Chapter 51 CHAPTER 51: THE EMAIL

Chapter 51 CHAPTER 51: THE EMAIL
Kira spent the next three mornings quietly mapping out the house's rhythm before she finally trusted the window she found. Between nine and half past, the library was always empty…Victor already gone into his study for calls, Rex still upstairs, Vanessa never surfacing before ten, and Maria occupied downstairs directing the day's laundry with the two younger maids. It was the only stretch of the entire day she was confident no one would wander past the library door without a reason, and she'd tested it twice already, sitting with a book and watching the corridor, before she trusted it enough to use.
The temporary email had taken more effort than the window itself. She'd approached one of the younger kitchen girls two days earlier, a quiet teenager named Sofia who kept mostly to herself and had no particular loyalty to anyone in the house beyond her paycheck, and asked, casually, if she could borrow her phone for a few minutes to set something up before her own device charged. Sofia hadn't asked questions. Kira had created the account quickly, a string of meaningless letters and numbers with no trace back to her, and deleted every sign of it from the phone's browser before handing it back with a thank-you and a five-dollar tip that made Sofia's face light up more than the favor warranted.
Now, sitting at the library computer with the door within sight and her ears tuned for footsteps, she opened the account and began composing the email with the same careful precision she brought to everything now.
She kept it short. No names beyond a signature she invented on the spot, something plain and forgettable, Anna Reyes. No mention of Hawthorne, no mention of Elena by name, nothing that could be traced back through a single obvious thread if the message ever ended up somewhere it shouldn't.
To whom it may concern,
I'm reaching out regarding a woman who may have been a private client of your firm some years ago, separate from any corporate or estate matters your office may have also handled for her family. I believe she may have retained your services personally, and I have reason to believe I have a legitimate interest in understanding the nature of that arrangement. I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with someone at your earliest convenience, at whatever level of discretion your firm typically extends to matters of this kind.
Thank you for your time.
She read it over twice, satisfied that it gave away nothing beyond the bare shape of a request, vague enough to mean almost anything to anyone who might intercept it, specific enough that Blackstone himself, if he remembered Elena at all, would understand exactly what she was asking without her ever having written her mother's name.
She hit send at nine twenty-two.
Then she moved quickly, methodically, the way she'd rehearsed in her head the night before. She cleared the browser history first, scrolling back through the entire session and deleting it line by line rather than trusting a single cache-clear command to do the job invisibly. She wiped the saved address from the browser's autofill memory. She checked the downloads folder, the recent files, every corner of the machine that might hold even a fragment of what she'd just done, and found nothing left behind that hadn't been there before she sat down.
She was back in her room with a book open in her lap, her hair pulled into the same loose knot she'd worn at breakfast, twelve minutes after she'd first sat down at the computer.
The morning passed the way every morning passed now, pleasant and watchful in equal measure, and Kira gave nothing away across the length of it, not at lunch, not during the hour she spent in the garden pretending to read while her mind turned over every possible response Blackstone might send back, not even when Vanessa passed her in the hallway with that same knowing half-smile that had become as familiar as wallpaper.
Dinner that evening found Victor unusually expansive, the good mood from the past several days apparently still holding, and when Maria brought out the wine he lifted his glass before anyone had a chance to touch their own.
"A toast," he said, and something in his voice carried a satisfaction that reached beyond the ordinary pleasure of a good meal. "To new beginnings."
His eyes found Kira's as he said it, warm and certain, the look of a man who believed he had already secured something he'd been patiently working toward for weeks, and Kira lifted her glass and met his gaze and smiled the exact smile she'd practiced so many times now that it required no thought at all to produce.
"To new beginnings," she echoed.
Rex's glass rose more slowly across the table, his eyes flicking once toward his father before settling on Kira, and she caught the faintest question in them, gone as quickly as it appeared. Vanessa drank without comment, watching the exchange with the careful attention of someone filing away one more detail for later use.
Kira let the wine touch her lips and set the glass back down, and beneath the pleasant, easy expression she wore for the rest of the meal, something cold and utterly determined had settled into her chest and showed no sign of intending to leave.
Friday was two days away. The lawyer meeting Victor had promised her, the one he seemed so satisfied about tonight, would arrive with all its careful transparency and rehearsed reassurance.
But somewhere out there now, sitting in an inbox belonging to a solicitor who had once handled Elena's most private matters, a message waited that Victor knew nothing about, one Kira intended to have an answer to long before Friday ever gave him the chance to control what she was allowed to learn.
She smiled again across the table, raised her glass a second time when Victor proposed a follow-up toast to the week ahead, and thought, with a calm that surprised even her, that he had no idea how little of this house's future he actually still controlled.