Chapter 46 VICTOR'S GIFTS AND THEIR PRICE

Chapter 46 VICTOR'S GIFTS AND THEIR PRICE
Victor’s next visit to Kira wasn't unexpected, but it came with a surprise she never expected. He arrived just after eight, and something about the way he carried himself when he walked into the room told Kira immediately that tonight was going to be different from the cold, watchful evenings that had followed her confrontation with him a few days ago. He held a small box in one hand, and his expression when he looked at her had none of its usual commanding aura. Instead, he looked like a man who had genuinely missed her.
"I have something for you," he said calmly and opened the box before she could ask.
Kira's breath caught at the sight of the necklace inside, a delicate gold chain with a single emerald pendant that caught the lamplight and threw it back in soft green fire. She recognized it instantly, not from any memory of her own but from the photographs she had found in Victor's wardrobe…the family portrait, the woman standing beside a much younger Victor with her head still intact, and that same pendant resting at the base of her throat.
"This was Elena's," she said quietly.
"It was," Victor replied confidently as he lifted it from the box with careful fingers. "I want you to have it."
He stepped behind her before she could say anything else, and she felt the cool metal settle against her collarbone as he fastened it, his fingers lingering against the back of her neck as he did. There was a tenderness in the way he did it, dominant and warm at once, the same method he used whenever he wanted her to feel chosen rather than owned, even though she understood by now that the two things were, for Victor, essentially the same gesture.
"There," he said, turning her gently by the shoulders to face the mirror. "Beautiful."
Kira looked at her own reflection with the pendant resting against her skin and said nothing for a while, mostly because there was nothing safe to say about wearing a dead woman's jewelry in a house full of secrets about how she died.
"Thank you," she managed to say finally.
Victor made himself comfortable in the armchair near the window and began loosening his tie, while the warmth in his face didn't fade the way it usually did once the gift had been given. "The lawyer meeting is confirmed," he said. "I've instructed the team to be thorough and transparent, so you'll finally have every answer you've been asking me for."
"So Friday?" She asked, and then let the smallest spark of hope creep into her voice, because she knew he wanted to hear it there.
"Friday," he confirmed, and smiled at her like a man pleased with his own generosity.
He talked for a while after that, more freely than she'd heard him talk in weeks, telling her small stories about the early years of his marriage to Elena…a disastrous dinner party where she'd charmed a roomful of investors into backing a deal he'd nearly lost, a winter they'd spent renovating the east wing together, and arguing over paint colors until two in the morning. His voice carried a suspicious familiarity she hadn't heard from him before, something that sounded fond. Kira sat across from him and listened with her whole attention, taking note of every detail, while asking careful questions in the pauses that kept him talking without ever sounding like she was digging for anything.
"She sounds like she was remarkable," Kira said.
"She was." Something flickered behind Victor's eyes, but it was gone before she could conclude on what it was. "Difficult, at times. She liked to keep certain things to herself. She had her own solicitor for personal matters, actually. Separate from the firm that handled the estate. A man named Blackstone."
The name landed in Kira's chest like a stone dropped into still water.
Blackstone. The same name signed at the bottom of the letter that had summoned her to New York in the first place. Hawthorne, Blackstone and Leeds, Attorneys at Law. Edward Blackstone, Esq.
She kept her face carefully, pleasantly curious, the way she had been practicing so many times now that it came almost naturally, and then she let a small furrow appear between her brows as if the name meant nothing to her at all.
"What kind of personal matters?" she asked timidly.
Victor waved a dismissive hand, though his eyes stayed on her face a while longer as he said it, watching for something she was careful not to give him. "Nothing important actually, just a few household accounts and that sort of thing. I only mentioned it because you asked what she was like, and she was the kind of woman who liked having things that belonged only to her."
"That's a nice way to remember someone," Kira said softly.
Victor's expression eased, satisfied by whatever he thought he'd seen or failed to see in her reaction, and the conversation drifted elsewhere after that, toward Friday's meeting, toward what she should wear, toward small ordinary things that no longer felt ordinary to her at all. He stayed with her for another half hour before rising, but he made sure to press a kiss to her temple exactly the way he had after his controlled fury the week before, and then left her alone with the necklace still cool against her throat.
Kira sat at the window long after his footsteps faded down the hall, staring out at the dark garden without seeing it.
Blackstone.
The same name from the letter. The same firm that had sent her a prepaid card and a summons to a fortune she'd never asked for. And now, apparently, the same man Elena had trusted with matters private enough to keep separate from her husband entirely.
That wasn't a coincidence. Kira didn't believe in those anymore, especially not in this house.
She reached for the pen on the small desk beside her bed and, without entirely deciding to, wrote the name across her palm in small, careful letters. Blackstone. She stared at it under the lamplight until she was certain it had lodged itself somewhere she wouldn't lose it, turning it over once more in her mind, and weighing it against everything else she'd gathered…the memo, the reassignment filing, and the cut photograph with its violent red mark.
Then she went to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and rubbed the ink away under the cold water until her palm was clean and bare and gave nothing away at all.
She dried her hands slowly, watching the water disappear down the drain, and thought that Friday could not come soon enough, and that she no longer had any intention of walking into that lawyer's office without already knowing exactly what she meant to ask him.