I had expected Blackthorn House to feel like a cage. I had not expected it to feel, in the first hour, like a stage.
The announcement came before I had even unpacked a single bag. My mother called while I was standing in the doorway of a bedroom that had not been slept in for a decade, dust sheets still draped over the furniture like something waiting to be mourned, and her voice on the phone was so calm, so reasonably pitched, that I knew immediately she was about to tell me something unforgivable.
"The council needs reassurance," Celeste said. "Two families do not survive a night like that without the city asking questions about succession, about stability, about whether the Morgans and the Dawsons are finally going to tear each other apart in public. An engagement solves that question before anyone can ask it."
I stood very still, the phone cold against my ear, and said the only thing my mind could produce. "An engagement to whom."
"Don't be tiresome, Hailey."
I did not throw the phone, though I wanted to. I have spent my whole life learning not to want things visibly, and that particular skill, cultivated over twenty-three years the way other women cultivate a garden, was the only thing standing between me and the sound of glass shattering against Blackthorn House's ancient plaster walls.
By the time I found Adrian, he already knew. Of course he already knew. He was standing in the long gallery that ran the length of the second floor, one shoulder against the window frame, looking out at the harbor with an expression that told me nothing at all, which told me everything.
"You knew before I did," I said, because accusation has always come more easily to me than any other opening line.
"My mother called an hour before yours called you." He did not turn. "I assume the timing was meant to make it feel less like a decision and more like a fact."
"And you didn't think to warn me."
That got him to look at me, finally, something sharp moving behind the calm of his face. "Would a warning have changed anything, Miss Morgan? Or would you simply have spent the hour being furious at me instead of at them?"
I did not have an answer for that which did not make me sound exactly as furious as I was, so I said nothing, and the silence between us filled up the gallery the way smoke fills a room, slow and total, until neither of us could quite remember what the air had tasted like before it arrived.
"You think I arranged this," he said eventually. Not a question.
"Didn't you?"
Something crossed his face, there and gone so quickly I might have imagined it if I had not spent my entire life being trained to notice exactly that kind of flicker. "I have spent my whole life being accused of things my family did before I could walk," he said. "I find I no longer have the energy to defend myself against the ones I actually didn't do."
I should have let that sit. I should have taken it for the strange, half-hurt admission it clearly was and left the gallery before either of us said something we could not take back. Instead I said, "How convenient, that you only deny the crimes that are inconvenient to admit."
He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his jaw tightened in a way that made me acutely aware of how alone we were in that long, dust-quiet room, thirty feet of ancestral portraits watching us from the walls like a jury that had already reached its verdict a generation ago.
"Careful, Hailey," he said, very quietly. "You keep looking for the version of me that lets you keep hating easily. I would advise you not to be too disappointed when you don't find him."
He left before I could decide whether that had been a threat or a confession, and I stood alone in the gallery for a long time afterward, furious at him for reasons I could no longer entirely name.
The house did not make it easy to avoid him. Blackthorn House had been built by two families who had once, apparently, liked each other enough to share a roof by choice, and its architecture reflected an intimacy neither of our families had any interest in reviving: connecting corridors instead of separate wings, a single grand staircase instead of two, a library that ran the entire western face of the ground floor with no door at all separating it from the rest of the house, as though the founders had wanted to make privacy structurally impossible for whoever came after them.
I went to that library on my second night, long after the staff had gone quiet and the only sound in the house was the low creak of old wood settling into the cold coming off the harbor. I told myself I was looking for anything useful, family correspondence, old security logs, anything that might tell me who had truly wired two bombs into a memorial gala and let two families believe they had done it to each other. What I actually wanted, though I would not have admitted it even to myself at the time, was information about my brother. About the night he died. About whether the file my family had built around his death was as complete as I had always been told it was.
I found the archive room at the back of the library almost by accident, a narrow door disguised as a section of shelving, unlocked, which surprised me until I stepped inside and found Adrian already there.
He was crouched in front of an open filing cabinet with a folder in his hands, and the look on his face when he saw me was not guilt, not exactly, but it was close enough to it that my whole body went cold and alert at once.
"What are you doing in here," I said.
"The same thing you're doing in here, I expect." He did not close the folder, but he did not offer it to me either. "Looking for something the official record left out."
"About the attack?"
"About all of it." He said it carefully, the way a man chooses his footing on ice he already suspects is thin. "The attack. My sister. Your brother. Whatever happened twenty years ago that made two families that used to share a house decide they would rather share a grave."
My pulse was too fast. "Then show me what you found."
"Not yet."
"Adrian."
"Not yet," he said again, and there was something almost apologetic in it, which made it so much worse than if he had simply refused me outright. "There are things in this house I am not ready for you to see until I understand them myself. I would rather you hate me for the delay than hate me for handing you something I got wrong."
"That is the same thing you told the police," I said. "That I couldn't be trusted. Now it's you deciding what I'm allowed to know, in my own family's history, in my own brother's death, and expecting me to simply accept that you know better than I do what I can handle."
He flinched. It was small, almost nothing, but I saw it, and some small, treacherous part of me was glad I had drawn blood even as the rest of me hated how much I had wanted to.
"That is not what I meant," he said.
"It's exactly what you meant."
He closed the folder then and rose to his feet, and the archive room, already narrow, seemed to shrink further with him standing in it, close enough that I had to tip my head back slightly to hold his eyes. For one long moment neither of us moved, and I was abruptly, uncomfortably aware of how quiet the house had become around us, how the only sound left in the world seemed to be the two of us breathing in a room built to keep secrets from everyone except each other.
"There are things about that night I am still assembling," he said, low. "Half-truths. Documents that contradict each other. I am not protecting myself, Hailey. I am trying to make sure that when I finally tell you what I think happened to your brother, it is the truth and not another convenient story someone built for us to believe."
I wanted, badly, to believe that. I hated how badly I wanted to believe it.
"You're very good at this," I said instead, my voice thinner than I meant it to be. "Making cruelty sound like protection."
Something shifted in his expression, some old, weary hurt surfacing before he could smooth it back under control. "I have had a great deal of practice," he said, "being the version of myself other people already decided I was before I opened my mouth. You are not the first person to assume the worst of me the moment I try to be careful instead of certain."
He stepped past me toward the door, and for one unbearable second, as his shoulder nearly brushed mine in the narrow space, I thought he might stop. I thought, absurdly, that some part of me wanted him to. He did not. He only paused in the doorway, his back to me, and said, without turning, "Lock this door behind you when you leave. Whatever wants this house to keep believing we're enemies would very much prefer to find it open."
The break-in happened two nights later, and it happened, infuriatingly, in a way that made his warning look like foresight instead of paranoia.
I woke to the sound of glass somewhere on the ground floor, sharp and deliberate, not the accidental crack of a house settling but the specific, ugly sound of someone choosing to break something. By the time I reached the top of the stairs, Adrian was already there, dressed only in the trousers he must have pulled on in the dark, a gun I did not know he kept in his room held loose and ready at his side.
"Stay behind me," he said, and for once I did not argue, because the two men moving through the library below us with flashlights were not moving like burglars looking for silver. They were moving like men looking for a specific room.
The house's security responded within minutes, Adrian's own detail flooding in from the service entrance, and the intruders vanished into the dark before anyone could lay a hand on them, leaving behind nothing but a shattered window and, on the desk in the archive room, a folder pulled half out of its drawer as though someone had been interrupted mid-search.
The security chief's verdict, once the house had been swept and secured, was blunt. Blackthorn House was no longer safe to sleep in fully staffed across its whole footprint tonight; too many points of entry, too few hours until dawn to secure them all properly. The safest wing, the one with a single stairwell and reinforced windows, held exactly two bedrooms, adjoining, connected by a shared sitting room.
I did not need anyone to tell me whose bedrooms those were.
"This is absurd," I said, standing in that shared sitting room at two in the morning in a robe I had thrown on over my nightclothes, watching a member of Adrian's staff carry my overnight bag through a door that led directly into a room fifteen feet from his.
"It's one night," Adrian said. He did not look thrilled about it either, which I found, against my will, slightly more bearable than if he had looked pleased.
"One night in which anyone standing in that sitting room could hear absolutely everything happening in either bedroom."
"Then we will both be very quiet," he said, and something in the dry, exhausted flatness of it startled a laugh out of me before I could stop it, a short, unwilling sound that seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised me. For one strange, suspended moment, standing in the wreckage of a night that had already tried to kill both of us twice, we simply looked at each other, and it was almost, almost, something like an alliance.
Almost.
I found the button the next morning.
I had gone back into the archive room alone, before the staff had finished cleaning the glass from the library floor, because I could not stop thinking about the folder the intruders had left half pulled from its drawer. I do not know what I expected to find when I knelt to check beneath the cabinet where it had fallen. I did not expect a button.
It was small, dark, a plain shirt button with a thread still knotted through it as though it had been torn free rather than cut, and it would have meant nothing to me at all except that it was crusted along one edge with something rust colored and old, and except that, tucked into the same gap in the floorboard, was a torn scrap of the security log from the night my brother died, a night I had been told, my entire life, that no one from the Dawson family had set foot anywhere near.
The handwriting in the margin of that scrap was faded but legible.
A. Dawson, admitted 11:47 pm, unlogged.
I sat on the floor of that archive room for a long time, the button cold in my palm, my brother's death rearranging itself in my mind into a shape I did not want to look at directly, and when I finally rose, my hands were not entirely steady.
Adrian had been in this house the night my brother died. Not accused of it from a distance, the way I had always been told, safely across the city in Dawson territory while the two families' hatred did the work of keeping everyone from asking harder questions. Here. Unlogged. Close enough to have done it himself.
I thought of his hand hovering over my throat in that tunnel. I thought of the careful, unfinished honesty in the archive room two nights ago, the folder he would not show me, the things he claimed he was not yet ready to hand me until he understood them himself.
I wondered, standing there with his family's blood, or someone's blood, drying against my palm, whether I had just spent two nights sleeping fifteen feet away from the person who had killed my brother.
End of Chapter Two.