Part 2
He pulled off his soaked cap, shaking out dark brown waves with a casual flick of his head that struck a painful, familiar chord in her chest.
"Clever girl," he said softly. "You always handled the accountants with far more grace than I ever could."
He moved down the corridor without needing to flick a switch, his steps certain in the pitch-black hallway.
When he reached the landing, he effortlessly skirted the third floorboard—the warped oak plank that had groaned beneath footfalls since their first winter in the manor.
Elena followed him, her pulse drumming a quiet, frantic rhythm behind her ears.
How could a stranger know the dead timbers of Blackwood Manor so intimately?
"I had Thorne lined up through the study window," he murmured, glancing back over his shoulder. "One pull of the trigger and the syndicate would have lost its chief hound."
"And the county police would have found two bodies instead of one," Elena countered. "Along with a rifle bearing fresh fingerprints."
A faint, self-deprecating smile touched his lips—a rueful curve she had watched across breakfast tables for seven years.
"You're right, of course. Forgive me. Seeing that brute corner you in our foyer made me reckless."
He reached out as they passed the drawing room, his gloved fingers brushing the crook of her elbow in an instinctive gesture of marital reassurance.
[[AD]]
The contact was feather-light, but it sent a sharp prickle of cold awareness sliding down Elena's spine.
He guided her into the private morning room adjoining Julian's ruined study, avoiding the police tape strung across the scorched doorway.
The room smelled faintly of old morocco leather, linseed wax, and the damp chill radiating off the stone walls.
Instead of illuminating the crystal chandelier, he reached with unerring accuracy for the banker's lamp tucked on the low credenza.
A soft pool of emerald light spilled across the Persian rug and the intricate oak wainscoting.
"Kenneth tore the north wing apart searching for them," he said, gesturing toward the charred threshold of the study. "He assumed I kept everything in the floor safe beneath the desk."
"Where did you put them, Julian?" Elena asked, giving the name just enough softness to sound genuine.
He walked directly to the northern wall, where an eighteenth-century Dutch seascape hung in a heavy gilt frame.
He did not touch the canvas; instead, he knelt beside the fluted pilaster flanking the limestone fireplace.
His gloved hand pressed against an ornamental rosette carved into the second panel from the base.
A muffled click echoed from the wall cavity, followed by the hiss of counterbalanced weights easing a concealed timber section open.
Behind the decorative woodwork lay a heavy, modern wall safe set directly into the manor's foundational granite.
The heavy oak doors of the study clicked shut, sealing out the damp draft of the gallery. Inside, the only light spilled from the dying embers of the hearth and the pale wash of moonlight through the arched casements.
The living man let out a long, ragged exhale and moved directly to the rosewood sideboard. He didn't hesitate, reaching into the gloom with unerring precision toward the crystal decanter of twenty-year-old Glenfarclas.
Elena remained near the door, her back straight, her hands clasped loosely in front of her charcoal skirts. She kept her leather driving gloves on, the chilled goatskin pressing cold against her knuckles as she watched every fluid, deliberate step he took.
He unstoppered the decanter, poured three fingers of amber liquid into a heavy cut-glass tumbler, and raised it to his lips.
Elena felt a sudden, sharp hitch in her breathing.
Julian had been an obsessive creature of manners, an aristocrat who regarded the handling of crystal as a tactile art. He always held a lowball glass delicately between his thumb and first two fingers, cradling it at the heavy base to avoid warming the liquor.
This man wrapped his entire fist around the glass.
His blunt fingers clamped the crystal in a tavern grip, squeezing with hard, careless pressure that threatened to fracture the facets. The kidskin glove he wore creaked under the strain, and when he threw his head back to swallow, he drank not with Julian's measured sip, but with the parched greed of an inmate.
"God, I missed this house," he murmured, setting the tumbler down with an uncouth clatter.
He didn't reach for a coaster. Instead, he shoved aside the seventeenth-century ivory-inlaid snuffbox that had belonged to Julian's great-grandfather, letting the wet base of the tumbler rest squarely on the gilded spine of a first-edition volume of Donne's elegies.
Elena's gaze locked onto the dark ring of moisture blooming across the three-hundred-year-old morocco leather.
Julian would have sooner cut off his own hand than deface that book. He had spent three months in auction houses across Paris tracking it down, dusting it every Sunday with a camel-hair brush, treating the fragile calfskin like sacred scripture.
The man standing before her didn't even look down at it. He used the edge of the snuffbox to scrape dried mud from beneath his fingernail, tossing the antique aside as if it were a ten-cent tin from a corner grocer.
"The safe is still behind the ancestral portrait in the alcove, isn't it?" he asked, his voice low, smoothed by the scotch but carrying that faint, gravelly friction at the back of the palate.
"Where you left it," Elena said evenly. She forced her voice to remain soft, pitched to the intimate timbre of a wife speaking to a man she believed she had lost.
