Chapter 203 Everything You Have Done
ADRIANA
At three fifty-five I left my room.
The two guards outside my door were the overnight rotation. I had been tracking their schedule since the first night and I knew these two specifically, knew that the one on the left had a habit of checking his phone every twenty minutes and that the one on the right had been fighting a cold for three days and was at his least alert between three and five in the morning.
“I need water,” I said. “From the kitchen.”
They looked at each other. The one on the left started to say something about calling a maid.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll get it myself. I won’t be long.”
I walked away before they finished the sentence. If they followed, I would deal with it. If they didn’t, I had three minutes.
They didn’t follow.
I went to Leo’s room first. He was already standing at the door when I got there, which meant he had been listening for my footsteps. Daphne was behind him and behind her were two younger children. They were the ones who couldn’t run fast, Leo had told me. He had a plan for those two. He had plans for everything.
“Eastern corridor,” I said quietly. “Door at the end. Don’t run until we’re outside.”
Leo nodded. He looked at Daphne and she looked at the two younger ones and whatever passed between them in that look was enough. They moved.
The eastern corridor was empty. The door at the end had swung open with a push and no resistance and no sound, and we stepped through it into the cold morning air.
“Now run,” I said.
They ran.
I put myself at the back and kept pace with the two youngest, who were slower but not as slow as I’d feared. Leo and Daphne had clearly been working with them.
They ran with the focused efficiency of children who had been practicing and were not going to waste it now.
The trees started about two hundred meters from the building. We hit the tree line and I felt the shift in the air. People ahead of us, Elijah’s people, positioned and waiting.
Aiden materialized from between two trees like he’d been standing there all night, which he probably had.
“Got them,” he said into his earpiece. Then to the children. “This way. Stay together. Keep moving.”
He started moving them through the trees and I turned back.
Leo stopped beside me.
“Go,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“Back inside. Landon doesn’t know you’re gone yet. I need sixty more seconds of him thinking everything is normal or he’ll lock the building down before Elijah gets through the front.” I looked at my son. “Go with Aiden. I will be thirty seconds behind you.”
He looked at me with an expression I recognized because it was Elijah’s expression. He was deciding whether to argue and concluding that there was no argument available that would change anything.
“Thirty seconds,” he said.
“Thirty seconds,” I confirmed.
He nodded and went with them while I walked back across the two hundred meters to the building. I went directly to Landon’s study because that was where he would be at this hour. He worked early, and was always in his study before five.
I opened the door without knocking.
He looked up from his desk. Confused. He was not expecting me and it was clear.
“I have an answer for you,” I said.
He put down his pen. “I said tonight—”
“The answer is no,” I said. “It was always going to be no. I came here because my son and all the children that needed to come home, and they are home now, and I have no further business here.”
He stared at me.
Then he stood up, fast, and the expression that came over his face was not the one he had been wearing for three days — the performed warmth, the practiced love. This was the thing underneath all of that, the thing that had always been underneath it, the real Landon, the one his father had made and the years had sharpened into something ugly.
“You think you can just walk out of here?” he said. He came around the desk and moved toward me and I held my position because moving back would have given him something and I was done giving him things. “I have guards on every exit. I have—”
A cracking sound came from somewhere in the building. Then another. Then the sound of a door coming off its hinges violently, which was a sound I recognized because I had once seen Elijah take a door off its hinges and the sound was distinctive.
Landon turned toward it.
I looked at the doorway behind him and watched Elijah walk through it.
He was not running. He didn’t need to run. He walked through the door of Landon’s study with the controlled certainty of a man who has arrived somewhere he intended to arrive and is in no hurry because everything is already exactly where he wants it.
He looked at me first. A full second of just looking at me, checking, confirming I was standing and unhurt.
Then he looked at Landon.
Landon took one step backward.
“You remember me,” Elijah said. It was not a question.
Landon said nothing. He had gone pale in a way that his skin had not been pale five minutes ago.
“Good,” Elijah said. “Then we don’t need introductions.”
I stepped to the side, out of the space between them, because what happened next was not mine to interrupt.
Landon looked between us once — a last calculation, a last search for an exit — and found nothing useful in either direction.
The building was full of Elijah’s people now. I could hear them moving through the corridors, methodical and quiet. And through the window, I could see the lights of vehicles on the road that Landon’s guards had been watching and had not been enough to stop.
“Sit down,” Elijah said.
Landon did as he was told.
I looked at my husband across the room and felt the weight of the past several days release itself from my shoulders all at once, and he looked back at me and something in his face did what it did when he was feeling something he was not going to say in front of other people.
Later, that look said.
I know, mine said back.
“Now,” Elijah said, turning his full attention to Landon. “Let’s talk about everything you have done.”