Chapter 207: SEE YOU SOON

DAMON'S POV

I stood in the study with Roan's voice in my ear and the message sitting in my chest like a stone.

See you soon.

Not a threat from a man who was panicking. A greeting from a man who was ready.

"The photograph," I said. "Who's in it?"

"Your advance team is sending me the image now," Roan said. A pause. "Young man, young woman, late twenties maybe. Nobody I recognise. But the back…" Another pause, longer. "Damon. The writing on the back. It's not a message to you. It's dated 1987 and signed with a name I need you to look at."

He sent it.

I looked at the image on my phone.

The name on the back of the photograph was the seventh name.

Not Seraphina's father. Not anyone we'd been tracking for the last three weeks. The seventh name, written in his own hand, dated thirty-six years ago, in a building he'd apparently used before either of us knew it existed and had apparently told someone else about before he told me.

He wasn't the one who left the photograph.

He was in the photograph.

Which implied that somebody else had discovered it in the building, and placed it because they wished for us to believe that word got out, that others were made privy to a location for the wedding which was provided by someone who remained oblivious or simply did not disclose.

I called the seventh name.

No answer.

I called Castellan.

No answer.

I looked at the photograph again and then went upstairs to see Seraphina because I was done managing what she knew and she was going to be standing close to me when it happens.

She was in the dress.

I'd seen it in stages, but not ever finished, not whole, and I had only one second of her face before her eyes traced my own and registered that something had changed.

I told her about the photograph. About the seventh name's name on the back. About Castellan not answering.

She listened very attentively.

"He might not have known it was compromised," she said. "Or he might have trusted that whoever else knew about it wasn't a threat."

"Either way," I said, "your father found knows this location."

"Which means he's not two miles out in a vehicle because he's watching to see if the decoy worked," she said. "He's two miles out because he's waiting for a specific time. He's planned an entry."

"Yes."

"During the ceremony," she said. "That's what he's waiting for. The ceremony is when everyone's attention is in one direction."

"Yes," I said.

She looked at me. "Then we know when he's coming and we know which direction he'll come from because Catherine told us how he moves and Catherine's already there." She picked up her bouquet from the table and smiled at me. "Let's go get married."

We left at ten as planned.

The stone house was everything I desired.

Roan was waiting at the gate. The vehicle was still in the lay-by without moving. Castellan’s people were ten minutes out.

The photograph had been removed and documented. The interior had been cleaned and decorated with the only disruption the spot where the photograph had sat above the mantelpiece, Roan saying he didn’t want to tamper with evidence.

Catherine was inside, positioned where I'd asked her to be, and when I saw her face I understood that she already knew.

"He'll come through the east side," she said quietly, when I reached her. "There's an old door there that was on his plans of the property, I heard him mention this building once years ago, I didn't understand the relevance until now. He'll think it's unwatched."

"Roan's already on it," I said.

She nodded.

The ceremony started at eleven.

Seraphina came through the main entrance, and as she walked toward me across the great stone floor, I watched her and realized she was the most beautiful creature in the room.

The officiant began.

I said my vows.

I'd written them four times and thrown three versions away, keeping the fourth because it was the truest things I knew how to say about a woman who had come through a door one day and rearranged everything I'd believed about what my life was going to contain.

Seraphina began hers.

She was mid-sentence, the second sentence, when Catherine moved.

Her father came through it.

He moved toward Lyanna and Marcus with the patient certainty of a man who'd waited three years and wasn't going to hurry the last thirty seconds, and Catherine stepped in front of him before he'd registered her presence, placed herself between her ex-husband and her grandson with the specific quietness of someone who had always known this was where the story ended and had decided that where it ended was going to be her choice.

He stopped.

Looked at her.

"Move," he said.

"No," she said.

The room had frozen, everyone understanding simultaneously what was happening except Marcus, who had no interest in anything except the interesting ceiling, and in the two seconds of absolute stillness that followed I covered the distance from where I was standing to where they were standing, and Roan came through the east door behind her father, and Castellan's people came through the main entrance, and the thirty seconds that followed were fast and controlled and not gentle, and at the end of them her father was on the floor and the room was still.

Catherine still had Marcus as she began swaying to the ground.

She looked at Seraphina.

"He always wanted a boy," she said, her voice steady in a way that the rest of her wasn't. "I'm sorry it took me this long to stand in the way of something."

Seraphina crossed the room in three steps and took Marcus from her arms and held him against her chest, and then she crouched beside her mother on the stone floor and took her hand and held it. Roan and his people were managing the situation, Lyanna on her phone calling for medical help, Diane already at Catherine's side with the focused competence of a woman who had spent her career being the person available when availability mattered most.

Her father was taken by the police who arrived eleven minutes later.

He looked at Seraphina once as they led him out.

She didn't look back.

The officiant stood in the middle of the room with the patient presence of a man who understood that some ceremonies contained more than the ceremony, and when the room had settled, he looked at Seraphina and said quietly: "Shall we continue?"

We looked at each other and she picked up where she'd left off.

She read the rest of her vows while her mother sat against the wall with Diane beside her and Marcus tucked in the crook of her arm.