Chapter 44 Chapter 44

Chapter 44 Chapter 44
~ Elena's POV
"Liz wasn't working alone," Marco said. "She was sent."
The hairbrush slipped out of my hand and landed somewhere near my feet. I didn't bother picking it up. "Sent by who?"
Marco's eyes flicked to Damian first, like he needed permission to say the rest out loud, and that alone told me I wasn't going to like it. Damian gave the smallest nod, jaw still tight, and Marco exhaled through his nose before he finally looked at me.
"Isabella."
The name hit me like a slap. For a second, the room tilted, the way it always did when her name came attached to something worse than I'd braced for. "That's…no. That's not possible. Liz has been here for months, she was Damian's contact long before any of this, she—"
"She was placed by Carlo," Marco said, gently now, the way you'd talk someone down from a ledge. "After that, Isabella got to her through Carlo's network. Fed her, funded her, and told her exactly which doors to walk through and which nights to walk through them. Everything Liz has done since after you got here… every visit, every scene she caused, every time she got you alone, it was all engineered. She wasn't trying to win Damian back, Elena. She was trying to get her hands on you."
I stood very still, my wet hair dripping down the back of my shirt, and let that sentence detonate slowly instead of all at once.
Isabella. My sister. The girl who used to steal the good blanket off my bed when we were seven and eight and blame it on the dog we never had. The girl who cried at my graduation… or pretended to, apparently, because I couldn't trust a single memory of her anymore, couldn't tell which version of Isabella had ever been real and which had always been performance. She hadn't just betrayed me once, in shadows, choosing Carlo over her own blood. She had gone further than that. She had built an entire operation around me. Spent months constructing a woman out of nothing, dressing her up in old grudges and real jealousy, and pointed her at me like a loaded gun with a bow tied around it.
"How long," I said, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be. "How long has she been planning this?"
"Long enough," Marco said, which wasn't an answer, but the way his eyes dropped to the floor told me it was the only one he was willing to give me right now.
I turned to Damian. He hadn't moved from the edge of the bed the entire time, elbows still braced on his knees, watching this unfold like he already knew the shape of it before Marco had said a single word. That was what undid me… not the revelation itself, but the utter absence of surprise on his face.
"You knew," I said.
"I suspected."
"That's not the same thing as telling me."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
I crossed the room, stopping in front of him, close enough that he had to tilt his head back to keep looking at me. "My sister has spent months building a person just to use her against me, and you suspected, and you didn't think that was something I deserved to know?"
"I didn't have proof," he said. "I wasn't going to hand you a theory and watch you carry it around like it was already true. You've done enough of that on your own."
It wasn't wrong, exactly. That was the worst part. I had spent the better part of a year chasing half-truths through this house, turning them over and over until they cut me, and he'd watched me do it every time without stopping me. But knowing he was protecting me from another open wound didn't make the silence sting any less.
"I'm so tired," I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle of the sentence, "of finding out how far she's willing to go after it's already happened."
Something in his expression finally shifted…not softness, exactly, Damian didn't do soft the way other men did, but something adjacent to it, something that looked almost like guilt. He reached out and caught my hand, thumb dragging once over my knuckles.
"She's not going to get near you again," he said. "I promise you that."
"You promised that after the kidnapping, too."
He didn't flinch. "And I meant it then. I mean it more now."
I wanted to believe him. That was the terrifying part. I wanted to sink into that promise the way I'd wanted to sink into every other one he'd made me since the night I stood at that altar in my sister's place, hating him, hating myself, hating the whole rigged architecture of a life I hadn't chosen. And every single time, some new piece of the truth came crawling out of the walls of this house to prove that hating him had always been the safer option.
Marco cleared his throat from the doorway, clearly wishing he were anywhere else. "I should go brief the others. Liz is being held until you decide what you want done with her."
Damian didn't look away from me. "Do it quietly. No one outside this room needs to know who sent her yet."
"Understood." Marco hesitated a second longer, glancing at me with something that might have been sympathy, before he slipped out and pulled the door shut behind him.
The silence that followed felt enormous.
I sat down on the bed beside Damian, my knees suddenly unwilling to hold me up any longer, and stared at the wall like it might rearrange itself into an explanation that made sense. "She changed," I said quietly. "I knew that. I saw it before, I saw it when she held a gun on me the first time. But this… this is different. This isn't rage anymore. This is patience. This is someone who sat down and planned, for months, how to take me apart."
"I know."
"Does that scare you?"
He was quiet long enough that I turned to look at him. There was something behind his eyes I didn't have a name for...not fear, not exactly, Damian didn't wear fear the way I did, out loud and shaking.
"It tells me," he said finally, "that Carlo isn't definitely using Isabella for his own gain and Isabella is too blind by power to see it. He has someone inside your blood now. That's not something I can shoot my way out of anymore."
Before I could ask him what that meant… what it meant for us, for this house, for the fragile, complicated thing sitting between us on this bed that wasn't quite trust and wasn't quite love but had started, somewhere in the last year, to resemble both, his phone buzzed against the nightstand.
He glanced at the screen, and whatever color had been in his face drained out of it in an instant.
"I have to go," he said, already reaching for a shirt, his voice flattening into the tone he used when he didn't want me asking questions.
"Go where? Damian—"
"Stay here." He pressed a kiss to my forehead, quick, distracted, already halfway to the door before his lips had even left my skin. "I'll explain when I'm back."
"You always say that."
He didn't answer. The door clicked shut behind him, and I was left sitting alone on the edge of our bed, staring at the space where he'd been, with the growing, sickening feeling that whatever had just called him away was going to change everything all over again.