly how frightened he'd been the last year of his life, and exactly how little he'd known how to protect me from what he'd started. I did not finish it that night. But I understand now, with considerably more distance, that the moment mattered more than either of us said aloud. It was the night I first let someone in that house see the unguarded, grieving parts of me I'd been keeping filed away since long before Dario Voss's men ever put me in a van.