Chapter 106: Listen Closely

By morning the house doesn’t feel like the house Elias has spent months learning the corners of.

The west wing, unused for as long as he’s known this family, empty rooms with furniture kept under sheets and a smell of disuse that never quite lifted no matter how often the staff aired it out, has transformed overnight into something else entirely. Men move through it now with the specific, unbothered competence of people who have clearly done this exact thing in many other houses, for many other reasons, setting up laptops and maps and equipment Elias doesn’t recognize with the efficiency of professionals who’ve stopped needing to think about the mechanics of it years ago.

He recognizes a few faces.

Men from his months working under Carver, men who by every rule Elias grew up believing should hate David Reid on sight, should refuse to be in the same building as him without a fight breaking out within minutes. Instead they are taking orders from him without hesitation, greeting him with the specific deference of soldiers greeting a commander they’ve followed before and would follow again without question.

It unsettles Elias more than he expects it to. He knew, in the abstract, distant way you know something you’ve never actually seen, that David Reid had a past that predated the boardrooms and the charity galas and the quiet, controlled authority he wears at dinner. But watching it activate in real time, watching decades old loyalty snap back into place with a single phone call, is something else entirely.

Marcus arrives midmorning, having cut his and Selene’s trip short the moment the call came through, and he moves through the west wing turned operation center issuing orders before he’s even fully through the door, no explanation offered to anyone, none apparently needed. Men fall into position around him immediately.

Eventually, Elias finds him alone near a bank of monitors sometime after noon.

“How many people does he still have?” Elias asks, mostly because he needs to understand the scale of what’s currently assembling around him.

Marcus barely even spares him a glance as he responds. “Enough.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.” And with that, Marcus stalks off, barking orders as he moves.

David finds him in the hallway later that afternoon, stopping in front of Elias with the same calm, level composure he brings to everything, whether it’s a business call or an interrogation in a clearing.

“You don’t have to be part of this,” David tells him flatly, “Zeke’s death isn’t a debt you owe.”

Elias almost laughs at the absurdity of the idea. As if there’s a version of this where he walks away now, where he goes back to his flat and his mother and his new school and lets this happen without him in the room for it.

He doesn’t say any of that though. He doesn’t tell David that whatever complicated, unresolved thing existed between him and Zeke – the distrust, the grudging respect that had started to build somewhere underneath it – doesn’t change the fact that Zeke died protecting the woman he loves, and that he feels that death sitting on him like a debt regardless of whether he owed it in the first place.

So instead of saying all that, he replies simply, “I’m in.”

David studies him for a second longer, then nods once and moves on down the hallway, already pulling his phone back out.

The rest of the day passes in a blur of activity that Elias watches more than participates in, still too new to this particular machine to be trusted with real weight yet. He watches Marcus command one arm of the operation with a coldness that doesn’t match the man who joked about villas and stolen appetizers at the dinner table weeks ago. He watches David work through a network that spans decades, contact after contact answering a call from a man they believed had retired permanently, voices Elias catches fragments of through speakerphone, old, careful respect layered under every single one of them.

Through it all, Lucia stays upstairs the entire day.

Elias checks on her twice between meetings, knocking softly on her door before finding her curled on her bed both times, awake but silent, refusing the food her mother keeps sending up, barely acknowledging him when he sits at the edge of her mattress.

He doesn’t push though. He just sits long enough for her to know he’s there, then gets up to leave.

Near midnight, once the house has finally quieted enough that the west wing’s activity has dropped to a low, watchful hum, he goes to check on her again.

He finds her on the floor this time with her back against the side of her bed and her knees pulled tight to her chest, staring at nothing.

As usual, he doesn’t say anything. He just crosses the room and lowers himself down beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touch, and waits.

For a long time neither of them speaks. The house settles around them, old pipes ticking somewhere in the walls, distant voices from downstairs too muffled to make out.

After a while of their usual grief-stricken silence, just when he’s about to take his leave again, she finally speaks.

“Did he suffer,” she whispers.

Elias closes his eyes for a second before he answers, choosing the words carefully, needing her to have something true even if it isn’t gentle.

“The bullet went clean through his skull,” he replies quietly. “He was dead before his brain could even process that the trigger had been pulled.”

She makes a small, strangled sound, something caught between relief and grief, and then goes quiet again, her knees pulling tighter against her chest.

He doesn’t say anything else either and for a long while, they stay like that. He starts to get up eventually, thinking maybe she needs the room to herself.

Her fingers catch his sleeve.

She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t look at him. Just holds on, and he sits back down without a word, settling beside her again, and this time she leans into him, her head finding his shoulder, and they stay like that for a long while, the silence between them heavy but not unbearable.

“He was supposed to come home,” she whispers eventually. “I wish I’d… I wish I’d listened to you.”

Elias doesn’t tell her it’s going to be okay. He knows better than to promise her something he can’t guarantee, knows she’d see straight through it anyway.

“I know,” he murmurs instead.

And for the first time since the warehouse, she cries properly against him, her whole body shaking with it, and he holds her through it, saying nothing else, just staying, just being there in the way that’s the only thing he actually has to offer her right now.

He leaves her room sometime later, once her breathing has finally evened out into something close to sleep, and finds David standing at the end of the corridor when he steps out, waiting.

Their eyes meet instantly.

Neither of them says anything for a moment, the hallway quiet except for the low hum of activity still bleeding faintly from the west wing.

When the tension becomes unbearable, Eli tries to force out a greeting, “Good evenin–”

“I damn well hope,” David interrupts lowly, “that whatever is happening between you and my daughter is nothing more than professional courtesy and concern for her health.”

Elias is still scrambling his brain for an answer, an excuse that would make the image of him coming out of his ex-boss’s teenage daughter’s room after midnight not sound quite so bad.

“Because if I get even a whiff that this is anything more than that,” David continues, taking a single casual step closer even though his eyes tell Elias there is absolutely nothing casual about this conversation, “and listen closely, Arden, because I am only going to say this once–”

He leans in, close enough now that the words come out barely above a whisper, meant for no one else but Elias.

“–I will forget that your father was my best friend,” David tells him, “and you will disappear so fast the world will never know you existed.”

The calm underneath the threat is what does it, the complete absence of anger, the flat certainty of a man stating a fact rather than making an idle warning, and Elias feels an actual chill move down his spine at the sound of it.

“Am I understood?” David finishes.

Elias tries to find words and comes up with nothing, so he settles for a short forced nod instead.

David gives him one final pointed look, and then turns and walks down the hallway without another word, leaving Elias standing alone in the hallway, wondering how soon he will be the next bodyguard with a bullet through the brain.