Chapter 52 SOMEONE IS AT THE DOOR

Chapter 52 SOMEONE IS AT THE DOOR
NOVA'S POV

I sat on my bed with the key in my palm for a long time after I left Richard's room.

Small and silver, worn slightly at the edges from years of sitting in a drawer wrapped in cloth. My mother's hands had held this. She had pressed it into Richard's palm three weeks before she died and trusted him to do the right thing with it.

He had kept it for eight years.

I closed my fingers around it and lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

The locked box was still at the second storage facility across the city. I had stood in front of it two weeks ago with no way to open it and driven home with a car that had followed me out of the parking lot.

I had the key now.

I also had strict instructions from both brothers to not go anywhere alone.

I thought about that for approximately four minutes before I made my decision.

\---

The next morning I was up before six.

I got dressed quickly, jeans and a plain top, nothing that required thought. I pulled my curls back and grabbed my bag and the key and went downstairs before anyone else was moving.

Riley was in the kitchen already, which I had not accounted for.

She turned from the counter when she heard me and looked at my bag and then at my face and then back at my bag.

"You are going somewhere early." She kept her voice neutral.

"Just an errand." I moved toward the front door. "I will be back before nine."

"Miss Sinclair." She said my name the way she said it when she was choosing her words carefully. "Mr. Elias was very specific last week about—"

"Riley." I stopped and turned around and looked at her. "I will be back before nine. If either of them asks, tell them I went out and I am fine."

She pressed her lips together and looked at me for a moment.

"Be careful," she said finally, turning back to the counter.

I went out before she could say anything else.

\---

The cab took forty minutes to cross the city in the early morning traffic. I sat in the back and watched the streets change from the wide clean roads around the estate to the narrower ones on the east side where the storage facility sat behind its chain link fence and flickering entrance sign.

The man at the desk looked up when I came in, the same bored expression he always had.

"Unit two forty seven," I said, already moving toward the corridor.

He waved me through without looking up from his phone.

The facility was quiet at this hour. My footsteps echoed off the concrete walls as I moved through the maze of corridors, past unit after unit until I reached the one at the far end of building C.

I stood in front of it.

The last time I had been here I had found the locked box and a car that didn't belong in the parking lot. I had driven home shaking and told Elias where I had been and watched his face go tight with something he hadn't put into words.

I looked over my shoulder.

The corridor was empty in both directions.

I unlocked the unit and rolled the door up and stepped inside. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. Everything was exactly as we had left it when the three of us had come here together weeks ago.

The locked box was at the back, sitting on top of a stack of crates under a shelf of my mother's old kitchen things.

I pulled it out and set it on the floor and crouched down in front of it and held the key up.

My hands were steadier than I expected.

The key slid in smoothly and the lock turned with a clean click that sounded very loud in the quiet unit.

I lifted the lid.

Financial documents, stacked neatly. USB drives, four of them, labeled in my mother's handwriting with dates going back twelve years. A handwritten ledger, the pages dense with figures and company names I didn't recognize yet. And underneath all of it, a photograph.

My mother, young, maybe early thirties, was standing next to a man I had never seen before. They were outside somewhere, steps of a building, both of them squinting slightly in the sun. She was smiling but it wasn't her real smile. I knew her real smile from photographs. This was the version she put on when she needed to look comfortable.

I turned the photograph over.

Two words on the back in her handwriting.

Vincent Castellano.

And beneath that, a date.

I sat back on my heels and looked at the date and did the calculation in my head.

This photograph was taken four years before she married Richard Blackthorn.

Which meant my mother had known Castellano long before she ever set foot in Blackthorn Estate.

Which meant nothing about her arrival in Richard's life had been accidental.

I sat there on the floor of the storage unit with my mother's things spread around me and that photograph in my hand and felt the whole shape of the story I thought I knew shifting underneath me like ground that had never been as solid as it looked.

My phone buzzed in my bag.

I pulled it out.

Elias: Where are you?

Not a question. Three words with no punctuation that meant he already knew I had left.

I looked at the photograph one more time.

Then I looked at the USB drives and the ledger and the documents stacked neatly in the box my mother had sealed and hidden and trusted a man with for eight years.

I typed back with one hand, the photograph still in the other. Storage unit. I have the box open. You need to come.

His response came in less than ten seconds.

On my way. Do not leave that building.

I put my phone away and looked back at the photograph.

My mother smiled at her performance next to the man who had spent two decades trying to destroy the Blackthorn family.

Four years before she married Richard.

I turned the photograph over again and looked at her face and thought about all the things she had never told me and all the things she had died before she could.

Then I heard footsteps in the corridor outside.

Too fast for Elias. He had said he was on his way and the facility was forty minutes from the estate.

I have been here for twenty years.

I stood up slowly and turned toward the open unit door and the footsteps stopped right outside it.