ELLA'S POV
The estate was obscene.
That was the only word for it. Obscene in the way that money, when it passes a certain level, stops being about comfort and becomes something else — a statement about the distance between the person who has it and every other category of existence. Marble floors that probably cost more than the average house. Chandeliers are weighted with actual crystals. Art on the walls I recognized from museum textbooks, hung casually, like posters.
Real Monets. Like they were nothing.
Lucien carried me through all of it — he had picked me back up at the car door, and I'd decided to stop fighting it, because I was bleeding from my feet and running on no food and whatever had happened to me in that auction house had taken something out of me that I didn't have a reserve of — up a staircase wide enough to drive a car up, through hallways that went on too long, past staff members who lowered their eyes when he passed.
"You can walk," I said, mostly because I needed to say something.
"I know."
"Then put me down."
"If I put you down, you'll run." He turned a corner with the certainty of someone who had mapped every inch of this house into muscle memory. "And I'd have to chase you, and you're exhausted and haven't eaten, and I'd rather not traumatize you further tonight."
"A little late for that."
"It's never too late to make things worse." He stopped in front of a set of double doors, managed them one-handed, carried me inside. "Your suite" East wing."
He set me down.
I stumbled — my legs had made quiet plans to give out, and they executed while I wasn't watching — and he caught me before I hit the floor, hands steady and automatic. He didn't say anything about it.
The room was bigger than my apartment. A bed that could have slept five, a sitting area with a fireplace that was already lit, windows overlooking gardens dressed in fairy lights. Everything in silver and cream and blue, the particular palette of someone who had a taste or had hired someone who did.
Gilded cage. Still a cage.
"When did you last eat?" he asked.
"I don't know. Yesterday, maybe."
Something moved in his expression. Not pity — something more like a person acknowledging a fact they don't like. He picked up his phone, typed something with his thumb. "Food will be here in ten minutes."
"I don't want—"
"Your body does." He guided me to the edge of the bed, and I sat because my legs made that decision without consulting me. "You can be angry at me and still eat. Those aren't in conflict." He crossed to the window, looked out at his ridiculously lit-up gardens. "I had your things moved here from your apartment. Your landlord will be compensated generously. There's nothing left for you to go back to."
"You evicted me." The flatness in my voice surprised even me.
"I'm thorough." He turned back. "I don't leave loose ends."
"You destroyed my life."
"I removed a life that was destroying you." He crouched in front of me so we were eye level, and his voice, when he said it, was not the voice of a man who thought he'd done nothing wrong. It was the voice of a man who had decided one wrong thing was necessary to prevent several worse ones. "You were working yourself apart at the seams. Your sister was dying. You had no floor left to fall to."
"It was mine to fall through."
"Yes," he said. "It was." He held my gaze. "And I took that from you. I know that."
A knock at the door. He opened it, took a tray from someone I didn't see, brought it to the table by the window. Soup. Fresh bread. Something chocolate at the end that my body noticed before my brain did.
"Eat," he said. "Everything else can wait."
I should have refused on principle.
I ate.
God help me, it was the best food I'd had in months. Hot and real and made with actual ingredients by someone who knew what they were doing. My stomach, which had been folded in on itself with hunger and adrenaline and fear, slowly unclenched.
I hated how much better it made me feel. Hated the relief of it.
Lucien watched me eat. Not predatorily — he sat in the chair across the room, his long legs stretched out, and watched me with an expression I couldn't categorize. Something between relief and guilt and something else I don't have the emotional capacity to name right now.
"Better?" he asked when I'd worked through most of the tray.
"I still hate you."
"I know." He almost smiled. Not quite. "But you're less likely to faint now. That's progress."
"That's not progress. That's a meal I didn't choose."
"Everything worth building starts from an involuntary foundation." He stood, moved toward the door. "The bathroom has everything you need. The closet has clothes in your size. Sleep. Tomorrow, your real education begins."
"Education in what?"
He paused in the doorway. In the hallway lights, the lines of his face were cleaner — less the composed mask of the man who had bought me and more just a face. A tired one.
"In what you actually are," he said. "Which is something extraordinary that no one thought to tell you about." He looked at me for a moment. "For what it's worth — I'm aware that nothing I'm doing is fair. I'm aware that you deserve better than how this started." The pause was brief, and something in it felt genuine rather than calculated. "I intend to give you better. Eventually. Even if you don't believe that yet."
"I don't believe that yet."
"I know." He reached for the door handle. "Goodnight, Ella."
"Don't call me that. You don't get to call me that."
He left without responding.
The door closed.
I sat in that enormous, beautiful room with its fireplace and its fairy light gardens visible through the window, and I let myself do what I'd been holding back since the hallway of the diner: I cried. Not decoratively. The ugly, deep-chested kind that comes from a place where you've been storing too much for too long and the container has finally failed.
For my apartment. My jobs. My freedom. For the version of my life that had been hard and exhausting and mine.
For Lily, who was healing in a hospital bed because this man had been paying for it, which meant I owed him something I didn't know how to name.
For my father, who had apparently known things about me my whole life and decided the kindest thing was to make sure I never found out.
I cried until there was nothing left to cry with.
Then I crawled into the enormous bed with my uniform still on, pulled the blankets up, and fell asleep before I finished deciding to.
LUCIEN'S POV
I felt her crying through the bond.
It was like standing in a room where someone had opened all the windows in a storm — not painful exactly, but impossible to ignore, impossible to be apart from. Every sob was something I felt secondhand and could do nothing about.
You could go to her, my wolf said.
And make it worse. Remind her of what she was crying about by showing up as the cause of it.
I stayed in my office and poured whiskey and did not drink it. Looked at the surveillance photo on my desk — Ella Monroe outside Mercy General, six weeks ago, in the parking lot. She'd thought she was alone. She was eating a granola bar and looking at nothing in particular with the expression of someone who had run so far past their limit that they couldn't remember where the limit was.
That was when I'd made the decision. When I'd stopped telling myself I was still weighing options.
"Is she settled?" Marcus appeared in the doorway.
"She's crying herself to sleep in a room that probably feels like a sentence." I pushed the photo face-down. "She called me what I am."
"What you did," Marcus said. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Yes." He came in, didn't sit. Marcus rarely sat when he had something to say that he thought I needed to hear standing up. "What you are is a man who's been dying for twenty years and ran out of ethical options somewhere around year fifteen. What you did is make choices you don't get to call justified just because they were necessary." He looked at me evenly. "She'll figure out the difference. Eventually. The question is whether you make it easy or hard for her to do that."
"And if she never forgives me?"
"Then you live with that." He paused. "If you live."
The black veins had reached my shoulder blade. I'd checked that morning, angled in the bathroom mirror. Three months, Helena had said. Maybe four if the bond continued to slow the progression.
"Increase security," I said. "Dante's interest in her was more than strategic. He knows what she is, or suspects it. He won't stay away."
"Already handled." Marcus moved toward the door. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow she starts learning what she is, and she's going to be furious about it, and you're going to need to be steady for that."
He left.
Through the bond, Ella's crying quieted. Shifted into the long, slow rhythm of exhausted sleep.
I sat with my undrunk whiskey and the photo I'd turned over and the particular weight of having done something I couldn't undo, and told myself that what came next would be better.
I would make it better.
Whether she let me or not.