Chapter 45 Chapter 45

Chapter 45 Chapter 45
~ Elena's POV
I gave him an hour before I stopped listening to him.
An hour of staring at the door, replaying the color draining out of his face when he'd looked at his phone, of running through every possible version of whatever "I'll explain when I'm back" could mean and hating every single one of them. An hour of Lucia knocking softly with a tray of food I didn't touch, of pacing the length of the room until my bare feet ached against the cold floor.
I wasn't built for staying put. I never had been, not really, not even in the beginning when staying put was the only thing keeping me alive in this house. Damian should have known that by now. A year of marriage to me should have taught him that "stay here" was less an instruction and more a challenge with my name on it.
So when the hour ran out, and he still hadn't come back, I opened the door.
The hallway outside our room was quieter than usual, staff moving with their heads down, avoiding my eyes the way they always did when something ugly was happening somewhere in the house and no one wanted to be the one who told me about it. I found Marco near the east stairwell, arms crossed, looking like a man standing guard over something he'd rather not be standing guard over.
"Where is she," I said. I didn't need to specify who.
Marco's eyes flicked toward the basement door at the end of the hall, then back to me, weighing something. "Elena, I don't think—"
"I didn't ask what you think." It came out sharper than I meant it to, but I was past apologizing for the edges in my voice today. "Where is Damian?"
"Handling something. He asked me to keep an eye on you while he's out."
Of course he had. I almost laughed, except there was nothing funny about it. "Then keep an eye on me from a distance," I said, already walking. "I want to see her."
"He's going to kill me."
"He's going to have to get in line."
Marco didn't stop me. I think, in the end, he'd learned the same thing Damian eventually had... that stopping me rarely worked, it just delayed the inevitable and made everyone involved more tired in the process. He fell into step beside me instead, muttering something under his breath about how none of them paid him enough for this job.
~ In The Basement
They'd put Liz in the same room they'd put several other traitors in. The thought made my stomach turn as Marco unlocked the door and I stepped through it.
Liz looked up at me from the chair she was bound to, wrists zip-tied in front of her, one arm still swollen and discolored from where Damian had bent it. She should have looked afraid. She'd been caught, exposed, dragged into a room built for exactly this kind of reckoning. Instead, she looked almost pleased to see me, like I was a guest arriving fashionably late to her own party.
"There she is," Liz said, tilting her head. "The little wife, finally off her leash."
"I'm not here to talk to you," I said, though clearly I was. "I'm here to listen."
"To what? My confession?" She laughed, short and dry. "I already gave that. Ask Marco. Ask Damian. I'm sure they've already told you everything you need to know, dressed up nice and simple so it doesn't keep you up at night."
"Isabella sent you."
Something flickered across her face...not surprise that I knew, but something closer to satisfaction, like she'd been waiting for someone to say the name out loud in front of her. "Your sister," she said slowly, "is a lot more patient than you give her credit for. She doesn't rage the way she used to. She plans now. Waits. Watches which doors people leave open even when they think they're locked."
"Why," I said. "Why go this far? What does she want from me?"
Liz smiled, and it was the kind of smile that made the hair on my arms stand up, the kind that told you the person wearing it knew something you desperately wanted to know and had every intention of dangling it just out of reach. "You're asking the wrong question, sweetheart."
"Then what's the right one?"
She leaned forward as far as the restraints would let her, voice dropping into something almost gentle, almost kind, which was somehow worse than if she'd screamed it at me. "You should be asking who else is in this house that Isabella didn't have to send. Someone who was already here."
The room went very cold very fast.
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the fact that I'm not the only one feeding information out of these walls," Liz said. "I was just the loud one. The distraction. The one you'd all waste your energy hating so you wouldn't look too closely at who's been standing quietly in the corner this whole time."
"You're lying," I said, though my voice didn't sound as certain as I wanted it to. "You're trying to get in my head."
"Maybe." She sat back, unbothered, as if the truth or lie of it made no difference to her either way. "Or maybe I'm the only honest person left in this house, and that's exactly why nobody's going to believe me."
The door opened behind me before I could push her further, and two of Damian's men came in, expressions unreadable, and began undoing the ties around her ankles.
"Time's up," one of them said, not unkindly, though it was clearly directed more at me than at Liz.
"Wait—"
"Bye bye, sweetie pie," Liz said, echoing her own line from the hall, grinning at me over her shoulder as they hauled her up and marched her out. "Say hi to manny for me."
And then she was gone, footsteps fading up the stairwell, and I was left standing alone in a basement room that smelled like bleach and old fear, with her voice looping over and over in my head.
The traitor isn't me.
She hadn't said those exact words. But that was what she'd meant, wasn't it, underneath all of it... someone else, someone already inside these walls, someone I'd trusted enough to stop noticing them at all.
I thought of Marco upstairs, pale-faced and evasive for weeks now. I thought of Lucia, who knew every corner of this house better than I did. I thought of the staff who moved like ghosts through these halls, present at every dinner, every argument, every private moment I'd assumed was actually private.
I thought of Damian, disappearing without explanation the second his phone buzzed, and I hated myself a little for the fact that his name crossed my mind too, even for a second, even as a possibility I refused to let myself finish thinking.
Marco was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, arms crossed, studying my face like he already knew something had shifted in it.
"What did she say to you?" he asked.
I looked at him for a long moment, weighing exactly how much of it I was willing to hand over, and to whom.
"Nothing," I said finally. "Nothing that matters."
It was the first real lie I'd told him. It wouldn't be the last.