Chapter 49 KIRA'S STORY

Chapter 49 KIRA'S STORY
Kira couldn't say anything for a long time. She searched and searched for an answer in her head, but nothing seemed to come to mind. Here she was, stuck between her present and the haunting past she thought could not follow her here.
"Kira," Rex said again, softer this time. "Talk to me."
She wrapped her arms around herself even though it did nothing against the chill, then she looked away as she finally opened her mouth to speak. Even as she spoke, her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone standing far away and reporting back from a place she hadn't visited in a long time.
"Before I came here, my life in Oklahoma was pretty much nothing to be proud of," she began. "I danced at a club off the highway, and everyone there knew me as Raven. It paid better than anything else I could find, but it was just a job, nothing more than that." She paused, watching for any signs of judgement in his eyes. When she found none, she continued again. "A few weeks before I left, a motorcycle club started coming around on most weekends. They were known as the Iron Serpents."
Rex's jaw tightened, but he didn't interrupt.
"Their leader was a man named Ezra Kane," she went on. "He usually came in on most Fridays with half his crew trailing behind him, and for some strange reasons I never understood and never wanted to, he became obsessed with me. He requested for me by name every time, sending flowers and gifts to the club with notes that I never opened. My manager loved it, of course, because Ezra tipped generously like the money meant nothing to him, but there was something underneath all the charm that made my skin crawl with disgust every time he looked at me. He acted like I belonged to him, and he was just waiting for me to catch up to that fact." She wiped a tear from her eyes and continued again. "I kept my distance as best I could, which wasn't an easy thing to do, but it kept him and his gang away…a least, or so I thought."
"What happened then?" Rex asked. The concern in his voice was getting stronger now.
Kira managed to look him in the eyes now, reassured that he was being so calm and supportive. "One night, one of Ezra's lieutenants called, Reaper came in drunk and paid for a private session, but I could see that it was not going to be an easy night with his current state of mind. He grudgingly agreed to behave at first, keeping his hands where they were supposed to stay while I worked. Her voice thinned as that night flashed vividly again in her head, but she pushed through it. "As the dance wore on, Reaper suddenly decided that the rules didn't apply to him anymore, and he grabbed me forcefully and refused to let go. When I warned him to stop, he simply laughed my warnings off and proceeded to make aggressive advances at me. I don't know how everything got out of control, but I remember reaching for a nearby bottle and swinging as hard as I could. He ended up on the floor and blacked out. I thought I killed him."
Rex was listening patiently. "You knocked him out?"
"I did," Kira said. "I didn't wait around to see if he was dead or just unconscious, I just grabbed my things from the back and I ran straight home. That's when I found the letter among my bills. It had come earlier that day alongside others. It was from a supposed lawyer, writing on behalf of my mother's estate and informing me about her passing. There was a summons in it about an inheritance waiting for me at a place called Hawthorne Estate, if I was willing to come and claim it."
"That's the letter that brought you here," Rex said quietly.
"That very letter," she confirmed. "But I never got the chance to sit with it and decide what to do. Reaper came looking for me that same night, and he didn't come alone. Half the club showed up outside my building, and I heard them long before I even saw them. And I knew at that point, I just knew, that if they got their hands on me, nobody would ever find what was left." Her voice cracked, finally, on the last of it. "I climbed out through the back and I didn't stop running until I reached the bus station. I took a bus out of the state that same night with nothing but the letter and the clothes on my back, and I didn't look behind me until I was three states away."
"And the letter brought you to New York," Rex said. "To us."
"To Hawthorne Estate," she said. "I told myself that it was probably fate, an opportunity appearing exactly when I needed one…especially when I had nowhere else in the world left to go." She let out a deep breath. "I was too busy being grateful that the door had even opened at all."
Rex's eyes had gone somewhere distant, the way they did when he was turning pieces over in his mind and testing how they fit against each other. "The contractor my father uses," he said slowly. "The one with ties to the Serpents. What if it isn't a coincidence that the letter found you the exact night you had nowhere left to run?"
Kira didn't want to believe it, but Rex was definitely making a very valid point. "Do you think Victor knew about Ezra, and Reaper, and what happened that night? About all of it?"
"Think about it,” Rex said confidently. I think it's possible that my father didn't just happen to have a connection to them," Rex said again. "I think it's possible he used it in his grand scheme. Setting the whole thing up from the beginning as a way to bring someone here who'd be desperate enough to stay quiet. Someone who'd have nowhere else to turn once she arrived, so she wouldn't ask too many questions about what she found."
Kira's mind raced backward through every strange, careful kindness Victor had shown her since that first night and made sure after letting her in that she understood, gently but unmistakably, that this house could be a sanctuary for her, provided she stayed within its walls and didn't look too closely at what lived inside them.
"He was definitely watching me," she said, the realization arriving with brutal clarity now. "He was counting on exactly what I would do once I got here. knew I would have nowhere else to run, so I would just stay grateful and quiet, exactly where he could keep an eye on me."
"It fits," Rex said grimly. "It all fits too well."
They stood there together as the picture assembled itself piece by piece between them, uglier with every part that clicked into place. Somewhere past the garden wall, a door opened, and the sound of footsteps came through the quiet morning air. Rex went still for a second before his head snapped toward the house.
"Someone's up," he said under his breath.
Kira's pulse jumped. If they were seen out here together, deep in a conversation neither of them could afford to explain, it would raise disturbing questions she wasn't ready to answer, especially not from Victor, or from anyone who might carry word back to him.
"We can't be found together like this," she whispered.
"No," Rex agreed, already stepping back and carefully putting some distance between them. "Not yet. Not until we know more." He held her gaze for one more second and smiled at her. "I'll keep digging on my end. Whatever my father's connection to that contractor really is, I'll find it. But you'll have to be very careful, Kira," Rex said quietly. "If I'm right about any of this, we're not just dealing with a man protecting his business anymore. We're dealing with someone who's already shown he's willing to reach into someone's life and rearrange it just to suit his selfish interests."
The footsteps drew closer now, and Kira quickly slipped back through the garden gate first, her heart still hammering from everything she'd just said out loud for the first time in a while. Behind her, Rex melted into the shadow of the hedge, and the pale morning swallowed him whole, as if he had never been standing there at all.