Chapter 53 Chapter 53

Chapter 53 Chapter 53
~ Elena's POV
I was a terrible liar, and Damian had spent an entire year becoming an expert in exactly how terrible.
It started small. A pause half a second too long when he asked how the ledgers were coming along. A flinch when Marco's name came up in casual conversation over lunch. The way I'd started angling my body slightly away from him at dinner, as if putting even a few degrees of distance between us might keep him from reading whatever was written across my face.
By the third day, I watched him notice all of it, cataloguing each tell the way he cataloged everything, filing it away behind those dark, unreadable eyes until he had enough pieces to demand the whole picture.

~ That Afternoon
I spent most of the day avoiding him without looking like I was avoiding him, which was its own particular exhaustion…timing my errands around his meetings, lingering in the garden longer than necessary, answering his texts with short, distracted replies that I hoped read as busy rather than evasive. 
I met with Marco once, briefly, in the pretense of reviewing patrol schedules, and came away with nothing more than a fresh photograph of Sofia that he'd received two days ago, thinner still, her eyes hollow in a way that made my chest ache every time I closed my own.
I hid the photograph in the same drawer as the ledger. My collection of things I wasn't ready to hand over was growing faster than I liked to admit.
By the time evening came, I'd convinced myself I'd bought enough time to think clearly. I hadn't accounted for the fact that Damian had spent the entire day doing exactly what I'd been avoiding, quietly working the same thread I had, from the other direction, until our two versions of the truth were close enough to collide.

~ At Dinner
"You've barely touched your food," he said, setting down his glass with more precision than the gesture required.
"I'm not very hungry."
"You've said that every night this week."
I pushed a piece of chicken around my plate, aware of Vito's careful silence at the far end of the table, aware of the way even the staff seemed to be moving more quietly than usual, as if the tension between us had a temperature the whole house could feel.
"I've had a lot on my mind," I said. "The ledgers are dense. I'm still learning the shape of them."
"Elena." His voice dropped, low enough that it wasn't meant for the rest of the table, though I doubted it fooled anyone sitting close enough to hear. "Look at me."
I did, and immediately regretted it. There was nothing soft in his expression tonight, only the sharp, focused patience of a man who had built his entire life around reading what people didn't want him to see.
"Something's changed," he said. "You've been distracted for days. You flinch every time Marco's name comes up. And this afternoon I asked you a direct question about the shell account discrepancies and you told me you hadn't found anything worth flagging yet, which I know for a fact isn't true, because I went through those ledgers myself last night after you fell asleep."
My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "You went through my work?"
"I went through the ledgers you were given access to because I trust you," he said, and there was an edge under the words now, something between hurt and fury that I hadn't braced myself for. "And I found a twelve-thousand-dollar transfer flagged in your handwriting, with a note that says nothing except a question mark. You found something, Elena. And you've been sitting on it for four days without telling me."
The table had gone very quiet. Vito's eyes flicked between us, careful, unreadable, the eyes of a man who had clearly seen this particular storm building for longer than I'd realized.
"Can we talk about this somewhere else…?" I said, low, urgent, aware of every set of ears in the room.
"We can talk about it right here," Damian said, and for the first time in months, I heard real anger in his voice instead of the controlled, strategic version he usually wore like armor. "Because I am done finding out what you're keeping from me secondhand, through my own investigation, after I specifically asked you to bring anything you found straight to me."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it? You stood in that war room two weeks ago and told me I needed to trust you. I did. I handed you access to things I've never handed anyone outside this family. And the first real thing you find, you bury."
I felt heat rise in my face, equal parts guilt and defensiveness, because he wasn't entirely wrong, and I hated that he wasn't entirely wrong. "I was trying to be careful," I said. "You said yourself…if you find proof, you won't hesitate. I wasn't ready to hand you a death sentence over a number in a ledger without understanding what it actually meant first."
"That's not your decision to make."
"Then whose is it?" My voice cracked, sharper than I meant it to, loud enough now that Vito quietly rose from the table and murmured something about checking on the kitchen, giving us a privacy neither of us had asked for but both of us clearly needed. "You keep things from me constantly, Damian. You disappear in the middle of the night and come back smelling like blood and tell me it's nothing I need to worry about. You've been sitting on a secret of your own for weeks. I've seen it on your face every time your phone rings. So don't stand there and act like keeping something back for a few days while I figure out what it means makes me some kind of traitor."
That landed. I watched it land, watched something flicker behind his eyes that looked almost like guilt before he buried it back under the anger. "This isn't the same," he said, quieter now.
"Isn't it?"
We stared at each other across the table, the silence stretching taut enough to hum, and for a moment I thought this was simply going to be another fight we survived by refusing to finish it, the way we'd survived a dozen others.
Instead, something in his shoulders loosened, just slightly, the fight draining out of him into something closer to exhaustion.
"I need to know what you found," he said. "Not because I don't trust your judgment. Because if it's what I think it is, I need time to figure out how to handle it without losing more men than we already have."
"And if I ask you to trust me with a little more time first? The way you're asking me to trust you with whatever's pulling you out of bed at midnight?"
He was quiet for a long moment, jaw working, clearly hating the position I'd put him in as much as I hated the one he'd put me in.
"You have three days," he said finally. "After that, whatever you're protecting, I find out myself, and I won't be as careful about it as you're being right now."
It wasn't trust, not fully. But it was more than I'd expected to walk away with, and I understood, watching him rise from the table without another word, that some new, fragile version of us had just been forged in that argument, one where we were finally, however reluctantly, starting to treat each other like equals capable of carrying our own weight.
I only hoped three days would be enough time to find Marco a way out before I had to choose between his sister's life and my husband's trust.